Aircraft : $b its development in war and peace and its commercial futureDavid, Evan John
History
Aircraft : $b its development in war and peace and its commercial future
David, Evan John
Aeronautics; Airplanes
At Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, on September 18, 1918, Major R.
W. Schroeder, of the United States Air Service, in an American-built
aeroplane driven by an American-made Hispano-Suiza motor, climbed to
a new world’s altitude record of 28,900 feet, only 102 feet short of
the highest peak of the Himalaya Mountains. In December, 1918, Captain
Lang and Lieutenant Willets claimed to have ascended to 30,500 feet in
a Bristol aeroplane, but the record has not been homologed. On November
19, 1918, an aeroplane flew from Combes la Villa to Paris and return, a
distance of eighty miles, carrying thirty-eight passengers. Two days
before a Handley Page, with a wing spread of 127 feet and a fuselage
measuring sixty-five feet, propelled by four motors and piloted by an
American, carried nine women and thirty-one men to a height of 6,000
feet during an hour’s cruise over London, England. A year ago another
type of this same machine, but with only a 100-foot wing spread and
driven by only two 275 horse-power motors and carrying five men, flew
across country from London to Constantinople, dropped bombs on the
German cruiser _Goeben_ anchored there, and then flew back to Saloniki,
covering a total distance of more than 2,000 miles and remaining in the
air a total of thirty-one hours. The flight was via Paris, Lyons, and
Marseilles—in order to avoid the Alps—and from there to Pisa, Rome,
Naples, and then across 250 miles of mountainous country, often at a
height of 10,000 feet.
Near the close of the year a huge triplane Caproni, with its 150-foot
wing spread, driven by three 700 horse-power Fiat motors, developing a
total of 2,100 horse-power, has carried seventy-eight people in trial
flights at the factory!
A Model F-5 flying-boat, with a wing spread of only 102 feet, driven
by two Liberty motors, and lifting a 50-foot boat, has carried 12,900
pounds over many hundreds of miles looking for German submarines, and
another flying-boat, with 123 feet of wing spread, carried fifteen
officers and a pilot from Washington, District of Columbia, to Newport
News, Virginia.
On November 27, 1918, a Curtiss N C 1 carried fifty people for a short
flight at Rockaway Beach, New York. It was drawn by three Liberty
motors. The flying weight of the machine was 22,000 pounds, and the
machine had a wing spread of 126 feet, and the NC-3 and NC-4, which
flew from Rockaway, New York, to Halifax, 520 miles for the first leg
of the transatlantic, weighed 28,000 pounds, and were driven by four
Liberty motors.
The War Department on December 23 also announced that a squadron
of four army training-machines flew from San Diego, California, to
Mineola, Long Island, a distance of 4,000 miles, in the actual flying
time of fifty hours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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