Peter Garrison
I take a miserly pleasure in finding big expensive books on sale at desperately low prices. A bookstore near me, another victim of Amazon, closed recently, disposing of most of its inventory, during its final weeks, at progressively more drastic discounts.


I had admired one book in a window display before the sale began but had been discouraged by its price; now it came down into my skinflint range and I grabbed the last copy they had.
It happened that at about the same time I was rereading, for the third time, a novel written early in the 1900s. The author describes being moved to tears when, as he was riding up a wooded hillside path overlooking the ocean – this would have been around 1910 – his horse shied at a noise overhead and he looked up to see an aeroplane passing by. He compares his reaction to the emotion of an ancient Greek who, during a stroll in the countryside, happened to glimpse a demigod. (It is parenthetically useful to know that in real life the author’s great love had died in an accident while learning to fly.)
Like a septuagenarian trying to glimpse again the emotion of first love, I have often tried to excavate from beneath the deep muffling alluvium of decades of flying the emotion I originally felt at the sight of aeroplanes, on the ground or in flight. The sculpted form of a P-80’s air intake was about as thrilling a thing to me then as a girl’s breast, and, it being the 1950s, about as accessible.
The book I got is called simply Aviation, or, if you include the smaller print, “The Hulton Getty Picture Collection/Aviation/The Early Years.” The text, consisting mainly of captions, is in French and German as well as English. The author/editor is Peter Almond, the publisher Könemann, the ISBN number 3-89508-682-7.
The photographs on the front and rear of the book’s dust jacket capture, in a way, a transition that occurred in the early years of aviation, and that parallels a transition that has occurred in me and, I suppose, in many other longtime pilots.
The front image shows an Antoinette monoplane in flight over the sea, backlit by sunbeams breaking through a cloudy sky and paving the calm ocean with silver. It is a photograph of breathtaking beauty; it evokes an emotion much like the one recorded by my novelist. (In fact. it’s so good I half think it must be faked.)
The pilot, possibly Hubert Latham, is seen in silhouette, wearing the peaked cap that seems to have been a favourite headgear of early aviators and motorists. He appears calm, as a demigod should. The caption implies, but does not unequivocally state, that this photograph was taken on the occasion of Latham’s unsuccessful attempt to fly across the English Channel. Latham’s engine failed and he ditched. When rescuers reached him he was seated atop his floating aeroplane, calmly smoking a cigarette. The dark horse Louis Bleriot succeeded a few days later, gaining immortality.
The back cover picture, taken almost exactly 20 years later, shows the magnificent all-metal Gloster VI (incorrectly identified in a caption as a Supermarine seaplane and progenitor of the Spitfire) at the 1929 Schneider Cup races. Actually, three Supermarine seaplanes did race that year, one of them winning the Schneider Cup, but the Napier-engined Gloster was not ready in time. It did set a world’s speed record of 336 mph soon afterward, but that lasted only two days before being broken by a Supermarine S-6 doing 358.
The Schneider Cup races, heavily supported by the military services of several European countries as well as the United States, probably contributed more than any other factor to the evolution of fast propeller aeroplanes.
In 1931, a Supermarine S-6B, aided by a 2,600-hp Rolls-Royce engine but retarded by two huge pontoons, achieved 410 mph on the deck. It would be a long time before even retractable-gear fighters could do as well.
The Gloster VI, in contrast to the fragile Antoinette on the front cover, is a completely accomplished object, aerodynamically and structurally “correct” by modern standards. It differs from the fighters of the Second World War, the apotheoses of the fast propeller aeroplane, principally in having pontoons and a thin wire-braced wing rather than a cantilever one. We often speak of the incredibly rapid evolution of the personal computer, but when you compare the computers of two decades ago to those of today, you have to conclude that the evolution of the aeroplane was even more rapid.
Some of the images in the book are well-known, for instance that of Orville Wright’s first powered flight on December 17, 1903. Less familiar is the photograph of the first sustained flight to take place in Europe: Alberto Santos-Dumont in his weird canard boxkite, the 14-bis, which he piloted while standing upright, like a milkman. By an odd coincidence, just as we see Wilbur running alongside in the Wright photograph, we see an unidentified photographer similarly caught in mid-stride in this one.
A few pages further on, the theme of excited runners and a flying aeroplane is repeated. Now it is January 1908, and Henry Farman is making by far the longest flight to date in Europe – about a mile – as two frock-coated men run toward him, waving their hats excitedly. On the next page we see Farman again, this time flying low over an old church as a strolling couple and a gendarme watch (both men’s hands are raised to their hats, perhaps to keep them from falling off as they peer upward).
It strikes me that something all these very old pictures have in common is the juxtaposition of a flying aeroplane with people on the ground. They convey something we tend to forget about early flights – that most of them took place at extremely low altitude. What was miraculous about them was the mere levitation – the then unfamiliar empty space between the machine and the earth which we now take entirely for granted. Climbing to thousands of feet of altitude, as balloons regularly did, was not yet customary – but it would come soon.
It was in August of 1908 that Wilbur Wright dumbfounded the Europeans with his mastery of controlled flight. Almond emphasises a subtle but fundamental difference between European and American (that is, Wright) thinking that may account for the superior early successes of the Wrights.
The Europeans, he says, expected aeroplanes to be inherently stable, like boats. This implied that they would make flat turns and be steered with a rudder. Many of their aeroplanes had no roll controls at all. The Wrights, on the other hand, perhaps because the family business was a bicycle shop, understood that to turn it was necessary to bank, and that roll control was therefore essential. They likewise understood that an aeroplane, like a bicycle, could be unstable to long as it had a human pilot to guide it. Were the Europeans aware that the marine paradigm was inappropriate? Or was their assumption a completely unconscious one?
Aeronautics was a vein that, once discovered, proved both rich and easy to mine. The aeroplanes of 1910 were flimsy, uncertain things, kites with motors; a few years later fast, streamlined biplanes were reconnoitring, bombing and dogfighting in the skies over France.
Immediately following the “war to end wars,” just ten years after Bleriot crossed the Channel, two English pilots, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, flew across the Atlantic. We see their huge Vickers Vimy tied down like Gulliver where it nosed over in an Irish bog, and an exhausted Alcock and a jaunty Brown reading the paper with their morning tea the day after their 16 hour 38 minute flight.
That day – June 14, 1919 – marked the end of the beginning. Aeroplanes would become safer, faster, more efficient and comfortable; but once one of them had crossed the Atlantic the pace of aeronautical advancement, if it did not slow, at least felt less dizzying.
When Lindbergh made his great solo flight eight years later, 91 people had already crossed the Atlantic in aeroplanes; and while Lindbergh flew farther than the others and alone, the media-induced frenzy over his flight was out of proportion to its slight technical significance.
The DC-3, at that point, was just around the corner. Already long gone were the informality, innocence, and wonderment of the earliest days, when men and women forgot their dignity and ran, waving their hats, after clattering flimsy craft that bobbed along a few feet off the ground; and when a glimpse of a passing aeroplane could make a horseman weep.