Humorous Side of Flying.

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17661, 12 August 1929, Page 6

Humorous Side of Flying.

Incidents in the Evolution of our Youngest Mode of Transport.

Practically every sport has its humorous side —fishing, golf, cricket, motoring—there is humour in them all. They have all, at some time or another,'been the butt of the comic artist and the humorist. It would be strange, then, if the most up-to-date sport —flying—should escape the usual broadsides of these amiable gentlemen. Being an alleged humorist myself, and looking at flying from a professional humorist’s point of view, I must confess that flying, as a field for funny jokes, is not excellent ground. There have appeared occasionally, in the/comic papers, anecdotes about flying, illustrated by a drawing of a pe■culiar contraption that does not look like an aeroplane, and usually without any engine, but these perpetrations 'are few and fan- between. The only reason I can give for this lack of jokes about flying is- that not many people—and few humorists —fly, <?r know anything about it.

' A Bashful Broadcaster. Compare this state of affairs with the early days of motoring. Now there was a fertile field for the joke merchant, if you like, and it is still good ground, especially in the case of certain cars. But in this instance the cars themselves are funny; but who ;ever saw a funny aeroplane, except the ;Heath Bobinson affair one used to see at the Hendon pageants ? . ,And yet there is a lot of humour in flying, if you know where to look for it. But it is humour of a type which is only appreciated by flying people. It is a humour with a technique and it requires a technician to understand and appreciate it. It is a bashful type of humour also, and is only heard where flying men congregate. I remember being asked to broadcast a humorous talk on flying from the Bournemonli: Ft,iti.cn, during a meeting at Ensbury \ About four weeks

before the ml broadcast I took pen and pa ad put down as a title, “The Lighter Side of Flying.” And then I tried to think of something to. say about flying which would seem funny to a lay audience. At the end of three weeks I still had the title staring me in the face, but nothing else. I went to all the flying men of my acquaintance, begging them to tell me something funny about flying. One said, “Why.” ' I explained that I had to broadcast a funny talk on flying, and he again said, “Why?” ■ I left him, muttering to myself, “Yes, why ?”

Never Again ! Some of these friends of mine did tell me funny jokes, but I certainly could not broadcast them. Others told me jokes which were not funny unless illustrated by weird motions of the .hands I did, however, manage to get together a few stories, and finished writing my talk about an hour before the time I was due to inflict it on an innocent public. I read it through and it seemed funny .enough, but in front of the microphone, reciting these yarns to an audience I could neither see nor hear, all the humour in them evaporated, and before I had finished I was wishing that the power plant would break down or the transmitter go off duty, or that anything might happen which would/give me ■ i reason for sneaking quietly out of the studio; so that I might go and bury my head in sand, or oil, or anything. # Never again will I attempt to broadcast a humorous talk on living. No, sir. Away back in 1910 a friend of mine who was keen on flying asked me if I

would join forces with him in building, a glider. I agreed, and we sot to] work. At that period we had both,, quite’ independently, evolved models; which put up remarkable performances. 1 . Before building the big glider we built’ an overgrown model of a monoplane,’ with a wing span of about twelve feet,; and a petrol engine giving abouri half a! horse-power, or something like that. We* tried this out one day, and to prevent ; it flying away altogether (what opti-i mists we were !) wo fastened a rope to-; the nose of the machine.

Well, it flew all right, but the fellow* holding the rope got scared and let g 0,.; and our monoplane promptly put it.s.l nose heavenwards, stalled and crashed, i

Having discovered that a machine! would fly much* better with someone iii.‘ it to control it, we began work on the; glider. We built this entirely ourselves, even making our own aluminium. - castings, and doping the wings, am- so - on. When I mention the fact thmade our turnbuckles out of e ■

nipples, it will give an idea.of the mar-! veilous strength of the thingummy bol> : we were building.

Full Speed—Down Hill

Came the day when it stood in theshed complete, and really looking '-kean aeroplane minus an engine. The undercarriage consisted simply of twosprung skids. These proved excellent, for landing on, but the braking effect, they had was too great to periuit of getting up a sufliciently fast initialrun down the hill-side to give us flyingspeed. And then—happy inspiration.. —we decided that wheels would be an improvement.

• They were —inasmuch as they made the task of getting the machine up the hill much easier, and that was the only thing those wheels ever did, because on the first run down the hill,’ with the weight of the pilot added to the weight of the machine, they buckled up into all kinds of beautiful shapes and then finally gave up the job and subsided. We should have known that bicycle wheels were never intended to support an aeroplane. All this may not sound very funny, but I was standing at the foot of the hill watching the machine on its run down, and the sight of those wheels wobbling and going through an evolution of the most fantistical shapesone can imagine, and then collapsing, was the funniest thing I have seen in connection with flying. Smiles in the Sky.

My friend, Captain Sparks, tell a. funny story, which I am inclined 'to. think is a classic. It is about a pupil who, in taking off, lost a wheel unknown to himself. The instructor and a mechanic went up in another machine the mechanic holding a spare wheel. . Wheiyji,e.,ipachines came near enough: together; the mechanic held up this wheel to indicate what had happened.-. The pupil looked over at th. other machine, saw the wheel, and went off into,, hysterical laughter. A little while flater he landed and piled up the machine. j The/instructor went over to him and said, “Well, I thought you would make a better attempt than that, after us lotting you know you had lost, a wheel.”' And the pupil said, ‘ ‘ Lost a wheel f Good Heavens ! I thought- you had lost it. That’s why I was laughing.” —By Will Hay in “Tit P' i.”

QOME men there be whose charitable j deeds are as rare as an eclipse, or j. a P'- vug-Ftar: these men deserve to j be pardoned fer their pious deeds, they, j are so seldom guilty, of them. —Thomas \ Fuliar.