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| Shaw family photo. |
To face the enemy in World War I, pilots first had to survive flight training.
(this article appeared in Air & Space magazine July 2008)
Dear
Mother and Dad:
This
looks cheerful, but it is much more cheerful than it looks… After 12 hours on
BE2c’s I took one up and smashed it to bits. Am not hurt—just messed up a bit.
(letter home, March 16, 1918)
Frederic Barr Shaw had reason to be
cheerful. He was alive, unlike scores of fellow cadets. On March 11, 1918,
shortly after take-off from a training field in Cranwell, England, the engine
on his single-engine BE2c biplane “went dud,” just as it had many times before.
At just about 50 feet off the ground and with a large hangar and a line of
airplanes looming in front of him, however, all his options were bad. Deciding
not to crash into the hangar and the planes, Shaw attempted to turn the plane
around. He didn’t make it. The plane stalled and nosed into the ground. Shaw
was pried from the twisted mass of wood, wire and cloth bleeding and
unconscious, later to be told the details of the crash.
But
again, Shaw was lucky. He would fly again. During most of World War I, pilots
stood a greater chance of being killed or injured during training or in
accidents than in combat itself. For every pilot lost in battle, two were
killed in training, reported the U.S. Secretary of War in December 1918. Flying
at that time, recalled one aviator, was “more art than science,” and the
process of training aviators was a raw and very dangerous business. Aviation,
after all, was only
a few years old when the war broke out in 1914. From a few dozen types of
planes and few hundred pilots around the world, it had grown to include
hundreds of types of planes and thousands of pilots. But the wartime pressure
to crank out planes and pilots and the frenzied pace of expansion meant that
the planes were ridiculously unreliable and the pilots grossly undertrained.
Many of the procedures that most pilots take for granted nowadays had not even
been thought of, so it's understandable why the learning curve was so steep.
For
example, take safety belts. While it didn't take long for the manufacturers to
include the devices on most planes, many of the old-time pilots, including many
instructors, thought it unmanly or simply forgot to use them, sometimes with
tragic results.
Montgomery was
killed when the pilot fell out of the front seat in an [Avro] in a loop.
Montgomery was in the back seat and crawled up into the front cockpit and just
had his hands on the controls when it crashed. Think of watching the ground
coming up at you for two or three minutes while you wiggle up the fuselage.
Makes my blood run cold! (diary of John M. Grider, Feb. 22, 1918)
Early in the war, the British lost a great many
pilots—literally.
A great
percentage of the RFC [Royal Flying Corps] casualties are due to an imperfect
knowledge of keeping a course and taking bearing, etc. It is only very recently
the RFC have used compasses at all. (Frederic Barr Shaw, Nov. 19, 1918)
Today, all pilots are trained in pattern
procedures when a approaching an airfield. Back then, as the number of planes
and pilots mushroomed, a new and baffling problem emerged—air traffic.
A horrible thing
happened today. We were all out on the tarmac having our pictures taken for
posterity when somebody yelled and pointed up. Two Avros collided right over
the airdrome at about three hundred feet. God, it was a horrible sight. We
didn’t know who was in either one of them. I was glad I was sitting next to
Cal. They came down in a slow spin with their wings locked together and both of
them in flames. Fred Stillman was in one machine and got out alive but badly
burned and Doug Ellis was in the other one and was burned to a cinder. (John M. Grider, Feb. 9, 1918)
Today, it takes years for a new plane to be
designed, built and tested before being put into production. Back then, new
planes were designed, built and flown in a matter of weeks, with the
aerodynamics, flight characteristics and structural integrity to be tested
literally on the fly.
Springs did ten
loops in succession and landed. Ainsworth went up later in the same machine and
was coming over the top of his loop when the wings fell off. He was killed
instantly. (John M.
Grider, Jan. 1, 1918)
It would take years of such trial-and-error before those who oversaw the manufacture, training and governance of aviation to establish the necessary rules and standardization to make aviation safer and more reliable. In the United States, federal regulation of aviation didn’t begin until the dawn of commercial aviation with the Air Mail Act of 1925 and the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which authorized the Department of Commerce to establish airways, encourage air commerce, create and enforce air traffic rules, license pilots, certificate aircraft, and operate navigational aids. Until then, the establishment of standardized procedures in aviation was largely up to individual squadrons or the pilots themselves.
Though the military potential of airplanes was recognized
soon after the Wright Brothers experiments in 1904, by the eve of World War I
most practical efforts to find a military use for airplanes were largely token
and experimental, led by a handful of aviation pioneers and visionaries.
Despite the achievements of the Wright Brothers, the United States lagged far
behind European nations in the development of military aviation, and its late
entry into World War I meant that all the early American aces flew under
foreign flags.
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| Curtiss aircraft undergoing tests by U.S. Army, 1913. Photo Historylink101.com |
(Capt. Duncan Grinnell-Milne on
flying a Farman Longhorn in his memoir “Wind in the Wires.”)
No wonder military strategists
viewed aviation skeptically. The machines seemed too fragile, too dangerous, too
cumbersome and too unreliable to be of any practical use. When the war broke
out, British military planners estimated the military wing of
the RFC would require only seven squadrons of 12 aircraft each and a total of
364 trained pilots—all to be dedicated solely to observation and reconnaissance work. Early pilot training was
basic, consisting of simple aerial maneuvers, take-offs and
landings, and cross-country flight by reference to landmarks on the ground—thus
the lack of compasses in many planes. The initial flight-training course was
set at six months, despite the opinion of some experts that the training of a
competent pilot took at least 9 months to a year to complete.
Once the war broke out, training time was cut to three months in order to
double the number of pilots produced.
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| Fred Shaw, circa 1914-15 Shaw family photo |
Shaw was wait-listed. Only after several months and a flurry of letters and
telegrams to the Admiralty did he get his wish. In October 1917, he was told to
catch a boat in Halifax bound for England, where he would begin training as a
Probationary Flight Officer in the RNAS.
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| Battle of Zonnebeke Photo by Frank Hurley |
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| Squad 16-A of the RNAS |
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| Fred Shaw (highlighted) |
At night, however, his time was his
own. Shaw and the other recruits could do as they please: play billiards, go
pub-hopping or tour nearby London, or just “bum” around. Off-base, pilots were
treated like visiting dignitaries, given the VIP treatment wherever they went
and swooned over by young women—no wonder so many accounts of World War I
aviators seem devoted as much to debauchery as they do to feats of aerial derring-do.
To be an aviator was special, and they were treated as such. They were the
astronauts of their era.
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| German pilots enjoying a little rest and relaxation. |
The
first flight with an instructor piloting is called the “joy flip”—I believe
they side-slip, nose spin and generally try to scare you green. I am looking
forward to it. (Frederic Barr Shaw, Nov. 9, 1917)
John MacGavock Grider, an American
from Arkansas who joined the Royal Flying Corps, was sent to Oxford College for
his ground school, then to flight schools in Grantham and Thetford.
A
flying field is not at all what I expected it would be like. They [the pilots]
all seem to do pretty much as they please, go where they please and fly when
they please. The chief occupation seems to be passing the flowing cup.
As the mission of military aviators
had changed, so had flight training. By 1917, every pilot was required to
perform aerobatics: how to side-slip, to loop, to imitate a fall out of
control, and to perform a dozen other aerial maneuvers. “Stunt or die” was how
one British instructor goaded his cadets. Unfortunately, many did the later. During the month of October 1916, of the 28
pilots killed in the RFC, half were in training, and fully 20 were the result
of accidents.
Though most training planes were outfitted with dual controls, allowing the
student to learn by first following the instructor’s control movements, many of
the instructors knew only marginally more than the students themselves. (In
France, recruits were taught starting on dual-control roleur or “penguin” trainers, planes with clipped wings that
allowed the student to gain confidence by taking short, flightless hops before
graduating to the real thing.)
Making things worse, mounting losses at the
front put enormous pressure on flight schools to churn out new pilots. Already trying
to deal with a shortage of planes, flight schools faced the dual problem of
having to do more with less, but having to do it more quickly. Many pilots were
sent to the front before they had officially finished training, some with as
little as five hours solo time. One officer
in May 1917 complained that most pilots being sent into combat “can’t even fly,
let alone fight.”
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| French roleur trainer. |
The predictable result was a
horrendous cost in both men and machines. For example, on July 1, 1916, at the
beginning of the battle of the Somme, the RFC had a total of 410 aircraft and
426 pilots available. By November 17, it had lost a total of 782 planes and 576
pilots, more than the total force it had started with.
In this case, while it was safer to be a pilot than a soldier in the trenches
(British ground troops suffered a staggering 420,000 casualties during the
battle), concern over the adequacy of training forced the RFC to establish
minimum requirements for new pilots. The new rules required 15 hours in the air
solo; a cross-country flight of 60 miles with landings at two places; a climb
to 6,000 feet followed by 15 minutes at that altitude; a dead-stick landing
(with engine stopped) within a circular mark 50 yards in diameter; and two
landings in the dark assisted by flares.
Despite the dangers, recruiting new
pilots was not a problem. Press accounts of the exploits of a handful of air
aces had given the flying corps the reputation of gallant “Knights Errant of
the Skies,” an image encouraged by the military brass as a morale booster for
the troops on the ground and a recruiting tool back home. In addition to the
romance and adventure of flying, pilots were officers, and thus entitled to
better food and quarters, as well as higher pay and status than the grunts on
the ground. Recruiters could afford to be picky. In one case, if a certain
school director deemed a candidate unworthy, he would sit the youth in a swivel
chair and spin him around until he was dizzy sick, thus providing the medical
excuse the director needed for rejection.
For recruiters, the biggest challenge was determining what exactly made for a
good pilot. With no other criteria to go by, recruiters relied on old
prejudices about good breeding and social standing. Potential pilots were
screened based upon their “standard of education, their sporting
accomplishments, and their social and general qualifications.”
Still, as the pool of prep-school
jocks dwindled, recruiters had to adjust their standards. Frederick Libby, an
itinerant cowboy from Colorado who volunteered in 1915 to join the Canadian
Army, was slogging through the mud driving a supply truck along the front lines
when he saw a notice announcing the RFC was seeking candidates. “True, I know
nothing about aeroplanes or what an observer is supposed to do,” he wrote. “But
one thing I do know, they don’t fly in the rain… Me, I’m not thinking of
flying, but it might be a nice way out of the rain.” (Libby went on to found Western Airlines).
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| Oops! |
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| Fred Shaw in RNAS uniform, 1917. Shaw family photo |
In fact, wrote Grider after his
first flight, the most surprising thing was, despite all knowledge to the
contrary, “the feeling of absolute safety” he got once the wheels left the
ground.
“If you were a kid and you got into
one of these planes, you wouldn’t know how scared you should be because you had
nothing to compare it to,” says Dan Taylor, a radio personality at WCBS-New
York and a pilot, restorer, and historian at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New
York, a “living museum” which not only has one of the largest collections of
vintage World War I-era aircraft, but flies them each weekend during the summer
in public airshows.
Compared to airplanes built today,
says Taylor, who flies everything from a 1911 Bleriot to a 1914 Avro 504 to a
1917 Sopwith Camel, “all these planes had a lot of drag, so they weren’t very
aerodynamic. They had the glide-ratio of a brick, so you always had to keep an
eye out for an open field.” There was no “hands-off” flying back then. “The
planes got pushed around by the wind, and the controls on many were heavy.” Not
only that, but “you had to manage the engine much more, and you had to watch
your attitude and airspeed to prevent over-stressing the airframe.” Also, every
plane was different, even among planes of the same type. “They each had their
own flight characteristics, depending on the individual rigging and what kind
of damage the plane had sustained,” Taylor says. Because of this, “you had to
learn to do little tricks to make the plane do what you want it to do.”
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| The Airco DH.2, nicknamed the "spinning incinerator." |
“But it did make you a better
pilot, because you were more prepared for the unexpected,” Taylor says.
Yes, but only if you survived.
Before accumulating five hours of flying time, Shaw had wrecked two planes, a
total that presumably was considered normal given that his instructors allowed
him to continue with his training. On average, Shaw’s training field witnessed
three crashes a day. In most, the pilot escaped with only minor cuts and
bruises, but over the course of several months, many were killed or seriously
injured.
Military orthodoxy demands order
and regimentation, but aviation was so new, evolving so rapidly and expanding
so greatly during the war that it defied all attempts at regulation. For
example, despite the huge increase in the number of planes British industry
produced, shortages plagued both squadrons and flight schools. While the actual
number of planes might have been sufficient to supply the growing number of
squadrons added by the RFC, the factories could not keep up with the number of
planes shot down, crashed or which just wore out. In 1916, for every plane lost
from enemy aircraft or ground fire, nearly six were lost from accidents or
deterioration.
In 1917, British military
strategists estimated that to maintain a standing force of 5,500 pilots, an even
greater number of pilots-in-training were needed in order to replace those it
expected to be killed, injured, or left unfit to fly from sickness or
exhaustion.
At one point, pilots sent to the front could expect to last, on an average,
three weeks.
More telling, perhaps, were statistics showing that more than twice as many
pilots were killed in accidents than in combat.
When advised that the brevity of training might be responsible for the high
losses, one commander answered that “short training was a consequence of the
number of casualties and not the casualties of the shortness of training”—a
rather twisted explanation that only described the vicious cycle in which the
RFC found itself.
After three and one-half hours of
dual (flight training with an instructor), Shaw soloed. His instructor told him
to fly two circuits around the field and then land. Over the next three weeks,
Shaw accumulated a total of 14 hours of both dual and solo time, flying both
Caudron and American-made Curtis J.N. “Jenny” trainers. In addition to
take-offs and landings, Shaw mastered spirals and S-turns, and climbed to 7,800
feet and performed a series of cross-country flights. He was then sent to
Cranwell, England, for final training before being assigned to a squadron. He had
a total of 25 hours flight time when he crashed.
When Shaw came to, he was in
the Northern General Hospital in Lincoln, a converted manor house. His injuries
were comparatively minor, just a concussion of the head and some cuts and
bruises, but he would spend nearly eight weeks at the hospital, apparently lost
in the bureaucratic shuffle as the RFC and RNAS merged to form the RAF. When
Shaw finally returned to Cranwell, it was June, and much of his previous
training needed to be repeated.
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| The wreckage from which Fred Shaw was pulled. Shaw family photo |
Grider survived flight training,
accumulating about 20 hours solo before being transferred to the School of
Aerial Fighting in Ayr, Scotland. He advanced from Farmans to Avros to Sopwith
Pups and finally to French Spads. Along the way, he had seen nine of his fellow
cadets killed in crashes. He was at Ayr just 19 days to practice dogfighting
when he was ordered to the front line. “I’d like to stay here a while,” he
wrote of Ayr, “but they kill off pilots too fast for any one to linger very
long.”
While experienced pilots understood
that if they manipulated the controls in a particular way, the aircraft would,
or at least should, move in a certain way, few could explain exactly why, or
what part the various controls performed at each stage of a particular
maneuver. Many general principles of flight were a mystery. This meant that if
anything unexpected happened, a pilot was apt to lose control, and it was often
a matter of chance whether he could regain it.
Take spins: Before 1916, few pilots unfortunate enough to get themselves into a spin lived to tell of the experience. One pilot who did found himself surrounded by people looking to congratulate him on his seemingly fantastic feat. When asked how he did it, he cheerfully answered that he did “everything wrong,” by which he meant he did the reverse of what his experience and intuition as a pilot told him. By 1917, enough anecdotes had circulated about pilots recovering from spins by pushing forward on the control stick in a spinning nose-dive rather than natural inclination to pull back that it motivated British commanders to rethink air training. Under the leadership and inspiration of Major R.R. Smith-Barry, the School of Special Flying was opened in Gosport, England in August 1917.
Up until then, instructors were
simply drawn from pilots either waiting to go to the front or pilots deemed
unfit for the front. There was no consideration given to their qualifications
or motivation, and they received very little supervision. Each instructor
taught on the basis of his own experience and attitude. As a consequence, given
the urgent need to produce more pilots, and given the general reluctance of
instructors to increase risks to themselves, students coming out of flight
schools were ingrained with a cautious inhibition toward flight. They were
taught how to avoid getting into dangerous flight situations rather than how to
recover from them. This attitude left them ill-equipped to deal with the
challenges of combat flying.
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| Major R.R. Smith-Barry, on right. |
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| Gosport School of Special Flying. |
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| Avro 504 standard trainer |
Assigned
to the 85th Squadron under Canadian air ace Lt. Colonel William “Billy” Bishop,
Grider flew bomber escort and patrols. He shot down five enemy planes before
being shot down behind enemy lines and killed in June 1918. He was buried in
Armentieres, France. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the local airfield is dedicated
to him.
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| Handley Page 0400 heavy bomber. Shaw family photo |
--Tom LeCompte
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| Grave of friend and fellow airman. Shaw family photo |
Note: Dan Taylor is still a disc jockey in New York City and still flies antique aircraft.
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