The decades after the First World War saw aircraft designers pushing the limits of what was possible in the air. New commercial markets were opening, and it was the visionaries who held the keys to success. Among them stood a Dutch airplane designer who would have the greatest influence on German aviation manufacturing in those early years. Born in the Dutch East Indies, Anthony Fokker became fascinated with aviation in 1908 at the age of eighteen, after reading about Wilbur Wright’s exhibition flights in France.
He built his first aircraft two years later and soon established his own manufacturing company in Germany. Known as the Flying Dutchman, Fokker flew as an exhibition pilot and wrote about the daring spirits, ne’er-do-wells, and adventurers he encountered on the flying field in the early years of aviation. When the First World War broke out, the German government took over his factory, keeping Fokker on as a director and aircraft designer. When French air ace Roland Garros was forced to make an emergency landing behind enemy lines, his monoplane was sent to Fokker’s factory.
There, the designer developed a synchronizer that allowed bullets to be fired between the blades of a moving propeller. The weapon gave Germany a significant edge in the air war for quite some time and became known as the Fokker scourge. After the war, Fokker smuggled hundreds of airframes, engines, and parts across the border into Holland, where he set up a new manufacturing plant. His most successful aircraft was the Fokker F.
7, an eight-to-twelve-seat airliner that proved highly successful for long-distance passenger travel. Built first as a single-engined high-winged monoplane, Fokker and Dutch airline KLM used early versions of the F. 7 to test different engines and new tail fins. Aeroplane manufacturing was moving from an era when designers often built their own inventions to a time when the level of complexity required specialist engineers and mechanics.
Fokker hired a team of six university-educated engineers to redesign the F. 7 into the best airliner in the world. The team kept the fuselage the same, concentrating on reworking the wings and undercarriage. Bertus Grase simplified the undercarriage, attaching just one main strut from each wheel to the main spar.
Rubber rings in the struts absorbed the shock of bouncing across grass airfields. A more rounded horizontal stabilizer was developed, and the pilot could adjust it in flight, making it much easier to trim the aeroplane correctly. On the twelfth of March, 1925, the F. 7A made its first flight, powered by a 420-horsepower Packard Liberty engine.
In the weeks following its launch, pilot Grase set several endurance records. At a public display, he impressed reporters and industry representatives with the ease of his aerobatic maneuvers. One observer wrote that the aircraft, just like other Fokkers, did not spin or side-slip when stalled, but remained fully controllable, nosing down slightly to pick up speed again before returning to normal straight and level flight. This was demonstrated both with power off and power on.
With power on, the aircraft came down like a parachute, nose down, before going into gliding flight. Before long, KLM ordered its first F. 7, although the airline specified it would provide its own engine to keep costs down. Forty aircraft of the type were built in total, four of them by KLM itself using parts retrieved from written-off airplanes.
American millionaire Van Lear Black took a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Batavia in an F. 7 fitted out for luxury travel especially for him. Extra fuel and oil tanks were added for the long journey, and the airplane set out from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport on the fifteenth of June, 1927, arriving in Batavia ten days later, a nine-thousand-mile trip. Even with a delay in Allahabad due to lubrication trouble, it was still a world record and became a potent symbol of the possibilities of civil aviation.
Black leased two KLM Fokker airplanes as his private transport and remained a high-profile supporter of flying up to his mysterious death in 1930, when he fell from the deck of his yacht Sabalo in mid-ocean. Licenses to manufacture the F. 7 were given to factories in seven countries, and in 1922, Fokker moved to the United States, where he established the Atlantic Aircraft Corporation. While talking to his Dutch-born American employee Robert Noorduyn, Fokker was given the idea to create a multi-engined version of the popular F.
7. Noorduyn later wrote that Fokker first told him he was crazy when he broached the idea. Noorduyn replied that nobody was crazy enough to fly over mountains in a single-engine aircraft. If the engine failed, you’d had it.
But with three engines, if one failed, you could just go on flying. Fokker was impressed by this reasoning and realized the commercial potential of a trimotor. As well as becoming a popular choice for emerging airlines from Europe to the United States, the F. 7 trimotor was flown by many pioneer aviators when they set flying records.
Amelia Earhart, Charles Kingsford Smith, and Richard Byrd were among the greats who used a Fokker trimotor when they embarked on their risky quests. The Fokker 7 remained a staple of the airline industry until 1931, when a trimotor crashed, killing eight people including star football coach Knute Rockne. An investigation revealed that the accident was caused by a structural defect, and all airlines removed the trimotor from service. Fokker concentrated on military aircraft until his premature death at the age of forty-nine from meningitis.
The Fokker 12 was another trimotor created for KLM, with eight ordered for the Amsterdam-Batavia route. After its first flight in December 1930, the airliner went into service on the fifth of March 1931, taking up to eighteen passengers on their ten-day flight to the East Indies in unprecedented comfort. Six seats could be folded out and used as beds. The three 456-horsepower Bristol Jupiter radial engines were later replaced with Pratt & Whitney Wasp C radials.
The beautiful four-engined F. 36, dubbed Ar Ent, was unfortunately superseded by metal airliners soon after its debut in 1934. Powered by four Wright Cyclone radial piston engines, the airplane could carry thirty-two passengers and four crew. But as a wood and fabric airplane, its era had come to an end, and no more of its type were ever built.
The Ar Ent survived the Spanish Civil War to fly with Scottish Aviation before entering service with the RAF as a wireless and navigator training craft during World War II. A crash landing in 1940 damaged it beyond repair. French air ace René Fonck was one of the few great fighter pilots to survive World War I. The dashing Frenchman left little to chance, applying mathematical principles to combat flying and developing a thorough appreciation of the engineering specifications behind the aircraft he flew.
After the war, Fonck joined with aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky to compete for the Orteig Prize, awarded to the first aviators to cross the Atlantic. A Russian-born American, Sikorsky designed his first helicopter in 1909, and his airplanes were used as bombers in the Russian Air Force during World War I. He then moved to the United States and formed the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Company with financial support from patrons, including composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. In 1926, Fonck convinced him to redesign his twin-engine long-range transport plane, the S-35, for a transatlantic crossing.
An extra engine was added and fuel capacity greatly increased. Jettisonable auxiliary landing gear was also fitted in time for takeoff on September the twenty-first. On board the airplane were pilot Fonck, co-pilot Lawrence Curtin, radio operator Charles Clavier, and Sikorsky mechanic Jacob Islamoff. No expense was spared, and the team received publicity for the lavishness of their preparations.
The New York Times reported that a hot dinner cooked in New York would be eaten in Paris some two days later if the plans for the transatlantic nonstop flight went through. The dinner, prepared by chefs of the Hotel McAlpin, would be placed in vacuum containers to keep it hot and served at the Hotel Crillon to Robert Jackson, the American sponsor, the aviators, and others after the plane’s arrival. A huge crowd gathered to watch the men embark on what it was hoped would be a record-breaking flight. But as the airplane gathered speed on the runway, part of the auxiliary landing gear broke off, and the aircraft spun out of control down a steep slope.
Only the two pilots survived, and the hundred-thousand-dollar airplane was damaged beyond repair. The following year, Charles Lindbergh won the prize. In 1928, the Sikorsky company was taken over by United Aircraft and became famous for its flying boats, such as the S-42. Sikorsky also pursued his interest in helicopters and developed the first American helicopter, the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, which made its inaugural flight in 1939.
Even today, the Sikorsky name is synonymous with aviation, and Sikorsky helicopters are in service around the world. Another important aviation company was Junkers & Co. , a major German aircraft manufacturer. Founded in 1895 by Hugo Junkers to manufacture boilers and radiators, the company moved into aviation after the First World War and was soon producing passenger planes, including the F-13, the world’s first all-metal airliner.
In 1929, the Junkers G-38 all-metal airliner made its maiden flight. With a staggering 144-foot wingspan, the 24-ton monster was an impressive example of German engineering. Its predecessors, the Junkers W-33 and W-34, had sold well to airlines and set many records for endurance, distance, and altitude. The G-38 could carry around thirty passengers, and its luxury rivaled the Zeppelin airships.
In 1931, it was put into service by German airline Lufthansa between Berlin and London. A second aircraft was flown between Berlin, Hanover, Amsterdam, and London. This G-38 flew for a decade before being converted to a transport craft in World War II. It was destroyed by a bombing raid in 1941.
One of the most memorable figures in American aviation was eccentric businessman and airplane designer Howard Hughes. The noted playboy had a string of glamorous Hollywood girlfriends, including Katherine Hepburn and Ava Gardner, and made several successful movies. One of the most expensive was Hell’s Angels, a war film focusing on World War I flyers. Hughes set several world speed records, often in airplanes of his own design, including the Hughes H-1 racer.
In 1938, he took just three days and nineteen hours to fly around the world in a Lockheed Super Electra, breaking the previous record by more than four days. Unfortunately, not all airplane designers were successful in their endeavors. Ohio-born pilot and designer Leonard Bonney flew exhibition flights for the Wright brothers in the early years of aviation. In 1914, he survived an accident in Pennsylvania when the elevator on his aircraft broke loose, causing the plane to plunge 1,200 feet before crash landing.
Miraculously, Bonney escaped the flames without even a broken bone. Sadly, he was not so lucky during the test flight of his personally designed Bonney Gull. He tested his design in a wind tunnel and was satisfied that it was ready to fly on the fourth of May, 1928, despite the protests of family and friends. Bonney took off, but the Gull wobbled and flailed, plunging into the ground and killing the inventor instantly.
Bonney had begun building the airplane in 1925 and designed it with revolutionary duralumin folding wings and a side-by-side cockpit. He modeled the aircraft on seagulls, believing that birds held the secret to aerodynamic principles. The angle of the wing could be varied, as could its dihedral and the sweep of the outer sections. Another inventor fascinated with birds in flight was Washington-born Lyman Gilmore.
The eccentric inventor was well known for his luxuriant long locks and flowing beard, the result of a bet with his brother. Gilmore swore he would not cut his hair or shave his beard until William Jennings Bryan was elected president, thus keeping his hirsute appearance until he was seventy-four, upon which it was shaved off on his deathbed by hospital staff. He also wore a trench coat in all weather, claiming it staved off infections. Gilmore’s first aircraft was an eighteen-foot glider he built in the 1890s that flew when towed by a horse.
Unfortunately, he had borrowed his employer’s horse without asking, and when the glider rose over it, the horse bolted in fright. Gilmore was subsequently fired and moved to Grass Valley, California, where he worked on his next contraption, a thirty-two-foot steam-powered flying machine that Gilmore claimed to have flown in 1902, a year before the Wright brothers’ successful flight at Kitty Hawk. However, he had no witnesses to the event, and most people were dubious that the heavy flying machine was capable of leaving the ground. Despite his annoyance at the authorities’ refusal to credit him with the first powered flight, Gilmore continued to construct inventions in his Grass Valley workshop, including a monster fuselage.
Although he did not go down in the annals of aviation history as the world’s first powered flyer, on March the fifteenth, 1907, Gilmore did open America’s first commercial airfield. The following year, Gilmore built two relatively sophisticated flying machines. The small monoplane could only fly in small hops, although some have speculated that a skilled pilot could have coaxed it to cover longer distances. The large aeroplane was a fascinating prototype that foreshadowed the design of later passenger planes.
It featured a closed cabin fuselage and weighed more than 1,600 pounds. While there is scant evidence about the actual flights made by Gilmore’s aeroplanes, a local newspaper referred to Gilmore as a full-fledged aviator who made a flight without breaking his neck. In the years following the First World War, Gilmore hired barnstormers to stage flying displays at his aerodrome. He displayed his own inventions in the hangars for public exhibition.
Sadly, these amazing machines were lost in a 1935 fire that burned the hangars to the ground. While the fire was classified as an accident, there was a rumor that it had been deliberately lit by someone aggrieved that Gilmore had shot his dog. After the fire, Gilmore lost interest in aviation and pursued a mining venture until his death at age seventy-four. In his will, he requested that his executors distribute his estate in a manner that would promote the knowledge and science of mechanical engineering.
Eccentric pilots were popular fodder for the newsreels of the 1920s. One entertaining piece showed pilot Major L. P. Openshaw taking his new bride Jean on their honeymoon in a Westland Widgeon.
The light two-seater monoplane was designed in 1924 in response to a British Air Ministry competition that aimed to encourage the development of cheap private airplanes. British manufacturer Westland Aircraft produced two designs for the competition, a biplane and the Widgeon parasol monoplane. The Widgeon was made from mixed steel tube and wood with wooden parasol wings that folded for easy storage. Unfortunately, the prototype crashed at the competitive trials due to an underpowered engine.
Nevertheless, Westland continued working on the monoplane, adding an Armstrong Siddeley Genet engine. During the early years of aviation, competitions were used to stimulate the development of aircraft design. In 1924, the British Air Council offered a prize for the best two-seater airplane. The Parnall Aircraft Company came up with the quirky Pixie 3A, a tiny biplane with foldable wings powered by a 32-horsepower British Cherub 3 engine.
The company also manufactured a monoplane version. However, neither airplane performed well in the competition, both being forced down with engine trouble. It wasn’t until 1926 that the Pixie 3 redeemed itself, coming fourth in the Lympne trials. Another fast, agile airplane was the U12, designed by Hanns Herrmann in 1925 for German flyer Ernst Udet’s aircraft company.
Udet was a German air ace second only to the Red Baron. Like so many fighter pilots, he struggled to find work after the war, turning to aerobatics, air racing, and aerial film work to make a living. In 1933, Udet brought his U 12 B Flamingo Special to the United States, where he performed thrilling stunts in front of huge crowds gathered for the International Air Races. He said he was glad to be able to fly in Chicago, though it was nothing like flying over Greenland, where he had made SOS Iceberg the previous year for the Universal Pictures Corporation.
Texan air adventurer Jimmy Wedell preferred a monoplane for his daring feats. Rejected for army flying because he was blind in one eye, Wedell became a gun runner along the Mexican border. When the law caught up with him, Jimmy and his friend Harry Williams set up the Wedell-Williams aviation business. One branch of the business was the manufacture of airplanes, including sophisticated racing monoplanes.
They tasted their first success with the 44, a pylon racer piloted by Wedell, which took out the coveted Alvin Callender trophy. In 1933, Wedell took out a swag of records, including the world speed record. However, the following year he was killed in a crash while giving a flying lesson. The interwar years saw some important innovations in the aviation industry.
In 1921, wing walker Wesley May climbed out onto the wing of a Curtiss JN-4 airplane with a can of fuel and poured it into the gas tank. While this was more a stunt than a practical refueling option, in 1923, two United States Army Air Service Air Corps DH-4B biplanes took part in the first air-to-air refueling. A hose was run down from a handheld fuel tank in one airplane into the other airplane’s fuel filler. A couple of months later, a DH-4B set an endurance record by staying aloft for thirty-seven hours.
It was refueled nine times with 687 gallons of gasoline and 38 gallons of engine oil. In 1929, the Spokane Sun-God, a Buhl CA-6 Sesquiplane, made the first non-stop transcontinental round trip flight. A section of its fuselage was removed so the airplane could be refueled in mid-flight. Pilots Nick Mamer and Art Walker flew from Spokane, Washington, to San Francisco, to New York, then back to Spokane.
The pilots endured savage storms, smoke from forest fires, and sheer exhaustion. At one point, refueling gas had to be delivered via milk cans lowered on a sling. After 120 hours, Mamer and Walker finally arrived back at Felts Field, Spokane, where they were welcomed by a crowd of 10,000 people. The five-day flight set a world distance record of 7,200 point-to-point miles.
Air-to-air refueling was just one option for non-stop flying. Slings that hooked fuel cylinders from the ground were also tested. German designer Alexander Lippisch was noted for his innovative prototypes. His first tailless glider was built in 1921, and Lippisch spent the next decade experimenting and refining a design he christened Storch.
The Storch 5 incorporated an 8-horsepower DKW engine and became Lippisch’s first powered model. The first public flight was made at Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield in October 1929, piloted by Gunter Gronhoff. Fellow pilot Hellmuth Kohl saw the demonstration and asked Lippisch to design an aircraft that could be used for transatlantic crossings, leading to the acclaimed Delta series of airplanes. The Storch series featured swept-back leading and trailing edges.
The Delta series incorporated a swept-back wing that changed the design of the trailing edge to be a straight line. Lippisch also experimented with rocket power, collaborating with fellow enthusiast Fritz von Opel, an heir to the Opel automobile fortune. Von Opel’s love of rockets and his showy demonstrations of rocket-propelled motorcycles had earned him the nickname Rocket Fritz from the international media. Von Opel attached a rocket to a sailplane designed by Lippisch and launched the world’s first rocket plane in 1928.
The solid rockets did not provide enough thrust and caused an explosion on its second flight. So von Opel commissioned a new airplane from Julius Hatry. The Opel Sander Rak 1 Hatry Flugzeug was to become the world’s first purpose-built rocket-powered aircraft. Hatry test flew the rocket-propelled glider on the seventeenth of September 1929, becoming the first pilot to fly a rocket plane.
On September the thirtieth, von Opel took the glider to an airfield at Frankfurt am Main. Like the previous design, the RAK. 1 had a sailplane wing. A pod was attached under the wing with room for the pilot and sixteen black powder rockets.
The tailplane was mounted on booms high on the aircraft to protect it from the rocket exhaust. German pyrotechnics engineer Friedrich Sander supplied the rocket engines. Von Opel had been disappointed not to have a chance to fly his first invention, so he seized the opportunity to pilot the RAK. 1.
He climbed into the cockpit to be launched by a twenty-meter-long rail launcher. After three attempts, von Opel got airborne and flew the aircraft 1. 5 kilometers in 75 seconds. Unfortunately, the airplane landed so hard it was damaged beyond repair.
Watching the flight was von Opel’s fiancée, Frau Selnik, also a pilot. Selnik had helped with the technical specifications of the project. General Motors, the majority shareholder of the Opel company, then banned further rocket research, and von Opel left the industry and moved to Switzerland. 1929 was also the year that Gotthold Espenlaub tested his own rocket plane.
After several years experimenting with sailplanes and collaborating with Lippisch, Espenlaub had moved into rocket testing, developing the E. 13 in 1928. A few weeks after von Opel’s test flight, Espenlaub successfully piloted the purpose-built rocket glider. Its eye-catching streamline chassis was given added impact by the eyes and teeth painted onto its nose.
The aircraft took flight powered by a rocket burst and briefly burned before Espenlaub brought it under control and to a safe landing. Soon afterwards, Espenlaub piloted the LF 5 monoplane created by Swiss designer Alexander Soldenhoff. Like all test flights of the era, it was a risky venture. One German newspaper wrote that grandchildren, when they saw a museum exhibit entitled aircraft from the first half of the twentieth century, would shake their heads at the courage of their forebears.
Powered by a 32-horsepower engine, the LF 5 was able to reach 150 kilometers an hour. With its fast speed and streamlined design, the LF 5 was a little more practical than another experimental airplane of the era, the rubber plane. Its single propeller was precariously mounted on the wing that swayed over a cigar-shaped body containing the tiny cockpit. Experiments such as this foreshadowed the invention of the helicopter.
Argentinian Raul Pescara was the first person to demonstrate that it was possible for a helicopter to reach the ground safely if its engine failed, as air rushing through the propeller could keep it turning, a phenomenon known as auto rotation. Of all his prototypes, the number three helicopter was the most successful, making ten-minute flights by 1924. It was the first flyable helicopter with collective and cyclic controls. Another helicopter pioneer was Frenchman Etienne Oehmichen, whose aircraft set the first helicopter distance record recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
He added a balloon to the machine to give the twin-rotor helicopter enough lift to fly. He was also the first to fly one kilometer in a closed circuit, a feat that took fourteen minutes and elevated him to an altitude of fifty feet. Although helicopter designs were slow to get off the ground, airship technology was going from strength to strength, with the post-war era turning out to be a golden age for zeppelins. Airship pioneer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin died in 1917, but the Zeppelin airship company continued to manufacture giant airships.
It reached the pinnacle in 1928 with the release of LZ 127, also known as Graf Zeppelin. This colossus of the skies made its first transatlantic passenger flight on October the eleventh between Germany and America. The twenty passengers, who included Hearst newspaper reporter Lady Grace Drummond Hay, landed in New Jersey 111 hours and 44 minutes later. The return journey was 71 hours and 49 minutes, half the time it took to cross the Atlantic by ocean liner.
Drummond Hay was also aboard the Graf Zeppelin when it embarked on a historic round-the-world flight in 1929. The only woman in the party, she sent back news reports as the airship flew across the Atlantic to Germany, across Siberia to Tokyo, then the first non-stop flight across the Pacific to Los Angeles. The final leg was a three-day journey, and the entire trip took twenty-one days. In future years, the Graf Zeppelin made an exploratory flight over the Arctic and carried thousands of passengers across the Atlantic.
It became the first aircraft to fly more than a million miles and had a perfect safety record. The American military also invested in airship technology during the 1920s. The airship Los Angeles was built in Germany as part of a war reparations deal and arrived in the United States in 1924. With its envelope filled with helium rather than hydrogen gas for safety reasons, the USS Los Angeles carried out test flights for the US Navy and tested mooring points on the floating airship base, the Patoka.
The dirigible also helped calibrate East Coast radio compasses and made a landing on the aircraft carrier Saratoga. The US Army Corps built its own airships in the 1920s, including TC-3, a non-rigid blimp. In 1924, the TC-3 and a US Army Air Service Sperry Messenger made the first successful airship-airplane hookup when the Messenger docked underneath the TC-3. The term blimp was supposedly coined by a Lieutenant Cunningham of the Royal British Navy from the sound made when tapping the balloon with a finger.
The Army’s tests were successful, but the project was abandoned, with only the Navy pushing forward with construction of rigid airships. Despite the catastrophic failure of airship R38 during maneuvers in 1921, Britain forged ahead with airship design. The non-rigid AD1GFAX was a private vessel built by the Airship Development Company for advertising purposes. After several months of work in an old army airship hangar, the blimp made its maiden flight in September 1929.
Unemployed men were paid to pull the airship in and out of the hangar using ropes, as no steering mast had been built. The first company to avail itself of the advertising opportunity was the Walter Wilson grocery chain. However, the AD1 had a short life, crashing in Belgium the following year while advertising cigarettes. The pilot was unhurt, but the airship was damaged beyond repair.
It was auctioned in 1931, with the gondola fetching two pounds and the 75-horsepower Rolls-Royce engine selling for thirteen pounds ten shillings. The engine found a new lease of life in a Whitley Bay speedboat. Also in Britain, the R100 series was being developed with the idea of using rigid airships as passenger and mail carriers from Britain to the far reaches of its empire. The government commissioned the Airship Guarantee Company, a subsidiary of the Vickers-Armstrong weapons firm, to build the R100.
At the same time, the Air Ministry started work on the R101. The R100 team included aircraft engineer Barnes Wallis and senior stress engineer Nevil Shute Norway, later to find fame as the author of adventure novels. Working in the wilds of Yorkshire, the team faced many practical difficulties, from lack of skilled workers to icy cold weather and a limited budget. However, the engineers overcame the problems and came up with ingenious solutions, such as a frame made from only eleven standardized components fitted into a non-rectilinear framework.
Wiring was color-coded for the first time. When it became apparent that customized engines would not be built in time, the team decided to fit six Rolls-Royce Condor petrol engines despite the increased fire risk. The R101 fitted diesel engines, which were much heavier. The Rolls-Royce engines included two with reversing ability to enable precise docking onto a steering mast.
The R100 team was surprised to learn that none of the R101 engines had the capacity to reverse. But there were many inconsistencies in the R101 design. The Air Ministry changed the original design from a safety factor of two to a safety factor of three. This strengthened the structural framework while overloading the airship by twenty to thirty tons.
While some of the design team’s innovations were ingenious, such as ballast operated by a valve system, the Beardmore engine was unsuited to the airship, and the fins, elevators, and rudders were poorly designed and difficult to operate. Ultimately, it was overweight, leaky, and short of lift. After the R100 successfully flew to Canada and back in 1930, the pressure was on for the R101 to demonstrate its prowess. Despite its many flaws, the airship was talked up by authorities, including the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson, who said it was safe as a house and scheduled its maiden voyage for October 1930.
Lord Thomson and fifty-three other officials and crew boarded the airship for the planned flight to India. Sadly, the vessel crashed into a hillside in France during bad weather, killing forty-seven people, including Thomson. The tragedy marked the end of Britain’s airship program, and the R100 was broken down for scrap and sold for less than six hundred pounds. The US Navy also had its share of airship disasters, with the USS Akron crashing off the New Jersey coast in 1933.
The 785-foot helium-filled dirigible was one of the largest flying objects in the world. On April the third, the Akron was caught in wild weather over the Atlantic and sank, killing seventy-three men. The few survivors were picked up by a German motorboat. The Akron’s bent and twisted framework was later salvaged.
Its sister ship, the USS Macon, was also lost two years later. Fortunately, lessons had been learned from the Akron disaster, and only two of the seventy-six crewmen died thanks to the introduction of life jackets and rafts. Naval airship officer Lieutenant Tex Settle served on several airships during the 1920s and designed a stratospheric balloon attached to a sealed cylinder that he dubbed with mordant humor, the flying coffin. In 1933, the balloon was launched at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago.
Settle, the only man in the world licensed to fly every type of aircraft, took it up in an attempt to set the world altitude record. It was the height of the Great Depression, and tens of thousands of people flocked to Soldier Field to witness the ascension of the 600,000-cubic-foot, 105-foot-diameter balloon. But trouble struck when the gas release valve failed to work properly. Settle was forced to make a spectacular crash landing on nearby railway tracks rather than release clouds of hydrogen gas that could have endangered the spectators.
Just a few weeks later, the Soviet balloon StratoStat took out the record. The 1930s saw intense competition between airplanes and airships for dominance in the commercial aviation industry, and the Germans were ahead of the field in airship design with their gargantuan transatlantic liners. The mightiest of them all was the Hindenburg, a luxury vessel accommodating up to fifty passengers over two decks. On the upper deck, its wealthy passengers could promenade along two walkways gazing out through huge windows at the panorama below.
The dining room offered silver service on white linen tablecloths, the lounge held a baby grand piano, and the rather cramped cabins contained two beds and a washbasin, similar to Pullman railroad coaches. On the lower deck were bathrooms, a shower, crew quarters, a kitchen, and even a smoking lounge. The largest man-made object ever to take to the skies, the Hindenburg was lifted by hydrogen gas, as an American military embargo prevented the airship from using the less flammable option of helium. However, German airships had been safely using hydrogen for some time, leading many to believe that they had mastered the volatile element.
After the first year of service in 1936, during which the Hindenburg crossed the Atlantic thirty-four times, weight savings, including the removal of the piano, increased passenger capacity to seventy-two. The Hindenburg was seen as a safe, comfortable way to travel, so stable that many passengers were airborne before they even realized they’d taken off. But on May the sixth, 1937, came the event that was to put an end to passenger airship travel forever. It was the eleventh time that year that the Hindenburg had approached its docking point at Lakehurst, New Jersey, following a voyage from Europe.
In mid-afternoon, the airship glided majestically over New York. After diverting due to electrical storms, the Hindenburg arrived at Lakehurst that evening. It was then that disaster struck. A lick of flame appeared high on the ship, and within seconds the airship had burst into flames.
The frame sank to the ground, killing thirty-five of the ninety-seven people on board. In less than thirty seconds, the great liner of the skies was a charred mass of twisted metal. Cameramen at the scene had stopped filming after they captured footage of the mooring lines being secured, so the actual moment of ignition was not caught on film. But radio reporter Herb Morrison’s eyewitness account was heard all around the world.
It’s burst into flames, he cried. Get out of the way. It’s fire and it’s crashing. It’s terrible.
Oh my god. It’s burning, bursting into flames, and falling on the mooring mast. All the folks are fleeing the scene. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world.
The exact cause of the fire remains a mystery. The crew believed it was sabotage from a time bomb set up by people opposed to the Nazi regime. But recent research suggests the sealant used to coat the skin of the airship’s gas bag, made up of iron oxide and aluminum powder, was ignited by static electricity generated from the electrical storm. Whatever the cause, the graphic images of the Hindenburg plunging to her doom meant the age of airships was at an end.
The other passenger liners were grounded, and airplanes took the ascendancy. Throughout the 1920s, designers had been improving airplanes. Following on from the giant biplanes flown in the final years of the war, the creation of even more powerful engines meant airplanes were growing ever bigger. The largest single-engine aircraft was the British Blackburn Napier Cubaroo, whose wings stretched an impressive eighty-eight feet from end to end.
The airplane flew at a weight of nine tons thanks to its 1,000-horsepower, sixteen-cylinder water-cooled X-type engine. Seen alongside the puny 1909 Antoinette monoplane flown by Hubert Latham, the Blackburn Napier demonstrated just how far aviation had come in less than twenty years. The Royal Air Force used the Cubaroo as a testing craft during the 1920s. The Vickers Vanguard was another giant of the sky, a twenty-three-seat airliner powered by two Napier Lion engines.
On display at the Hendon Air Show in 1925, it was described as a striking commercial type. The Vickers company was better known for its military aircraft and weapons manufacture. But the end of the Great War had seen Vickers aircraft playing an important role in civil aviation. It was a Vickers Vimy converted bomber that carried out the first flight from England to Australia, and the Vimy was commissioned as a commercial airliner in 1919.
The Vanguard entered service with Imperial Airways in May 1928. A one-off civil variant of a military design, the aircraft became the type 103 Vanguard when its engines were replaced with 485-kilowatt Rolls-Royce Condor 3 models. Sadly, the Vanguard had a short life, as it was destroyed in late 1928 during testing following modification of its tail unit. France’s Farman Aviation Works also produced a number of big airplanes, including the F.
180 Wibault Blue, a distinctive twin-engined biplane with the capacity to carry twenty-four passengers. The two Farman piston engines were mounted on the upper wing facing in opposite directions. Its wingspan was a mighty eighty-five meters. The airplane was originally intended to operate non-stop from Paris to New York, but Farman decided to keep its three F.
180s and use them as company planes for several years. The world’s largest monoplane was the Beardmore Inflexible, a revolutionary stressed-skin metal aircraft that heralded a new era of airplane design. With a wingspan of 157 feet, the mid-wing airplane towered over its rivals. But the Beardmore’s massive girth was also its downfall, as it was actually too heavy for its three Rolls-Royce Condor engines.
It took its maiden flight in 1928 in front of a huge crowd at Martlesham Heath airfield. An extra 400 yards of heath was cleared, as it was thought the airplane would overrun the existing runway on takeoff. However, the monoplane took off before the end of the runway and made an uneventful flight. But because it had been fitted with support cables due to concerns that its wings would fold from the weight of the aircraft, it was only ever flown as a display model.
In 1930, the Beardmore was pulled to pieces and ended its days as a testing board for corrosion experiments. French engineer René Couzinet’s revolutionary monoplane was another aircraft making its maiden flight in 1928. The trimotor Couzinet 70, known as the Arc-en-Ciel, featured a thick wing with freight drift and a cutting-edge, ultramodern design. It was twenty-three-year-old Couzinet’s first airplane, built while he served as an officer with the 34th Aviation Regiment at Le Bourget.
The monoplane weighed sixteen tons, had a wingspan of more than twenty-seven meters, and could carry enough fuel to travel 10,000 kilometers. It also had a wing loading of 100 kilos per square meter, double that of most other airplanes of the time. The proving flight took place on May the seventh. Sadly, the pilot, Maurice Drouhin, and mechanic, Monsieur Lanae, were killed three months later when the airplane crashed on a test flight following modifications to its engines.
But Couzinet went on to develop the Couzinet 70, which flew Air France flights across the Atlantic during the 1930s. And these are just part of a long list. But exciting as they are, they mean nothing to the true goal of aviation unless the experience gained is applied to further the speed, safety, and all-round performance of air transportation. The 1920s and 30s were decades of experimentation and discovery.
Aeronautical breakthroughs set the scene for commercial passenger travel. Helicopter technology moved rotorcraft from the realm of fantasy to reality. Airships demonstrated the potential of lighter-than-air flight, and giant airplanes pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Once regarded as lightweight, monoplanes took ascendancy over biplanes as designers experimented with radical new structures and materials.
Metal bodies replaced fabric and wood, providing strength and endurance and opening the door to a new era. In only two decades, the airplane had gone from being a novelty to an indispensable part of modern life. People expected reliable goods and mail delivered by air. They eagerly took up opportunities to visit far-flung parts of the globe.
Commercial passenger travel was on the cusp of becoming an integral part of the world economy.
