The Airplane - Jay Spenser [78]
Weary of upstate New York’s heavy snowfalls, Glenn Curtiss relocated his airplane factory to the south end of the state, settling on the Hempstead Plains in July 1909. After testing his Golden Flyer, Curtiss shipped it to Reims, France, and flew it to victory that August to claim the Gordon Bennett Cup. In turn, New York hosted many of the same aviators the next year in a major air meet at Belmont Park, the horse racetrack at the western edge of the Plains.
During World War I, the United States trained thousands of Army aviators at two military airfields on the Plains. One was Roosevelt Field. Bordering Curtiss Field immediately to the east, it was named in honor of Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, the former president’s youngest son, who died valiantly in aerial combat over France in July 1918.
The other military installation lay to the south. This was Mitchel Field, named for John Purroy Mitchel, once New York City’s youngest mayor, who had died in a flight training accident in Louisiana in 1918. Charged with New York’s aerial defense, Mitchel Field in the late 1920s was one of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ premier installations.
Crickets chirped in the surrounding night. Inside a dark hangar, feet scuffed concrete. Shadows swung as a handheld lantern, the building’s sole source of light, was handed up to a man crouched on the lower wing of a silver-and-yellow biplane. He lowered the lantern onto the seat of the rear cockpit and closed an improvised canvas hood over it, plunging the Mitchel Field hangar into darkness.
Jimmy Doolittle and his Full Flight Laboratory team stood in a circle around this airplane, a Navy Consolidated NY-2 selected for its stability. They scrutinized the trainer from every angle. Wherever they saw light escaping through chinks in its fabric, they pointed it out to a mechanic, who hurried forward with a can of aircraft dope and opaque fabric patches. With a few swipes of his dope brush, the gleam vanished.
Within minutes, all traces of the lantern’s glow had been eliminated. Doolittle, a thirty-two-year-old Army first lieutenant, was satisfied. When he flew by reference to instruments alone, no light would enter from outside to provide clues as to his airplane’s orientation.
In the latter 1920s, the world knew how to build rugged, capable airplanes, but bad weather often kept these fine machines on the ground. Worse still, it often caught them aloft and claimed lives when pilots were denied a view of the ground.
Fog was the killer most feared, but it was just one of many. Depending on where in the world people flew, they might also contend with thunderstorms, hurricanes, tropical squalls, monsoons, blizzards, typhoons, and sandstorms. Even clear skies and calm winds were dangerous for airplanes overtaken by falling darkness on a moonless night.
Airmail pilots in the 1920s knew these dangers all too well. Flying day or night in open-cockpit machines with unreliable engines, they took in stride whatever nature dealt them. Those who survived did so by knowing that, contrary to the prevailing belief, there was no such thing as seat-of-the-pants flying.
Mail pilots occasionally found themselves trapped above a solid undercast. When that happened, their orders were to grab the mailbags and bail out. Lindbergh did that twice because he knew descending through clouds was a sucker’s bet. Even if the clouds stopped short of the ground, there was no guarantee you could keep your airplane upright long enough to break safely out in the clear.
Physiological tests confirmed what these aviators