By July of 1909 he had fitted an 80 horse-power motor to his biplane,
and with this he made a flight of over four miles over Laffan’s Plain
on July 21st. By August he was carrying passengers, the first being
Colonel Capper of the R.E. Balloon Section, who flew with Cody for
over two miles, and on September 8th, 1909, he made a world’s record
cross-country flight of over forty miles in sixty-six minutes, taking
a course from Laffan’s Plain over Farnborough, Rushmoor, and Fleet,
and back to Laffan’s Plain. He was one of the competitors in the 1909
Doncaster Aviation Meeting, and in 1910 he competed at Wolverhampton,
Bournemouth, and Lanark. It was on June 7th, 1910, that he qualified
for his brevet, No. 9, on the Cody biplane.
He built a machine which embodied all the improvements for which he
had gained experience, in 1911, a biplane with a length of 35 feet
and span of 43 feet, known as the ‘Cody cathedral’ on account of its
rather cumbrous appearance. With this, in 1911, he won the two Michelin
trophies presented in England, completed the _Daily Mail_ circuit of
Britain, won the Michelin cross-country prize in 1912, and altogether,
by the end of 1912, had covered more than 7,000 miles with the machine.
It was fitted with a 120 horse-power Austro-Daimler engine, and was
characterised by an exceptionally wide range of speed--the great
wing-spread gave a slow landing speed.
A few of his records may be given: in 1910, flying at Laffan’s Plain in
his biplane, fitted with a 50–60 horse-power Green engine, on December
31st, he broke the records for distance and time by flying 185 miles,
787 yards, in 4 hours 37 minutes. On October 31st, 1911, he beat this
record by flying for 5 hours 15 minutes, in which period he covered
261 miles 810 yards with a 60 horse-power Green engine fitted to his
biplane. In 1912, competing in the British War Office tests of military
aeroplanes, he won the £5,000 offered by the War Office. This was in
competition with no less than twenty-five other machines, among which
were the since-famous Deperdussin, Bristol, Flanders, and Avro types,
as well as the Maurice Farman and Bleriot makes of machine. Cody’s
remarkable speed range was demonstrated in these trials, the speeds of
his machine varying between 72.4 and 48.5 miles per hour. The machine
was the only one delivered for the trials by air, and during the three
hours’ test imposed on all competitors a maximum height of 5,000 feet
was reached, the first thousand feet being achieved in three and a half
minutes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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