NEW AIR LANGUAGE

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 January 1928, Page 12

NEW AIR LANGUAGE

A THOUSAND STRANGE TERMS. Springing into existence on pioneer flying fields, the new air language has already achieved a permanent place for itself (writes H.B. 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 adition will nevertheless be considerable ; it will be vivid and picturesque, as have been the words given us by the sea, the automobile, and the radio. Some of these terms are obvious, others are not. Some are misused. Some are still such innovations —like the term “avigator” which Hegenberger applies to himself —that they will not be discussed here, though they may eventually come into the language. The new air langauge is, naturally enough, a hybrid showing ancestry in many quarters. This is what gives the romantic philologist his fund. It is to the sea, for instance, that .we owe the designation of a ’plane as a ship, referred to as she; the fact that a ’plane 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 flies into an airport. To the natural inhabitants of the element we have so bodly and succcessfully 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. ‘We come back to earth for words when we talk about smooth, rough, or bumpy air. These are, by the way, perfectly serious terms, descriptive of real conditions, as a columnist discovered recently when he was corrected for venturing the idea that air travel would have none of the inconveniences of riding over an uneven roadbed. Besides aileron, we have borrowed various other terms from the French for our air vocabulary. The peasant farmer whose hay barns were preempted by war-time forces, gave us dur hangars. Fuselage, by which we denote the elongated structure to which are attached the wings and tail unit; nacelle, which is shorter than a fuselage and 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. Runaways 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 token, stalling an airplane in the air is not related to the engine nor comparable to the inadvertent process cursed in motor-cars. Stalling in the air refers to the very dangetous act of allowing an airplane to fall below the speed necessary to sustain controllable flight. Other familiar expressions take on new meaning in the air. Even the rapidly 1 disappearing Puritan should not quarrel over the “leg” of a flight, nor the 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 headline 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 carry oranges. Jennies and crates to a pilot, are contemptuous terms with which he refers to certain superseded types of airplanes. The airmen have appropriated numbers of other words from our common speech and given them t meanings puzzling enough to the unitiated. Take a few such terms at random: Ceiling, visibility, endurance, rigging, elevators, level off, pancake, stick. When fliers speak of the ceiling 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 earth after descending from ordinary flying altitude, preparatory to “putting a ’plane 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. The “stock” —or, more expressively, the “joy stick”—is to the airplane what . the wheel is to the automobile; that is, it controls the ’plane, though in a dif-

ferent 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 the land. Or we might classify airplanes as follow: 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, triplanes, quadruplanes, multiplanes, sesquiplanes, (a plane), and tandems, which have two combination of monoplane and. bior more sets of wings of substantially the same area placed one in front of the other and on about the same level. The exceptions are the glider, which has no power plant; the kite, which is propelled by a towline and relies on thb wind moving past its surfaces for support; the helicopter, whose support is derived from the vertical thrust of propellers; the ornithropter, which

has flapping wings. . Unquestionably the air age with a, specialised vocabulary has begun.