The Airplane That Wouldn't Come Down

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 672, 25 May 1929, Page 18

The Airplane That Wouldn't Come Down

FROZEN TO THE SKY

DEATH-DEFYING DIVE FROM SEVEN Ml EES IN AIR . . .

T) EVEN miles up I and couldn't get VgyjlgjM'Z! down! Seventy way to get there but glide! And for a while he couldn't make the plane glide. Seven miles up in the air, fifty-five degress below zero. Fahrenheit, apd in danger of freezing to death if anything went wrong with the electric heating apparatus! No petrol, and the controls frozen solid in a plane that insisted on climbing. A rise from 34,000 to 34,700 feet in twenty-four minutes of struggling to descend. No air to breathe except through a tube from an oxygen tank. Immediate death if the oxygen failed! This was the predicament in which Captain St. Clair Street, with Captain Albert Stevens, found himself recently. Snapshots From Space It was really Stevens's persistence in taking photographs that brought about the precarious situation. He wanted to experiment with a new method of taking altitude measurements by photography'. But frozen controls at seven miles above the'earth presented a new problem to Street. Ordinarily an airman has to cope with the problem of coming down when he doesn’t want to, but in this case Street wanted to come down and couldn't. He. was buzzing round in the sky as though the law of gravitation had ceased to operate. He had already twisted the throttle rod out of line. “After reaching 26,000 feet, both the throttle controls and the supercharger controls were in the extreme forward position, indicating that the engine was delivering its greatest power at that time,” he said, when the ordeal was over. “From 26.000 feet until the plane had reached its ceiling—4o,2oo feet indicated altitude —-these controls remained in the same position. The plane was in very gold atmosphere for about forty minutes at the top of tfie climb, when we beat the altitude record for a plane with two persons. This condition was sufficient to shrink the metal parts of the throttle and supercharger controls to such an extent that they could not he moved manually. “I must have worked for twenty minutes intermittently to puli hack the throttle and supercharger control with absolutely no luck, although I had bent the latter out of shape trying to reduce the engine speed. Coasting Through Freezing Clouds “We succeeded at last In forcing the plane by diving down to about 34.000 feet, but when we had reached that altitude our indicated speeds were pretty high, and a dive sufficient to overcome the climbing tendency of the airplane was dangerous because of the stresses. We weren’t sure that our wings would stay with us if we drove much in excess of 115 miles an hour, because of the light construction of the plane. • “We were afraid to cut our switches, which would have been the only way of cutting the engine off, for fear the

water in the radiator and water jackets would freeze, and It would have been dangerous to have cut the switches and turned them on again ; intermittently because of the risk of fire. “Shortly after we succeeded in getting the supercharger off and the throttle reduced, we ran out of gas and the engine began to pop and spit, but fortunately we were able to reduce our altitude sufficiently, in the short period that the engine did function after it first began to spit, to get it low' enough to preclude the possibility of freezing the water in the radiator and the water jackets." Down, down they slid, the air whistling over the nose of the c losed radiator. Once in a while the nose of the plane would turn upward and the machine would rise again. Finally Street was able to get dow u to 12,000 feet, and then he picked out one of the several fields which seemed to offer possibilities for a safe landing. The plane was not an easy one to land. It was built for high-altitude flying—for great lifting ability—and, in consequence, other factors had been sacrificed. It had no “air feel, ’ and, the aviators expressed it, “It flew like a barn door." Realising the shortcomings of his ship, Street had chosen for his landing one of the largest fields—about half a mile long and 160 yards wide. He banked the long wings of the plane at a sharp angle and turned and ! landed with a dead stick, rolling to a stop with two-thirds of the field left for a take-off when he should get a new petrol supply. How Science Aids Adventure On the morning of the flight the two aviators had completely covered their backs, chests and faces with vaseline as protection against the cold. Their ! leather suits were fur-lined, and the , thick fur collars were turned up ! closely around their necks over the ends of the padded helmets, and they wore fur-lined mittens strapped closely , around their wrists. Over all this was ; strapped the parachute wrapping. 1 Over their faces oxygen masks were strapped, peculiar cone-like snouts • with a piece of rubber tubing dangling from the apex of the cone through which the impure air is expelled. The airmen also wore electrically heated goggles. Stevens drilled a | three-eighths-inch hole in each lens of the goggles just over the pupil of each eye, and through these tiny holes both he and the pilot had to do all their seeing to operate the plane and the .{ camera. There is every reason to believe , that Captain Stevens’s method of taking high altitude records will prove I a practical one.