AMERICA TESTS THE AUTOGIRO.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 139, 13 June 1936, Page 8 (Supplement)

AMERICA TESTS THE AUTOGIRO.

Experiments With Wingless Machine.

ITS PLACE AND USEFULNESS IN WARFARE

(By HARRY LEITHEISER.)

BALTIMORE, Maryland. THE flight-lieutenant sagged against the hangar door, an eye on the 'giro hovering over the field: His army equanimity appeared 5 a little ruffled. I'd have said he seemed astonished; but a 27-year-old army pilot is never astonished. Incredulous—that may be the word. But whatever his frame, of mind, he relieved it with a little bad language. "Man and boy," he continued, "I've seen and flown quite a few crates of one kind or another. But that one's not in the book. No wings, no ailerons, no flippers, no rudders; yet she skylarks around like a tumbling pigeon, an.l hangs up there on a sky hook. Look at her," as the machine drifted straight down, stopped in its tracks. "Comes down like a hen over a fence, and sits there like a drunken grasshopper. They

always told me," he concluded resen: fully, "that aeroplanes travel fast, or they come down hard." And so they do; that is, aeroplanes do. But an autogiro —well, that's u bird of another feather. The machine that outraged the lieutenant's conception of decent conduct for aircraft was one of two autogiro-! delivered to the Army Air Corps about Christmas time. At Langley Field, the army's proving ground- for aircraft, these fledglings are undergoing service tests to find out what they can do and .how well they can do it, and what makes them tick. Purchase Is Important. That the army has just bought two autogiros seems of little moment when it is recalled that their purchases of aircraft of conventional forms totalled some 500 machines and nearly 25,000,000 dollars of money during the past year. But to the giro people it is a matter of extreme importance; it establishes a most significant milestone in the progress and development of rotary wing aircraft in the United States. For the Air Corps is finicky about aircraft; caution in taking up new ideas is the watchword there. They don't trifle with rosy drafting room pictures. They want serviceable, dependable equipment; machines intended for and which actually accomplish definite jobs in the business of modern warfare.

Heretofore, the Brass Hats have looked askance at (in point of fact, they have definitely looked down on) autogiros. And not without reason. For, until last year, the giro was a hybrid affair: half rotary, wing machinehalf aeroplane. It was supported in the air by the automation ..of ; the blades—so far. fine! —but it.'also had a pair of abbreviated aeroplane wings and a complete outfit of the usual aeroplane controls.

Now an aeroplane depends on forward speed not only for sustentatjbn in the air, but also for control. Air lias to pass over tlie surfaces at a relatively high speed, or tlie controls won't catch hold. Loss of speed means stalled, ineffectual controls; in an aeroplane, a grave condition; in the old giro, an embarrassing one. So while the earlier giro, oy virtue of its rotating blades, could remain aloft with little or no forward speed, and could descend vertically and take off in its own length, almost —all these highly desirable qualities _ were sacrificed because it had,, to maintain aeroplane speed to make effective' uso of its aeroplane controls. Since its inception in 1918, the autogiro hfts been the 'tenderly nurtured brain-child of Senor Don Juan de la Cierva, its inventor. And he it was who clipped its wings entirely away in 1933 and so severed its relationship with the aeroplanes; made the rotor blades tiltable and launched the first wingless, direct-control machine. It's as simple as can be. The rotating blade unit is pivoted with respect to the body of the machine, and is connected to the usual form of aeroplane .control stick. You move the stick forward, the machine dips do>vn;' move the stick back, rotor tilts back, -machine follows along and you climb;, same thing to right or left.* Speed Not Necessary. Wings, ailerons, elevators —all gone, and along with them the necessity for a minimum forward speed for. control. In this direct-control .. machine .the ,entire •lifting surface is the control area; the body and flight path follow the direction of the rotor as.imparted by the pilot,

no matter if tlie giro' is high-tailing along at 150 miles an hour, or if it is drifting down like a parachute. A year ago, when the first wingless machines were brought forth in this country, the army began to reveal a definite interest. It looked as if the new machine really could do what had been claimed for, but seldom accomplished, by the old heterogeneous machine. It was demonstrated that the new giro could take off from a space an aeroplane could hardly turn around in. It could loaf along at 15 miles an hour, and it could log its 140 miles, too; only a shade slower than aeroplanes of similar power. With the merest whisper of a breeze to help, it could hover over a point on the ground indefinitely; and when it came down it could land on half a tennis court. Best' of all, it was responsive to ,the pilot's will in all altitudes, at all speeds. You could actually do all the tricks with it that had been extravagantly predicted for the earlier models. And you could fold its blades back and

stow it in a garage or in the corncr of a hangar; you could tow it along the highway, no bigger than a truck. Truly a war machine of great promise. Just as the exigencies of war demand lGin railway-mount rifles with a 30-mile range, as well as howitzers and mortar.s of much shorter scope, but with an equal capacity for destruction, so also is there a place in the air for the gyro, along with the general service types of 'planes. While the tremendously fast pursuit and ground-strafing 'planes, the higlialtitudc, heavily-armed destruction, dealing bombers do their jobs in a workmanlike manner, there is still a sap in observation, photographic, communication and messenger service, between land vehicles and present aeroplanes, which has never been satisfactorily bridged. That's where the field of the gyro is. Invented in 1918. I To-day's autogyro has been 18 years in the making. Cierva began his experiments in 1918 as a result of the crashing of a big bombing aeroplane he had built for the Spanish Army. His reaction to tho destruction of his machine was the abandonment of aeroplane principles, and the beginning of a search for a new method of flight.

It was not until 1923 that the machine first left the ground. In the interval Cierva had built countless models; hai built and rebuilt a full-sized machine time and again. When his efforts were finally rewarded by seeing his machine rise from .the ground and fly, he knew he was on the right track; that freely pivoted airfoil blades, once started, would continue to rotate at sufficient speed to support the machine.

But the first flight in 1023 represented just the beginning of the job. Cierva encountered, studied and overcame one obstacle after ( another. True, his machine had left the ground and had returned whole. But it had as little control as a dead leaf in a gale of wind. Besides that, a tremendous gyroscopic effect was produced by the rotating blades. Also, it flew one side high, due to the difference in speed and consequent difference in lift, between the advancing blades turning forward toward the direction of flight and the retreating ones turning backwards.

This condition looked pretty hopeless for a while. Cierva give's credit for its solution to the happy chance of having built a flying model out of flimsy material. At any rate, find the solution he did; he hinged the blades at their roots so that they were free to flap; and there, you might say, was where the autoglro really was fledged. It is that single, most important detail that makes the giro a practicable machine, and not only that, but one that is inherently stable. — (N.A.N.A.).

send news from ships at sea. As a matter of record, homing birds actually handled the first authorised air mail service. A cbmpany known us the Great Barrier Pigeongram Service established a regular service between Auckland and the Great Barrier Island, Go miles to the north-west, in November, 1807. In the siege of Paris, in 1871, pigeons were employed by the beleagured Parisians to fly the mail past the encircling Prussian armies. The Gen mans used hawks to intercept tlieee messengers. "President Wilson's" Exploit. Even in the World War pigeons were used to supplement the various means of communication utilised by the signal corps of the different armies. Often they