THE AIR MASTERS

Southland Times, Issue 18965, 13 June 1923, Page 15

THE AIR MASTERS

WHERE BRITAIN STANDS SUPREME. MACHINES THAT ALMOST STOP DEAD. I happened to be motoring from a visit to one of the Royal Air Force airdromes, writes a special correspondent of the Sydney Sun, when the newsagents were busy placarding the city with the alarmist contents bills that followed the Lords’ debate on the Peril from the Air. Strange as it may seem, I had spent an entertaining day at one of those airdromes within a stone’s-throw of what Lords Birkenhead, Grey and Carson have been pleas- < ed to describe as “our undefended coast.” If the British Air Force is small and “hopelessly outnumbered” (and I have no reason to doubt the figures that in machines and personnel France outnumbers Britain by about three to one), it is small, with the smallness of concentrated efficiency. It strikes me as being one of those tabloid-brand affairs of which two grains or so by weight go to make a whole bucketful. Walking across the well-rolled field, neatly bordered with camouflaged hangars, workshops, hospital and barracks, I was shown a small —ridicuously small —singleseater airplane. I should say that for absolute nakedness of wings and feather it appeared to the layman as incapable of fight as the world-famed parrot at Tom Ugly’s, Sydney, in its last ageing days. But I saw it fly. The pilot shouted “contact”; the glistening steel propeller disappeared in a cloud of spurting flame and smoke, and in a second I was watching the black helmet of the pilot mounting in the wake of a rocket that without preliminary run literally leapt into the air and held inflexibly to its almost vertical course. “That machine.” said my guide, “could lick single-handed any three machines owned by France or any country in the world to-day.” RAPID CHANGES OF SPEED.

A comparison of hawks and sparrows was forming in my mind when I was told to watch the featherless one carefully. Yes, certainly, it was travelling on a level keel in a series of jerks—first like a streak, and then practically stopping. What of it ? My companion smiled. “Supposing,” he said, “you are diving down on an enemy who ambles along at a constant speed, he would make a sitting shot, eh?” I nodded. “But supposing at the moment of your attack he were able to stop almost dead, you would find yourself just where he wanted you—going down in front of his nose.”

That was the secret of this little machine. It could climb as fast, or faster, than anything in the air, it could twist and corkscrew and dive, as we saw it, but its star turn was to suddenly change speed from 130 to 37 miles an hour without losing a foot of height. After all, there was some reason for the Air Minister forbidding aircraft instructors to exhibit their latest models at international shows. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that the war-time spirit and esprit de corps of the Royal Air Force has in any way diminished. One Saturday morning, I was told, a party of pilots, each mounted in Sopwith scouts, were amusing themselves chasing swallows in at one door of a hangar and out at the other. After lunch the entertainment was resumed. The first man to swoop into the hangar found that the great steel doors at the further end had been closed. The door partly yielded to the terrific impact, which hurled the airplane and pilot , a shapeless mass of wreckage across the concrete floor. The pilot who followed—one may imagine without a flicker of an eyelid-sized up the situation on the instant—it was all the time he had. While spectators waited breathless for the crash he calmly turned one wing swallowlike to the ground and darted through the narrow opening made by his ill-fated companion,' FATAL DAREDEVIL FEAT. I record one other fatal feat of daredevilry as it was told to me. After scaring the neighbourhood cold by vying with each other in spinning their machines nose down from enormous heights to within a few feet of the ground, one pilot misjudged his distance, and was killed, and the other, following closely behind, also crashed, but escaped with severe injuries. This was the report his commanding officer received from the hospital. “If you please, sir, I was laying myself 10 to four that—was going to write himself off, and was so absorbed in watching him do it that I completely forgot to pull her out of the dive in time.” If there is anything that will “crab the style”—as they put it—of the Air Force it is the increasing introduction of civil servants, retrenched from other departments, into many of the highly-paid administrative positions at the Air Ministry. Air Force officers complain bitterly that many of these civil servants—members of the “secretariat” as the non-flying division at the Air Ministry is known—have been seconded for duty from the Admiralty, and are suspected of being concerned in the agitation for a separate naval air force. One knows well that if such a change were made they would return to the Admiralty with considerable advancement and prestige.