On a wing and a prayer
Aviation has become just another boring part of modern infrastructure. Few people bother to look out the window for a view of Earth that was unimaginable to most of our ancestors, or to reflect on the miracle of technology, engineering and organisation that daily airline operations represent.
Among the many virtues of John Lancaster’s delightful The Great Air Race is how vividly it conveys the entirely different world of aviation at the dawn of the industry a century ago. Many airplanes in those days were literal death traps. A biplane known as the DH-4, used as a bomber by Allied forces in World War I, had its gas tank immediately behind the pilot in the cockpit. As Lancaster explains, “Even in relatively low-speed crashes, the tank sometimes wrenched free of its wooden cage, crushing the pilot against the engine.” To get a DH-4 properly balanced for landing, a copilot or passenger might have to leap out of the open cockpit and climb back to hang onto the tail. And this was one of the era’s most popular and successful models.
Some planes had no gas gauge, so pilots would learn they had run out of fuel only when the engine stopped; pilots’ navigation tools were a magnetic compass and their own eyes. If pilots were fortunate, they could follow a river or railroad tracks, or read city names on water towers. If not, they went the wrong way, or landed in pastures to ask farmers where they were.
The most dangerous thing in smallplane flying is being inside a cloud. Unless you are trained to fly “on instruments,” you will inevitably become disoriented and lose control of the plane — this was the tragedy that befell John F Kennedy Jr But until the late 1920s such flight instruments did not exist. To stay out of the clouds, pilots might make trips at 150 to 200 feet above ground level, or about where a modern airliner is just seconds before it touches down. It’s small wonder that nearly 900 American pilots were killed, injured or captured during the country’s relatively brief combat involvement in World War I. Or that in a single week of operations by the newly formed US air service in July 1919, nine of its pilots died in crashes.
For readers familiar with modern US aerospace pre-eminence — Boeing, governmental and private space programs; military aviation and corporate jets — perhaps the most startling aspect of American aviation a century ago is how uncertain its future seemed. The country had quickly ramped up aircraft production and pilot training as it entered the Great War. At the war’s end it wound both down. Idealists, engineers and hucksters promoted new aircraft designs and airline concepts. Nearly all of them failed — while their competitors in Europe set the standard for the world.
This is where Lancaster, a former correspondent for The Washington Post, sets up his story, with the efforts of a brigadier general, polo player, promotional wizard and wealthy scion of a Midwestern banking and political family named Billy Mitchell. In 1925, Billy Mitchell was court-martialled for insubordination, because of his incessant public criticism of military superiors who lacked his interest in air power. Back in 1919, fresh from his role as commander of US air units in France, and fearful that his country was throwing away its aviation future, Mitchell was searching for ways to make airplanes seem practical, reliable, fascinating and necessary.
He pushed for the expansion of airmail. He ordered military pilots to fly aerial patrols over forest fires in the West, and across the Southern border during the time of Pancho Villa. But Mitchell thought his publicity masterstroke would be a newsworthy event: a coast-to-coast airplane race, open to any certified military pilot. Eventually it turned into a bicoastal round-trip contest.
What happened next — oh, boy. The pilot contestants were fabulously varied and colourful. A onetime movie actor. A former college track champion whose legs had been crushed in an earlier flying accident, and who got into his plane with crutches and wearing metal braces. A pilot who had attacked German planes over France while flying upside down, to confuse his adversaries. An ordained Baptist minister who had learned to fly just two years earlier but had become renowned as “one of the best American pilots in France.” Like most of his rivals, he competed in Mitchell’s race in the ill-designed DH-4, with a German police dog named Trixie along in the cockpit. The tabloids lionised him as “the Flying Parson.”
On the first day of competition, three pilots were killed in crashes. By the time it was over, nine had died, and 54 airplanes had been damaged or destroyed. Newspapers and politicians denounced Mitchell for his recklessness. One contestant survived the eastbound leg to Long Island but said, “No one can make me race back.” He went home by train.
Lancaster deftly embeds social, economic and political history as he writes — for instance, how coast-tocoast air travel fits into the history of wagon trails, railroads and highways connecting the continent. And how Billy Mitchell’s disastrous stunt in fact may have aided the modern air age. A history of industrial policy is painlessly woven into the narrative.
I have read a lot about aviation and the aircraft industry over the years, but almost everything in this tale was new to me. You might take it on your next airline flight, pause to look out the window and spare a thought for those who helped make it all possible.