Chapter 30

DE HAVILAND-4. USED FOR OBSERVATION, RECONNAISSANCE, COMBAT, DAY BOMBING, AND DEFENSIVE FIGHTING.Engine, Liberty 12-cylinder, 400-horsepower. Weight, empty, 2,391 pounds. Weight, full load, 3,582 pounds. Ground speed is 124.7 miles per hour. Speed at 10,000 feet, 117 miles per hour. Speed at 15,000 feet, 113 miles per hour. 10,000 feet is reached in 14 minutes with full load. Ceiling, 19,500 feet.

DE HAVILAND-4. USED FOR OBSERVATION, RECONNAISSANCE, COMBAT, DAY BOMBING, AND DEFENSIVE FIGHTING.

Engine, Liberty 12-cylinder, 400-horsepower. Weight, empty, 2,391 pounds. Weight, full load, 3,582 pounds. Ground speed is 124.7 miles per hour. Speed at 10,000 feet, 117 miles per hour. Speed at 15,000 feet, 113 miles per hour. 10,000 feet is reached in 14 minutes with full load. Ceiling, 19,500 feet.

UNITED STATES DE HAVILAND 9-A.This is the American development of the British DH-4.

UNITED STATES DE HAVILAND 9-A.

This is the American development of the British DH-4.

Figure 11.De Haviland-4 Airplanes Produced Each Month During 1918.Jan.0Feb.▎ 9Mar.▏ 4Apr.▌ 15May█████ 153June███████████ 336July████████████████ 480Aug.████ 128Sept.█████████████████████ 653Oct.████████████████████████████████████ 1097Nov.██████████████████████████████████ 1036Dec.███████████████ 472

The production of the model machine only served to show us some of the problems which must be overcome before we could secure a standard design that could go into quantity production. Experimental work on the De Haviland continued during December, 1917, and January and February, 1918. The struggle, for it was a struggle, to secure harmony between this English design and the American equipment which it must contain ended triumphantly on the 8th day of April, 1918, when the machine known as No. 31 was completely finished and established as the model for the future De Havilands. The characteristics of the standard American De Haviland-4 were as follows:

Endurance here means the length of time the fuel supply will last. The ceiling is the maximum altitude at which the plane can be maneuvered in actual service. Ground level means only far enough above the ground to be clear of obstructions.

The first De Havilands arriving in France were immediately put together, such remediable imperfections as existed were corrected then and there, and the machines were flown to the training fields. The changing and increasing demands of the service indicated the advisability of certain changes of design. The foreign manufacturers had brought out a covering for the gasoline tanks, making them nearly leak-proof, even when perforated by a bullet. In the first De Havilands the location of the principal gas tanks between the pilot and the observer was not the best arrangement in that the men were too far apart from each other so that, if the machine went down, the pilot would be crushed by the gas tank. Also the radius of action was not considered to be great enough, even though the later machines of this type carried 88 gallons of gasoline.

As a result the American aircraft designers brought out an improved De Haviland known as the 9-A. This carried a Liberty-12 engine; and the main differences between it and the De Haviland-4 were new locations for pilot and tanks, their positions being changed about, increased gasoline capacity, and increased wing surface. The machine was a cleaner, more finished design, showed slightly more speed, and had a greater radius of action than the De Haviland-4 which it was planned to succeed. We ordered 4,000 of these new machines from the Curtiss Co., but the armistice cut short this production.

The difficulties in the way of producing new service planes on a great scale without previous experience in such construction is clearly shown in the attempts we made to duplicate other successful foreign planes. On September 12, 1917, we received from the aviation experts abroad a sample of the French Spad. We had previously been advised to go into a heavy production of this model and had made arrangements for the Curtiss Co. at Buffalo to undertake the work. This development was well under way when in December a cablegram was received from Gen. Pershing advising us to leave the production of all single-place fighters to Europe. As a result we canceled the Spad order, and after that we attempted to build no single-place pursuit planes.

THE LEPERE CORPS OBSERVATION PLANE.

THE LEPERE (CAMOUFLAGED). THE ENGINE IS A LIBERTY 12-CYLINDER, 400-HORSEPOWER.This plane was developed in the United States.

THE LEPERE (CAMOUFLAGED). THE ENGINE IS A LIBERTY 12-CYLINDER, 400-HORSEPOWER.

This plane was developed in the United States.

At the time this course seemed to be justified. The day of the single seater seemed to be over. The lone occupant of the single seater can not keep his attention on all directions at once; and as the planes grew thicker in the air, the casualties among flyers increased.

But the development of formation flying restored the single-place machine to favor. The formation had no blind spot, thus removing the principal objection to the single seater. The end of the war found the one-man airplane more useful than ever.

Our concentration here, however, was upon two-place fighters. On August 25, 1917, we received from abroad a sample of the Bristol fighting plane, a two-seat machine. The Government engineers at once began redesigning this machine to take the Liberty-12 engine and the American ordnance and accessories. The engine which had been used in the Bristol plane developed 275 horsepower. We proposed to equip it with an engine developing 400 horsepower.

The Bristol undertaking was not successful. The fact that later in the airplane program American designers successfully developed two-seater pursuit planes around the Liberty-12 engine shows that the engine decision was not the fault in the Bristol failure. There were repeated changes in the engineering management of the Bristol job. First the Government engineers alone undertook it; then the Government engineers combined with the drafting force of the airplane factory; finally the Government placed on the factory the entire responsibility for the job, without, however, permitting the manufacturer to correct any of the basic principles involved. All in all, the development of an American Bristol was most unsatisfactory, and the whole project was definitely abandoned in June, 1918.

The fundamental difficulty in all of these attempts was that we were trying to fit an American engine to a foreign airplane instead of building an American airplane around an American engine. It was inevitable that this difficulty should arise. We had skill to produce a great engine and did so, but for our earliest models of planes for this engine we relied upon the foreign models until we were sufficiently advanced in the art to design for ourselves. We were successful in making the adaptation only in the case of the De Haviland and then only after great delay.

But eventually we were to see some brilliantly successful efforts to design a two-place fighter around the Liberty-12. We had need of such a mechanism to supplement the De Haviland observation-plane production and make a complete service-plane program.

On January 4, 1918, Capt. Lepere, a French aeronautical engineer, who had formerly been with the French Government at St. Cyr, began experimental work on a new plane at the factory of the Packard Motor Car Co. By May 18 his work had advanced to a stage wherethe Government felt justified in entering into a contract with the Packard Co. to provide shop facilities for the production of 25 experimental planes under Capt. Lepere's direction. The result of these efforts was a two-place fighting machine built around a Liberty engine. From the start this design met with the approval of the manufacturer and engineers because of its clean-cut perfection.

The performance of the Lepere plane in the air is indicated by the following figures:

Here at last was a machine that performed brilliantly in the air and contained great possibilities for quantity production, because it was designed from the start to fit American manufacturing methods. We placed orders for 3,525 Lepere machines. None of the factories, however, had come into production with the Lepere on November 11, 1918. Seven sample machines had been turned out and put through every test. It was the belief of those in authority that at last the training and technique of the best aeronautical engineers of France had been combined with the Liberty, probably the best of all aerial engines; and it was believed that the spring of 1919 would see the Yankee fliers equipped with American fighting machines that would be superior to anything they would be required to meet.

Nor were these expectations without justification. The weeks and months following the declaration of the armistice and extending through to the spring of 1919 were to witness the birth of a whole brood of new typically American designs of airplanes of which the Lepere was the forerunner. In short, when the armistice brought the great aviation enterprise to an abrupt end, the American industry had fairly caught that of Europe, and America designers were ready to match their skill against that of the master builders of France, Great Britain, Italy, and the central powers.

The Lepere 2-seated fighter was quickly followed by two other Lepere models—one of them, known as the Lepere C-21, being armored, and driven by a Bugatti engine, and the other a triplane driven by two Liberty engines and designed to be a day bomber. Then the first American designed single-seat pursuit planes began making their appearance—the Thomas-Morse pursuit plane, its 164 miles an hour at ground level, making it the fastest airplane ever tested by our Government, if it were not the speediest plane ever built; the Ordnance Engineering Corporation's Scout, an advanced training plane; and several others. In two-seater fighting planes there was the Loening monoplane, an extremely swift and advanced type. There were several other new two-seaters designed experimentally in some instances and some of them giving brilliant promise.

THE LOENING MONOPLANE.This is one of the new distinctively American planes.

THE LOENING MONOPLANE.

This is one of the new distinctively American planes.

THE LOENING TWO-PLACE PURSUIT PLANE.

Perhaps the severest and most exacting critic of aviation material is the aviator who has to fly the plane and fight with the equipment at the front. Brig. Gen. William Mitchell, then a colonel, was sent to France in 1917. He became in succession chief of the air service of the First Army Corps, chief of the air service of the First Army, and finally chief of the air service of the American group of armies in France. He commanded the aerial operations at the reduction of the St. Mihiel salient, where he gained the distinction of having commanded more airplanes in action than were ever assembled before under a single command. At St. Mihiel there were 1,200 allied planes in action, including, with our own, French, English, and Italian planes.

Gen. Mitchell, therefore, is a high authority as to the relative merits of air equipment from the airman's standpoint. In the spring of 1919, after a thorough investigation of the latest types of American planes and aerial equipment at the Wilbur Wright Field at Dayton, he sent to the Director of Air Service, Washington, D. C., the following telegram under date of April 20, 1919:

I recommend the following airplanes in the numbers given be purchased at once: 100 Lepere 2-place corps observation, 50 Loening 2-place pursuit, 100 Ordnance Engineering Corporation 1-place pursuit, 100 Thomas-Morse 1-place pursuit, 50 USD9-A day bombardment, 700 additional Hispano-Suiza 300-horsepower engines, 2,000 parachutes. All of the above types are the equal of or better than anything in Europe.

Mitchell.

Now, let us see some of the specifications and performances of these new models. The USD9-A, being the redesigned and improved De Haviland 4, may be given a place as a latest model. It is a two-place bombing plane of the tractor biplane type, equipped with a Liberty 12 engine and weighing 4,872 pounds, loaded with fuel, oil, guns, and bombs, and with its crew aboard. With this weight its performance record in the official tests at Wilbur Wright Field in Dayton was as follows:

The Lepere C-11, a tractor biplane equipped with a Liberty 12 engine, Packard make, weighing with its load aboard 3,655 pounds, performed as follows in the tests at the Wilbur Wright Field:

The Lepere carries two Marlin guns synchronized with the propeller and operated by the pilot and two Lewis guns operated by the observer. A total of 1,720 rounds of ammunition is carried.

The Loening monoplane, a tractor airplane equipped with an Hispano-Suiza 300-horsepower engine and representing, loaded, a gross weight of 2,680 pounds, its military load including two Marlin and two Lewis machine guns, performed as follows at the Wilbur Wright Field:

The Ordnance Scout with a Le Rhone 80-horsepower engine, weighing, loaded, 1,117 pounds, is an advanced training plane. In its official test at Wilbur Wright Field it performed as follows:

The Thomas-Morse MB-3 pursuit plane, a tractor biplane equipped with an Hispano-Suiza 300-horsepower engine, weighing, including its crew but without military load, 1,880 pounds, in unofficial tests at Wilbur Wright Field, performed as follows:

THE THOMAS-MORSE PURSUIT PLANE.

S. E. 5. EQUIPPED WITH 180-HORSEPOWER HISPANO-SUIZA ENGINE.

The Thomas-Morse pursuit plane is armed with two Browning machine guns synchronized with the propeller and carries 1,500 rounds of ammunition.

Uncertain as we were originally as to types of pursuit and observation planes to produce in this country, we were still more uncertain as to designs of night-bombing machines. These relatively slow weight-carrying planes were big and required the motive power of two or three engines, with the complications attendant upon double or triple power plants. They really presented the most difficult manufacturing problem which we encountered. Until the summer of 1918 there were only two machines of this type which we could adopt, the Handley-Page and the Caproni. We put the Handley-Page into production, not because it was necessarily as perfect as the Caproni, but because we could get the drawings for this machine and could not get the drawings for the Caproni, owing to complications in the negotiations for the right to construct the Italian airplane.

We were not entirely satisfied with the decision to build Handley-Pages, because the ceiling, or maximum working altitude which could be attained by this machine, was low; and, 12 months later, when we were in production, we might find the Handley-Pages of doubtful value because of the ever-increasing ranges of antiaircraft guns.

We secured a set of drawings, supposed to be complete, for the Handley-Page in August, 1917; but twice during the following winter new sets of drawings were sent from England, and few, if any, of the parts as designed in the original drawings escaped alteration. The Handley-Page has a wing spread of over 100 feet. Therefore, it was evident from the start that such machines could not have the fuselage, wings, and other large parts assembled in this country for shipment complete to Europe. We decided to manufacture the parts in this country and assemble the machines in England, the British air ministry in London having entered into a contract for the creation of an assembling factory at Oldham, England, in the Lancashire district. When it is realized that each Handley-Page involves 100,000 separate parts, the magnitude of the manufacturing job alone may be somewhat understood. But after they were manufactured, these parts, particularly the delicate members made of wood, had to be carefully packed so as to reach England in good condition. The packing of the parts was in itself a problem.

We proposed to drive the American Handley-Pages with two Liberty 12 engines in each machine. The fittings, which were extremely intricate pieces of pressed steel work, were practically all to be produced by the Mullins Steel Boat Co. at Salem, Ohio. Contracts for the other parts were placed with the Grand Rapids Airplane Co., a concern which had been organized by a group of furniture makers at Grand Rapids, Mich.

All of the parts were to be brought together previously to ocean shipment in a warehouse built for the purpose at the plant of the Standard Aero Corporation at Elizabeth, N. J. The Standard Aero Corporation was engaged under contract to set up 10 per cent of the Handley-Page machines complete in this country. These were to be used at our training fields.

Again, in the case of the Handley-Page, the engineering details proved to be a serious cause of delay. We found it difficult to install the Liberty engines in this foreign plane. When the armistice cut short operations, 100 complete sets of parts had been shipped to England, and seven complete machines had been assembled in this country.

None of the American-built Handley-Page machines saw service in France. There had been great delay in the construction of the assembling plant in England, and the work of setting up the machines had only started when the armistice was signed. The performance table of the Handley-Page shows its characteristics as follows:

On its tests 390 gallons of gasoline, 20 gallons of oil, and 7 men were carried, but no guns, ammunition, nor bombs.

After a long delay, about January 1, 1918, tentative arrangements had been made with the Caproni interests looking toward the production of Caproni biplanes in this country. These machines had a higher ceiling and a greater speed than the Handley-Page. Capt. d'Annunzio with 14 expert Italian workmen, bringing with him designs and samples, came to this country and initiated the redesigning of the Caproni machine to accommodate three Liberty engines. The actual production of Caproni planes in this country was limited to a few samples which were being tested when the armistice was signed. The factories had tooled up for the production, however, and in a few months Capronis would doubtless have been produced in liberal quantities.

The performance of the sample planes in two tests is shown by the following figures:

ONE OF THE SMALL THOMAS-MORSE SCOUTS BESIDE A GIANT HANDLEY-PAGE MACHINE.

ARMORED GERMAN AIRPLANE SHOT DOWN ON THE WESTERN FRONT.

NIEUPORT SCOUT BESIDE A LOENING MONOPLANE.

As we had produced fighting planes built around the Liberty motor, so, too, in the night-bombing class American invention, with the experience of several months of actual production behind it, was able to bring out an American bombing plane that promised to supersede all other types in existence. This machine was designed by Glen L. Martin in the fall of 1918. It was a night-bomber equipped with two Liberty 12-cylinder engines. The Martin spread of 75 feet gave it a carrying capacity comparable with that of the Handley-Page. Its speed of 118 miles an hour at ground level far exceeded that of either the Caproni or Handley-Page, and it was evident that its ceiling would be higher than that of the Caproni, the estimated ceiling of the Martin being 18,000 feet. The machine never reached the state of actual quantity production, but several experimental models were built and tested. Being built around its engine it reflected clean-cut principles of design, and its performances in the air were truly remarkable for a machine of its type. The following table shows the results of the preliminary tests of the Martin bomber:

The total delivery of airplanes to the United States during the period of the war was 16,952. These came from the following sources: United States contractors, 11,754; France, 4,881; England, 258; Italy, 59.

Figure 12.U. S. Squadrons at the Front.A squadron is equipped with from 15 to 25 planes.Apr. 30, 1918██ 3May 31, 1918██████████ 12June 30, 1918██████████ 13July 31, 1918███████████ 14Aug. 31, 1918█████████████████████ 26Sept. 30, 1918██████████████████████████ 32Oct. 31, 1918██████████████████████████████████ 43Nov. 11, 1918████████████████████████████████████ 45

Estimates of aircraft strength on the front were always uncertain, due to variations in the estimates of the number of planes in a squadron. The standing of the United States in aeroplanes at thefront is indicated in the estimate of the American Air Service as of November 11, 1918. The figures of this estimate are as follows:

These figures represent fighting planes equipped ready for service, but do not include replacement machines at the front or in depots or training machines in France.

Figure 13.Comparison Enemy Planes Brought Down by U. S. Forces and U. S. Planes Brought Down by the Enemy.U. S. planes lost to enemy.████████████████████ 271Enemy planes lost to U. S. forces[29]████████████████████████████████████ 491[29]Confirmed losses; in addition there were 354 unconfirmed.

[29]Confirmed losses; in addition there were 354 unconfirmed.

The actual strength of the central powers in the air is at this time not definitely known to us. Such figures as we have are viewed with suspicion because of the two methods of observation in reporting an enemy squadron. This may be 24 planes to a squadron, that number representing the planes in active service in the air. But each squadron had a complement of replacement planes equalling the number of active planes, so that the squadron could be listed with 48 planes.

However, as some indication of the relative air strengths of the central powers we have a report from the chief of the Air Service of the American Expeditionary Forces showing that on July 30, 1918, Germany had 2,592 planes on the front and Austria 717.

THE GLENN MARTIN BOMBER.The gross weight of this machine is 9,663 pounds. It can be equipped with five Lewis machine guns. Its ground speed is 113 miles an hour and its service ceiling is 12,800 feet. It climbs to a height of 6,500 feet in 10 minutes 45 seconds and to 10,000 feet in 21 minutes 20 seconds.

THE GLENN MARTIN BOMBER.

The gross weight of this machine is 9,663 pounds. It can be equipped with five Lewis machine guns. Its ground speed is 113 miles an hour and its service ceiling is 12,800 feet. It climbs to a height of 6,500 feet in 10 minutes 45 seconds and to 10,000 feet in 21 minutes 20 seconds.

THE CAPRONI, EQUIPPED WITH THREE LIBERTY 12-CYLINDER ENGINES.

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