NEW AIR LANGUAGE

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 6, 9 January 1928, Page 11

NEW AIR LANGUAGE

VIVID AND PICTURESQUE A THOUSAND STRANGE TERMS Springing into existence on pioneer flying fields, tho new air language has already achieved a permanent place for itself (writes 11.8. in the "New, York Times Magazine"). Perhaps all of the 900-odd terms from "aerofoil" to "zoom," which the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics includes in its official "Nomenclature," will not enter the vocabulary of the layman. The addition will nevertheless be considerable; it will be vivid and picturesque, as have been the words given us by the sea, tho automobile, and the radio. Some of these terms are obvious, others are not. Koine arc misused. Some are still such innovations—like the term "avigntor" which Hegenberger applies to himself—that they will not be disc.iss.'d here, though they may eventually come into the language. The new air language is, naturally enough, a hybrid showing ancestry in many quarters. This is what gives tho romantic philologist his fund. It is to the sea, for instance, that wo owe the designation of a 'plane as a ship, referred, to as she; the fact that a '[>lano has a cockpit or cabin, as the case may be; that she has a rudder and a pilot; that she cruises, leaves a wash, sometimes yaws, finally flics into iau airport. To the natural inhabitants of the element wo have so boldly and successfully invaded we, of course, owe the term wings and its French cousin, aileron—that auxiliary surface of the wing which functions in banking a ship for a. turn. Wo come back to earth for words when wo talk about smooth, rough, or bumpy air. These are, by the Avay, perfectly serious terms, descriptive of real conditions, as a columnist discovered recently when ho was corrected for venturing tho idea that air travel would have none of tho inconveniences of riding over an uneven roadbed. Besides aileron, we have borrowed various other terms from the Trench ior our air vocabulary. The peasant farmer whose hay barns were pre-emp-ted by war time forces gave us our hangars. Fuselage, by which wo denote the elongated structure to which are attached the wings and tail unit; nacelle, which is shorter than a fuselage find does not carry a tail unit; longerons, the fore-and-aft members of. the fuselage framing, are words found in French dictionaries as well as in our own. Another is empennage, which includes the stabiliser, fin, rudder, and elevator. Runways and airways are obvious terms; obvious, also, is the expression "to wreck a plane." Not so "Wash out," for a pilot may be squeezed into a forced landing and wash out his landing gear on dry land. By the same toicen, stalling an airplane in the air is not related to the engine nor comparable to tho inadvertent process cursed in motor-cars. Stalling in the air refers to tho very dangerous act of allowing an airplane to fall below the speed necessary to sustain controllable fliftl' t'Other familiar expressions take on new meaning j n the air. Even tho rapidly disappearing Puritan should not quarrel over tho "leg" of a flight, nor tho purist sniff at "dope," which is the official nomenclature for the liquid that is applied to the cloth of airplane members to increase strength and produce tautness. So, too,'the old lioadlino writer who remembers "when a_ hop was nothing but a Saturday night dance at a Summer resort, and when a take-off was a bit of burlesque or mimicry" should be informed that Jenny is not always a girl's name and that not all crates cany oranges. Jennies and crates, to a pilot, are contemptuous terms with which he refers to certain superseded types of airplanes. The airmen havo appropriated numbers of other words from our common speech and given them meanings puzzling enough to the uninitiated. Take a few such terms at random: Ceiling, visibility, endurance, rigging, elevators, level off, pancake, stick. When fliers speak of the coiling they refer to the height above earth of the bottom of the lowest cloud level at a given time. The elevators'(or flippers) at either side of the rudder cause the nose of the 'plane to lift whenever they are raised. To level off is to fly closely parallel to the oarth after descending from ordinary flying altitude, preparatory to "putting a 'piano down"— that is, before making a landing. To "pancake" is to level off at a greater altitude than, in a normal landing, causing the 'plane to stall and descend on a steeply inclined path. Tho "stick" —or, more expressively, the "joy stick" —is to the airplane what the wheel is to tho automobile; that is, it controls the 'plane, though in a different manner. Airplanes are of four sorts: Amphibians, which rise from and alight on either land or water; seaplanes, which do the same on water only; ship planes, on the decks of vessels, and land planes, on tho land. Or we might classify airplanes as follows: Pushers, which carry a propeller or propellers in the rear of the main supporting surface, and tractors, which have the motivating power forward. Or as monoplanes, biplanes, triplancs, quadruplanes, multiplanes, sesquiplancs (a combination of monoplane and biplane), and tandems, which have two or more sots of wings of substantially the same area placed one in front of the other and on about tho same level. Tho exceptions arc the glider, which has no power plant; tho kite, which is propelled by a towlino and relies on tho wind moving past its surfaces for support; the helicopter, whose support is derived from the vortical thrust of propellers; tho ornithropter, which has flapping wings. Unquestionably the air age with a specialised vocabulary has begun.