CHAPTER VIII
THEOcean FlyerCREW IS COMPLETED
THEOcean FlyerCREW IS COMPLETED
THEOcean FlyerCREW IS COMPLETED
Before the arrival of the big automobile, Ned and Alan had a conference with the man in the rear room on the first floor. In all their aeronautical experience, one constant annoyance had been their inability to estimate exactly the speed at which they were traveling. Advancing either with or against the wind—which is always in motion a few hundred feet above the ground—they always had to take the readings of the anemometer with allowances. With the airship speeding into the wind, the pressure set up by the aeroplane itself was increased by the force of the encountered wind. The flight of a balloon directly upward is accurately determined by the barometer. But the drift of a dirigible is largely a matter of judgment or deduction from the anemometer readings.
Because of this the boys had been utilizing the reserve monoplanes of the Universal Transportation Company and some of the lighter, standard aeroplanes of the manufacturing company, tomake experiments in flight speed and how to determine this speed with exactness. Alan, the mathematician of the young partners, had made deductions based on their accumulated data and these he had recently submitted to the engineering department of the company. In the light of the new project this phase of their work had an added importance.
At times, when there was no appreciable breeze (and the boys were always on the lookout for these infrequent occasions) quick flights had been made and the speed of the aeroplane in relation to propeller revolutions had been exactly timed by land marks. Records were also made of the anemometer register on these trips, the latter giving, in the absence of wind, the real pressure on the instrument due to the rush of the aeroplane through the air. At other times, flights were made in the wind, both with and against it. The movement of the atmosphere was carefully measured before these flights and from these figures, compared with the wind gauge readings recorded when the aeroplane was under power—at all speeds of the propeller—tables were made of pressure due wholly to the wind and that caused by the flight of the air craft. Different forms of propellers were used and out of this mass of statistics the engineer of the company and Alan had worked out formulas for speed computation.
“We’ve got to know the wind, Lieutenant,” exclaimed Alan as the boys looked over the engineer’s neatly recorded calculations. “If we don’t know and can’t measure that, we’re as helpless as the old sea dog who navigates ‘by guess and by God.’ We may guess right on its velocity when we start a flight, but in a little while the whizzing sound dulls your sense of speed. You may make a bad mistake in rising or ‘banking’ and you won’t know where you are—especially at sea.”
“‘Bird sense’ is all right for race track stunts,” added Ned, “but it won’t do when you’re out of sight of land. We’ve got to have something that is automatic; something, at least, that we can use as a guide for figures.”
Upon his desk and at other places in the engineer’s room were aneroid barometers, a new pocket device in shape like a watch especially interesting the young aviators. A barograph for automatically recording air pressure and indicating height in the air, not only received attention but was at once repacked in its case to be taken to Newark. A new aerometer was also wrapped up for the same purpose.
“This barograph looks like a good thing,” the engineer explained. “It has a recording cylinder that revolves by clockwork and the indicator needle bears on a series of levers which communicate their displacements to a pen arm. Each movement of the mercury is then recorded on the cylinder. On that you have a graphic story of your up and down journey.”
Compensated and gyroscopic compasses, statoscopes for measuring equilibrium, thermometers and shaft speed indicators were also to be seen. But with the new barograph and the new aerometer, Ned and Alan seemed to content themselves for the time.
“Mr. Russell tells me the new ‘Flyer’ did all you expected of it,” said the engineer.
“It’ll do two hundred miles at sea level when it’s tuned up,” answered Ned proudly.
“Then you’ll certainly make your ocean flight?” suggested the engineer.
The boys immediately explained in brief the new program. The engineer heard them soberly.
“In that event,” he said at once, “you’d better take several days for experimenting with the wind and speed pressure of the new car. I can’t guarantee that the figures made for the other machines will apply to this one. I’ll come to the works in the morning and make the kite andground records while you young gentlemen get me the flight pressures of the ‘Flyer’ under all conditions.”
“Fine,” exclaimed Alan. “You know you’ll have to project a new ocean course for us with all the variations, sailing rhumbs and course alterations.”
“From New York to London?” asked the engineer nodding his head. “I wish you could have counted on the stops at St. Johns and Cape Clear in Ireland. I’d have felt better about it,” he continued turning to his desk and opening a large portfolio. “That chart is ready.”
“Let’s have a look,” exclaimed Ned.
On a United States Hydrographic Office “Pilot Chart of the North Atlantic Ocean,” the boys traced a slightly circular line reaching from St. Johns in Newfoundland to Brow Head and Cape Clear, in Ireland just below which appeared the little dot indicating Fastnet Light, the first old world signal to passengers from America. Far north of any steamer route, the seeming curve of the lieutenant’s projected line of flight was seen to be really a succession of straight lines—the sailing variations and compass courses from hour to hour.
In neat engineering letters, in a vacant place on the map, was this memorandum: “From St. Johns, Newfoundland, to Fastnet Rock, Ireland, by great circle is 1666 miles. Initial course is N. 66 E. true. Final course is S. 81 E. Therefore you port one-eighth of a point every seventy-five miles easting.”
Alan made a few figures with his pencil on a corner of the chart. “A point,” he said aloud, “is eleven degrees and fifteen minutes. One-eighth of that is one degree and twenty-four minutes. Every seventy-five miles we port one degree and twenty-four minutes.”
“Exactly,” replied the lieutenant, “and that’s why you’ve got to be right on your speed measurement. Then, knowing the distance covered, you can navigate by compass.”
“The machine is out here eatin’ her head off,” shouted Bob at this juncture. “Get a move on, youse ducks, I’ve wired the works to have lunch ready for us.”
“In a minute,” answered Ned. He turned to the engineer again. “Did you work out those distances and the time from St. Johns to New York by rail and steamer?”
In some of the preliminary talk on the possibilities of a transoceanic aeroplane service it had been suggested that the actual air flights bebetween Brow Head or Cape Clear in Ireland and St. Johns in Newfoundland. But the boys had been so busy on the new sky-craft that they had not gone into the shore ends of this suggestion.
“I’m afraid the company would beat itself by doing that,” answered the engineer. “However fast you flew from Cape Clear to St. Johns, you’d lose so much time by finishing the trip on land that the big liners would almost beat you in. It’s eighteen hundred and forty-five miles from St. Johns by rail through Nova Scotia up to Montreal and down to New York and the present train schedule calls for seventy-four hours to cover it.”
“How about rail to Halifax and then by steamer to Boston and New York?”
“Worse,” laughed the lieutenant. “That would take nearly eighty hours.”
“That settles it,” announced Ned picking up the barograph case. “It will be New York to London direct. We can’t afford to hustle over the Atlantic at two hundred miles an hour to lose one hundred and fifty miles an hour on a slow fifty mile an hour express train. Lieutenant,” he added affectionately, patting their skilled assistant on the shoulder, “we’ll be glad to see you to-morrow and we’ll do all the experimenting you suggest. But, sometime in the next six days, just piece out that ocean course and hook London and New York on the ends of it.”
“That’s almost what I’ll do in reality,” was the prompt answer of the engineer. “Until you figure it, you’d hardly believe that a direct east or true great circle sailing course between London and New York would pass over St. Johns. But it’ll come mighty close to it. The route I’ve projected,” he explained pointing to the sweeping curve on the chart, “if extended on the same lines, will pass just south of New York bay.”
Alan had the new aerometer under his arm but at this suggestion he laughed, put it down and opened an atlas of the world. Turning to the map of Ireland with his finger he followed the southern shore line until it came to Cape Clear. Nearby he made out a small town from which he traced the Cork, Bandon and Southern Railway, connecting through Cork with Dublin on the east coast. Then he slammed the book shut and exclaimed:
“All aboard, in Aeroplane Number One, for St. Johns, Newfoundland, Skibbereen, Ireland, and London. First stop St. Johns. All aboard.Ocean Flyerleaves in one minute.”
Major Honeywell and their guest now appeared and Ned and Alan hurried with them to the automobile. In the trip to the ferry and across the Hudson river Ned entertained theHeraldmanager with an account of what a flight across the ocean meant.
“Ordinarily,” said the journalist at one time, “all I have seen to-day and what you are telling me would make very good newspaper reading—to say nothing of what we threw away last night.”
“And I’ve been livin’ in that kind of stuff for over three years,” volunteered Bob, “without writing a tenth of what I knew.”
“I’m afraid your reportorial instincts are a little dulled,” laughed the editor.
“No, sir, not by a jugful,” retorted Bob. “When I do break out it’ll be good and proper. They’ve had me for three years just where they had theHeraldlast night.” Evidently Bob was a little touched by the comment of the editor. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll make a guess you’ve found out considerable to-day thatyouain’t goin’ to print.”
“You’re right,” laughed the editor heartily. “I’ll withdraw what I said. Your friends seem wonderfully successful in keeping their business to themselves. You’re quite right. TheHeraldis going to print nothing that will detract from the spectacular finish of what we shall try to do.”
“We’ve been counting on that, of course,” broke in Ned. “And even after we make the trip,” he went on, “I hope theHeraldwill never print anything more than we tell its reporters. There are some ideas that we can only protect by secrecy.”
“You mean that what I have personally seen and been told to-day is confidential? Of course. Feel perfectly free, while I am with you, to say what you like. All editors must be able to distinguish between conversation that carries news and the free talk of friends.”
The car was speeding out of Jersey City on the marsh road westward toward Arlington.
“If every flight we have made over these marshes had left a mark in the air,” remarked Alan, “that sky up there would look like a waffle.”
“Are all three of you equally old in this aviation business?” asked the editor smiling and unconsciously looking skyward as if he really expected to see a maze of aerial paths.
“Bob is what we call an auxiliary,” explained Alan. “He hasn’t flown as often as he wanted to but he’s no tenderfoot. However, his chance is comin’. He’ll have to make a full hand on this ocean trip.”
“Will it require three of you to operate the machine?” the editor asked.
“Four,” answered Ned. “There’s a young man out at the works, Roy Osborne—the son of the chief engineer—who has had experience all over the country. He’ll probably be the fourth member of the crew.”
“Tell me what each one does,” asked the editor straightening up and grasping his Panama to make sure the speeding car did not tear it from his head. “Talk about two hundred miles an hour,” he added with a grimace as he saw forty-five miles indicated on the speedometer, “this is enough for me.”
“Me too,” announced Ned to the editor’s surprise. “There’s more sense of speed right now in this car goin’ forty-five miles an hour—and more real danger too,” he added positively—“than there is in an airship going sixty miles an hour. In the air, our road bed is perfect. Here a rut may pitch the whole machine over the fence. High up in the air you have no objects along your path to measure flight. The ground is so far away that it is no criterion. In the air, at your highest speed, there is almost no sense of motion. It’s like a swiftly ascending balloon in which you can only judge your flight by tossing paper overboard.”
“Tommy rot,” broke in Bob, “you talk as if you were selling aeroplanes. Ruts in the road! There are more ‘ruts,’ ‘holes,’ ‘pockets’ and ‘chasms’ in the air than you’ll find on the worst roads on the ground. And that ain’t all! You can’t see ’em till you’re in ’em. The death record this year tells what they mean too. As for bein’ no danger, give me an automobile and a place to fall even if it is hard.”
“Then you’re not going?” asked the editor wonderingly.
“Sure,” answered Bob. “That’s one reason I’m goin’. And that’s the reason theHeraldis goin’ to give us $60,000. You can bet you wouldn’t give us that for drivin’ an automobile to San Francisco—even at top speed. It’s the chances we take of strikin’ one of these ‘gullies’ up in the sky and turnin’ turtle just where the Atlantic is deepest and wettest.”
“He’s all right now,” was Alan’s quiet comment when Bob had finished. “Bob always blows off under pressure.”
“Well,” said the editor in turn, “I had an idea—a suggestion—but Mr. Russell’s speech almost killed it. Still—”
“What is it?” insisted Ned.
“You said you had not definitely made up your crew. For a time I was prompted to ask if all your operators had to be persons of experience with aeroplanes.”
“They should be, on a trip like this,” explained Ned, “but not necessarily so. They must have coolness, however, and nerve and endurance.”
“Would it be out of the way for me to send a representative with you?”
“If you had the sort of man we could use, that is, one that could stand watch with us and who was not merely a passenger,” answered Ned looking at Alan and noting that the latter approved, “it would not only be proper but we’d be glad to make him our fourth man.”
“I’m sure I have such a young man,” continued the editor quickly, “and he is just about your own age. I never saw him until two o’clock this morning.”
“You mean the guy that tipped us off to theHerald,” exclaimed Bob impulsively.
The editor nodded his head with a smile.
“The young man we saw leaving your office as we entered it?” asked Ned edging forward.
“Buckingham Stewart, aHeraldreporter,” answered the editor. “He seems to me to have all the qualities you name. I don’t know that he’ll care to take the risk. If he does, I offer him as my representative.”
“Don’t you worry about him not goin’ if he gets a chance,” volunteered Bob.
“Alan,” said Ned with a broad smile, “if this fellow was smart enough to find out all he did about theFlyerwithout a look at it in the daylight or a word from us, it’ll take him about fifteen minutes to understand it when he really sees it. I say, take him.”
“I’m agreeable,” answered Alan and the crew was complete.