Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 209, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1917 — How Uncle Sam Is Goinn to Whip the Germans in the Air [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

How Uncle Sam Is Goinn to Whip the Germans in the Air

ITHIN ten months the United States will have 25,tXH) battle planes in service in Europe. The planes will be equipped with American motors of 250horsepower, capable of driving them at a maximum speed of 100 miles an hour. Furthermore, these motors will be constructed principally of aluminum and will be of less weight per horsepower than any airplane motor here~~tofore~bullt. ThusTlhe plans of the

•irciaft board of the council of national defense, adopted by the war department and financed by congress, are in a fair way to be speedily consummated. Not long ago, the Washington correspondent of the Kansas City Star, who signs himself “H. J. Stt,” went to Dayton, 0., to interview one of the inventors of the airplane about America's great aerial program, planned to “blind” the German *nny. Portions of the reporter’s story are printed {below. It gives some details of what Uncle Sam hs doing in the production of an army of mantlrda :• — A young man jumped and caught the propeller {blade of the biplane and gave it a pull. It turned thuir way nrounri and stopped, lie repeated the

performance two or three times. Suddenly there was a roar and the propeller became a blur. It was a hot morning In Dayton and the breeze from the revolving propeller fan looked refreshing. The plane

'wasn’t going up. It was blocked on the ground and they were merely trying out the engine. I (Stepped forward into the breeze. “The power isn’t turned on yet, - ” said Orville 'Wright, at my side. “It won’t be so pleasant here when it is.” The roar turned into thunder. The ground iseemed to be blowing away in a cloud of dust. +We grabbed for our hats and retreated. “Just one of the training planes,” Mr. Wright lexplaiaed. - “Only a hundred horsepower.” Of no importance on a battle line, perhaps. But one of the gathering squadrons that even now are beginning to cast a faint black shadow across the German horizon.

For this field? with its four square miles, is to be one of the great centers Of the aircraft work which is relied on to turn the scale of battle on the western front. And there at one end of the field, which has been named the Wilbur Wright field, in honor of one of the two brothers

who invented the airplane, is the little, weathersbeaten shed which was used by the brothers as the hangar for their original plane, only thirteen years ago. It Is Just a plain shed, and beyond It stretches the Imposing line of hangars off into the distance — pretty nearly two miles of buildings, calculated to house the 240 planes that are to be assembled fn the fleld eight miles east of Dayton. And, yet, it is fittingly preserved as a memorial to the days •when air flight was being slowly and painstakingly developed by the daring scientific genius of the 'Wright brothers. In Washington I had talked with the men whose imagination had conceived the great 640-million dollar aircraft program, and who are now in charge of its execution. They are engineers and executives, not practical aircraft men. They know America’s industrial and engineering resources. Their enthusiasm is contagious. I went to Dayton to talk with the world’s foremost aeronautical engineer and to learn some of the difficulties that must be overcome before we can put out the eyes of the Germans in the air, organize our surprise attacks, destroy the enemy communications and blow up the Krupp works at Essen. Orville Wright is a man of 46, of medium size. Modest and unassuming, he gives the impression of .independence In thought and action. He is deliberative in manner, well-organized, perfectly controlled, clear thinking. “We can do the job,” he said, as we drove to the aviation field. “And it’s worth doing. It offers us the one big hope of winding up this war next year, instead of permitting it to drag along for years to come. All our information is that Germany and the allies are keeping about an equid number of planes on the battle front. IN e can t be sure, but their resources in building seem about equal. Each side probably has about 3,500 planes in active service on the western front, aside from their reserves and training planes. “If we were in a position to put several thousand planes, manned by trained aviators, on the western front today, we might bring the war to an iearly end.” “By using the planes to extend the range of lartlllery, and bombing the enemy lines of com,munication and his munition plants and naval i “Possibly, to some extent. I am not particularly sanguine over bombing, and I do not believe other flyers are. The men who have never flown are the most enthusiastic over the possibilities of propping bombs. The antiaircraft guns keep the (flyers at a height of above two miles. Anyone 'who has ever flown at that height knows the tremendous difficulty of hltting a target. There is iDothlng for him to gauge his speed by. The bomb drops through air currents movingin different di-

rections which deflect it from its course. "The Krupp works at Essen offer a large enough target so that a squadron of airplanes might be able to put them out of business. Other plants might be

successfully attacked.. JJnder favorable conditions Other bombing operations might be carried out successfully. But my idea of the effectiveness of supremacy in the air is along different lines.” "Which ones." ,— ~~ "In other wars the element of surprise has determined the outcome when the forces were of approximately equal strength. The general who could mass his men so as to fall on a smaller force Of the enemy won the battle. The airplane has stopped that. Now a commander on the western front knows exactly what his opponent is doing. is no chance to mass men for surprise

attacks. Consequently, we have the present deadlock in France. “What we must do is to drive every enemy airplane out of the air. By doing this we not only prevent the Germans from knowing what we are doing, but we also cripple their artillery, for artillery fire has been directed by the airplanes. Then we can plan surprise attacks and can drive the enemy back. In modern warfare the side without airplanes is at a hopeless When we gain complete command of the air, when we have literally smothered the enemy airplanes, we

break the deadlock and win the war. “The airplane has produced the deadlock. The airplane can end it.” “How soon can we hope to do this?” “We have the best men In the country at

work on the problem. But people must not be impatient if at first our progress seems slow. Only men who have tried it know the difficulties of building a high-power airplane motor.” In the matter of personnel. It may be noted, our aircraft promoters believe we have a great superiority over the rest of the world, for this reason: Jt takes an exceptional sort of man to make a good flyer. He Ynust be quick-witted and have the steadiest sort of nerves. Otherwise, he comes to grief and smashes an expensive machine. Men of this type volunteered extensively in Britain and Canada jzarly in the war. They constituted the armies that went into the battle line without adequate artillery protection and so were largely destroyed. The same forces operated to destroy the strong and vigorous young men of France and Germany who would have made good aviators. So today America is the greatest reservoir in “he world of the right soft of material for the personnel of the aircraft service. While the other countries are having difficulty in getting proper men for flyers—England has invited us to send men to her aviation schools because she cannot keep them filled —our problem is merely to train them and provide them with equipment. I asked Mr. Wright what speed plane we might •'xpect to develop.

“It is a complicated problem, the limit oFUseful speed,” he replied. “A good many reckless statements aije made on the subject by persons with vivid imaginations. It is safe to say there are machines on the western front that can make 130 miles an hour. So far asTspeed Is concerned there are no inherent impossibilities in developing a plane that might make as high ns two hundred miles an hour. The difficulty is in the landing. “A machine’s landing speed is about half its maximum speed. That is, if a plane is designed to make a speed of fifty miles an hour its wings will "not sustalh it in the air ifjt travels slower than twenty-five miles. It must T>e moving at a “peed of at least twenty-five miles an hour to make a successful landing. So a plane with a speed of 130 miles an hour cannot land at a speed of much less than slxty-flve miles.” From the field we drove to the laboratory. It is simply a development of the crude shop in which he and his brother together worked out the problem of air flight. The airplane was no lucky find. It was not developed by rule of thumb. Wilbur and Orville Wright, sons of a Dayton United Brethren bishop, after getting through high school, set up a bicycle repair shop. They had a natural taste for mechanics and for sports. Twen-ty-one years ago they became interested in the experiments of Lillenthal, the German experimenter, in a glider. His death attracted their attention to his work. For two years they worked on data and "laws” that other investigators had produced, only to find that the work so far done was worthless.

So in their own shop in Dayton they devised a “wind tunnel’’—a chute through which an air blast was driven by an electric fan. and set to wprji measuring the resistances of'curved surfaces by a wonderfully Ingenious method of their own devising. By a long series of exact measurements and elaborate mathematical calculations involving sines and cosines and such, they worked out the problem of the curvature of the planes and of the propellers. The problems of balance were enormously intricate, But these, too, they solved. They were pioneers. They had to discover the difficulties and then find the way out. So they had to devise the methods. It took unlimited patience, resourcefulness and hard thinking to win success. They were impatient to devote themselves to the

scientific side of furthering the development of aeronautics. But they necessarily had to finance companies, fight patent suits and conduct the business of establishing a new industry. Wilbur Wright died five years ago, and in 1915 Orville Wright was able to dispose of his business interests and devote himself to

the scientific work where his heart has always been. In his well-equipped laboratory in Dayton he is now conducting two lines Of work which will be of immediate value in the great aircraft program planned by the government. One is the measurement of the air resistance of curved surfaces; the other the development of a stabilizer to make the control of the airplane more nearly automatic. Other aeronautical laboratories the world over have made these measurements of air resistance, but the figures have sometimes been as far as 100 or 200 per cent apart. The results obtained by the Wright method fourteen years ago proved substantially accurate, and now Orville Wright is taking up the work where he left it off. “Ihope to provide the proper measurements for a large variety of planes,” he said, “so-that in building different sorts we shall not have to depend on cut and try/’ The stabilizer Is an intricate device by which the action of a revolving fan holds the airplane steady. * “We can set the stabilizer,” the Inventor explained, “in such a way, for instance, as to keep the plane moving In a circle, leaving the pilot free to use his hands for making photographs.” The stabilizer has been tried out successfully, but needs further refinements so as to do away with the need of daily adjustments before Mr. Wright is willing to put it into service. He is

on Intimate terms with members of the government’s aircraft production board, and all his results are at the disposal of the government for the prosecution of the war. He has great expectations of the development of aircraft in practical use after the war, when thousands of trained flyers shall return to civil Hfe, and when we shall have enormous factory capacity for turning out the best machines in the world. . But that, again, Is another story. The Joy and Chivalry of Air Fighting. • Flying has become as much a matter of routine in war as marching on land or steaming «t>n the sea, and men are ordered to fly, at fixed hours and for stated periods, as thbugh flying were a natural act, and not the organized miracle that It really Is. A correspondent of the London Times writes interestingly about it, saying: Out In France the last chivalries, the last beauties of battle have taken refuge In the air. From the labors, butcheries, miseries, horrors and ashpit desolation of the earth, the fighting romance of war has taken wings and climbed sunwards. There alone combat is individual, visual, decisive. There alone has the combatant toj-ely solely on

himself. There alone is the battle decided not through veils of distance, between Impersonal and unknown hosts, but wing to wing and face to face. There alone are the rare courtesies of warfare still possible; it was a British squadron that suggested, and a British airman who executed, the dropping of a funeral

wreath over the German lines as a tribute to the air-warrior Immelmann. And there alone can individual skill and courage have their swift reward. For one flash, between a dip and a climb of his swallow flight, the fighting airman may catch the glint of his opponent’s eye, and, if the momentary burst of fire be truly directed, see him crumple up in his seat and the nose of his machine dip and begin its fatal spinning (jive, while the victor soars up again to safety and solitude. And what a solitude is his! From the moment in the airplane when the mechanic has given, his last heave, and the last curt verbal exchange, " ‘Contact, sir’—‘Contact, ” has been given, and the engine sets up its mighty droning song, the airman Is alone, submerged in that roaring music, deaf and dumb. For perhaps a minute he sits there testing his engine, fingering his levers, assuring himself that all is well; and then, as the

drone sinks to a hum, he makes his last ’communication the characteristic quick outward wave of the hands and arms. The chocks are pulled away, the hum rises to a drone, breaks into a roar, and he is off, bumping over the uneven earth until his speed gives his wings their

life, the rough ground is. shed away from beneath his feet, and he rises into the sudden peace of the air. The “peace of the air” may seem like a contradiction in terms in war time; but it is the supreme sensation of fair-weather flying, apart from flying and fighting. Once you have got your height, whether it be a thousand or ten thousand feet, you seem to be absolutely at rest —at rest In sunshine and a strong gale. The dinj carpet or map beneath you hardly moves; and although the trembling fingers of the little clocks and dials before you witness to the fluidity of your element and the tenderness of your hold on it, yet the

only things that do not seem to move are the wings and stays of your machine which surround you, a rigid cage from which you look forth upon the slow-turning earth or the rushing clouds. It is not until the engine has been

shut off, and you begin to plane in mighty circles toward the earth again, that you get, in that delicious rush down the hill of air, any sensation of speed; and not until, a moment before landing you skim over the earth at 80 miles an hour, that you realize with what pace you have been rushing through the'airy vacancy. But these are the sensations of mere joy-riding Ten or twenty minutes may take the fighting pilot to his statioh in the air over the enemy’s lines. How puny the absurdity of the greatest war of all time can appear is only known to the airman as he sits in the breeze and the sun, high above it all; the danger to him is not down there, although to ascend into his remote sphere he has to pass through the zone of anti-aircraft fire; his own particular enemy is the German fighting machine, which may come down to harry or destroy the observer, and which he must himseif attack the moment it makes its appearance. Between these two he watchfully patrols, and all this time, although a battle may be raging beneath him, he hears nothing but the strong, rasping hum of his engine. He flies and fights alone.