Читать книгу Wings for the Fleet - George Van Deurs - Страница 14
ОглавлениеCHAPTER THREE: THE SHIP AND AIRCRAFT MEET
The first flight from ship to shore, from forecastle of the cruiser Birmingham to Willoughby Spit, resulted in a blaze of publicity. In Washington, Captain Chambers endeavored to take advantage of such favorable atmosphere. But the interests of the bureaucrats in that bureau-infested city soon proved to be different from the aims and desires of Chambers.
Nobody denied that aeronautical research was needed, and everybody wanted the appropriations and the prestige that went along with it. When Chambers suggested a national laboratory, he was quickly seconded by the National Aeronautical Society and the Smithsonian Institution. Charles Walcott, who had taken the Langley pictures to Theodore Roosevelt, headed the Smithsonian. He announced the reopening of Langley’s old laboratory as a very inadequate nucleus for expansion.
But Chief Constructor R. M. Watt objected. A national laboratory would be needless—a costly duplication. Construction and Repair’s ship model basin could do all the necessary research, if only a few extra pieces of equipment were added. H. I. Cone, engineer in chief of the Navy, claimed that his Bureau had the necessary equipment, and offered the use of the Engineering Experiment Station across the Severn River from the Naval Academy. President Taft opposed a separate laboratory and, in spite of continuous agitation by Chambers and his backers, no national aeronautical research organization was formed for over four years.
Another scheme that bristled with controversy was Chambers’ plan for a small naval air organization. He wanted an Office of Aeronautics, headed by a director responsible to the Secretary of the Navy, to coordinate all aviation developments. Because Chambers thought naval planes would be like ships’ picket boats, he assumed they would be similarly bought, maintained, and operated. The Bureau of Construction and Repair would take care of the airframes; the Bureau of Engineering would provide motors and wireless; the Bureau of Navigation would equip, man, and operate them. And someday the Bureau of Ordnance might arm them.
Chambers ignored the interbureau rivalry and blamed naval aviation’s slow start on ignorance and lack of interest. Hence an informed coordinator to help everyone seemed a natural solution. He seems to have expected to have the office going within a week or so after he had suggested it. Although he knew Wainwright and the Secretary would oppose anything aerial, the stubborn opposition he encountered in other quarters took him by surprise. Watt, still trying for exclusive control of aircraft by the Bureau of Construction and Repair, said that no other bureau, except possibly Engineering, should be involved with planes. Since these two bureaus already cooperated on many things, they needed no outside coordinator to get them together on this new item. Other bureau chiefs shoved in their oars.
In addition to this open maneuvering, there was a covert, foot-dragging resistance by many veteran bureaucrats. They were jealous. They suspected Chambers of empire-building in order to make aviation a sinecure for himself. Ships, planes, and fleets were nebulous things to these men for whom the only reality was their individual spot in the Washington sun.
When Chambers persisted in his campaign, the opposition got rough. Captain Fletcher complained that aviation took so much of his assistant’s time that his regular work was being neglected. Then Chambers was refused clerical help for his aviation correspondence. So he answered letters in long-hand, using this circumstance as an additional argument for an Office of Aeronautics. Every letter, to anyone, on any subject, included a plug for his proposed organization. In addition, he set forth his aviation ideas in several magazines.
In March 1911, his article, “Aviation and Aeroplanes,” was the first original work on aviation to be printed in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. It comprised a lengthy report of the machines and the flying at Belmont Park and Halethorpe and told of Ely’s work for the Navy. It stated the case for scouting planes, an Office of Naval Aeronautics, and a National Aeronautical Laboratory.
Soon after this article appeared, Secretary Meyer addressed a long, involved memorandum to Chambers, made him a handcuffed coordinator, and did nothing to check interbureau bickering. That day Chambers wrote to the Wrights’ factory manager, saying he was “running into obstruction in establishing the Office of Aeronautics,” but that he still hoped to have naval aviation started right.
In the spring, Admiral Dewey had Chambers ordered to the General Board. Ostensibly Chambers was to advise on aviation. Incidentally, the move made the Board’s typists available to him, but this break lasted only a couple of weeks. Then President Taft approved an appropriation bill which included the first funds for naval aviation. Over Dewey’s protest, Chambers was immediately assigned to the Bureau of Navigation to handle this.
Next to the chief of this Bureau, Admiral Reginald F. Nelson, Chambers was the senior officer attached. Nevertheless, the chief told him to work at home since there was no room for him, nor for aviation, at the Bureau. Instead, Chambers moved himself into Room 67, a hole under the basement stairs of the old State, War, and Navy Building. A caller described this as being about eight feet square, half filled with files, leaving barely room for a man and a desk. It was a good place to take cold and was “so unsanitary,” said Chambers, that no one wanted to take it away from him.
2. Eugene Ely’s “flying gear” consisted of an inflated bicycle tube tied over his stained leather jacket, a padded football helmet, and goggles. His “seat belt” was a length of rope looped over each shoulder which could easily be shrugged off in case of accident. His plane was a Curtiss landplane with pneumatic landing wheels. In case of a forced landing in the bay, metal air tanks were secured to each side of the plane to help keep it afloat, and a skid was placed forward to prevent “nosing up” in the water.
For over three years his proposal for an Office of Aeronautics was tossed out every time it was brought up. During those years, Chambers’ unofficial cubbyhole under the stairs was headquarters for naval aviation.
After his successful flight from the Birmingham, Ely received a fulsome letter of congratulations from Secretary Meyer.
“That four-flusher has a crust to congratulate me,” Ely commented. “He tried to stop me.”
And with that, he threw the letter at the wastebasket. After he stamped out of the room, Mabel Ely salvaged it for a souvenir. Then it was discovered that it bore the initials “WIC.” Chambers had drafted it.
Then came another letter, this time from Chambers himself. He asked if Ely still wanted to fly on and off a ship. If so, when and where would he be available? Ely wired his acceptance, suggesting San Francisco, where he expected to take part in an air meet during January 1911.
The commander of the Pacific Fleet was authorized to choose a convenient ship and arrange the details. Before Christmas, platform plans were sent to the Mare Island Navy Yard, with instructions not to spend over $500 on the project. The letter mentioned that the Birmingham’s platform had cost only $288, but it did not say the money had been put up by John Barry Ryan, and not the Navy!
In due course Rear Admiral Edward Barry, commanding the Pacific Fleet, named the armored cruiser Pennsylvania for Ely’s second demonstration flight. This vessel had nearly four times the tonnage and was a hundred feet longer than the Birmingham. Late in December 1910, at the Los Angeles air show, the Admiral’s liaison officer and Ely agreed to set the date sometime during the San Francisco air meet. Ely wanted to pick the weather and test his gear. He did not want to worry as he had in Norfolk.
Gene and Mabel Ely registered at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on the evening of 4 January 1911. The Pennsylvania had moved up to Mare Island that morning. Her skipper, Captain Charles F. (“Frog”) Pond, a classmate and friend of Chambers, was a square-faced little man with a shaggy gray mustache and laughing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Naval Constructor Gatewood, from the Navy Yard, supervised the building of a platform above the quarter-deck. It was 37 feet longer and 7 feet wider than the Birmingham’s platform, and it had a 14-foot apron drooping over the ship’s stern. Forward of this overhang, the planking sloped gently up over the after gun turret to the bridge deck at the base of the mainmast. There were two low canvas barriers just aft of a two-inch timber backstop. Said Gatewood:
“We’ll hang a canvas screen from that searchlight platform to catch you if the sudden stop throws you.”
Ely announced stiffly that he intended not to crash, but to land. However, the thick steel mast, just forward of the platform, flanked by two tall boat cranes, looked terribly solid. He did a lot of thinking on the ferry ride back to the city. He needed something on that platform to prevent a possible overshoot. The arrangement that he devised was essentially that used on the carriers of a much later day. Controversy still exists as to the source of the idea.
3, 4, 5, 6. White lines, with 50-pound sandbags secured at each end, Were stretched at 3-foot intervals to prevent the plane from crashing into the mainmast at the end of the platform. Hooks were secured underneath the plane to catch on the lines, which were raised several inches above the platform by two longitudinal wooden rails. Tarpaulins placed on either side were to catch Ely if the craft skidded off the runway. His plane passed over ten of the arresting lines before it eased down and landed lightly on the platform, and the hooks began engaging the ropes. After a 30-foot run, the drag of the sandbags stopped the 1,000-pound aeroplane within 50 feet of the end of the platform.
Curtiss, in his Aviation Book, noted that he went to Mare Island with Ely and told the Navy Yard people “just what would be required . . . across the runway we stretched ropes every few feet with a sandbag at each end.”
Some years later, Hugh Robinson, a Curtiss man who had been present at the San Francisco meet, related how he had once worked in a circus where a pretty girl rode a car down a steep track, looped the loop, then stopped herself by plowing into sawdust heaped on the track. Robinson hated to see her covered with sawdust at every show. So he rigged hooks on the car to pick up weighted lines which would stop the car clean. Robinson claimed that at San Francisco he had suggested the same system to Eugene Ely.
In an interview more than 40 years later, Rear Admiral R. F. Zogbaum, Jr., who had been a young officer aboard the Pennsylvania in 1911, remembered that he had proposed the lines and 50-pound sandbags. Ely had told him that a blacksmith at the field could make him a hook.
But Mabel Ely claimed that they were all wrong. Gene had used this system to stop his racing cars long before he ever saw an aeroplane.
These claims could all have substance. Quite probably a lot of people took part in discussions regarding arresting gear while Ely was trying out ideas on the aviation field at Tanforan. He tied a weight to each end of a rope, stretched it across two-by-fours and taxied over it. A blacksmith’s hook usually skipped over the rope and, if it caught, the plane swerved alarmingly. By trial and error he found that, if he caught the rope dead center, carefully matched weights would slow him in a straight line.
After looking at the Pennsylvania’s mast, Ely knew he had to be right the first time. On the ship he could not go round again if the hook failed to catch. That worried him until he got three pairs of spring-loaded, racing-car hooks from a San Francisco friend and lined them up in tandem on a slat under his landing gear. With that arrangement he picked up the line on every run.
Glenn Curtiss did not like the plan. Ely was confident. For months he had been making short takeoffs and precision landings. He was certain of his skill. He had a new and heavier plane which let him land slower than with the old one. When he put aluminum floats under the wings he felt ready for anything, even if the engine should quit over the water.
So Ely went back to Mare Island and told of his field tests. He wanted 50-pound bags at 3-foot intervals. Gatewood had spent the Navy’s $500 on timber, so Captain Pond and Ely used their own money for sandbags, the necessary line, and guard rails. Gene told how the lines sometimes slewed the plane out of control and Pond promised to rig heavy awnings beside the platform where it was narrower than the ship. “If you skid too far,” he said, “they’ll keep you from being skewered on one of those stanchions.”
Chambers had proposed that during the landing the ship should steam into the wind. Pond did not think the deep water area of the bay big enough. Ely thought the open sea, outside the Golden Gate, too far from Tanforan. He was more afraid of the ocean than of any landing. He was sure he could land aboard with the ship standing still. So it was agreed that the ship would be anchored. They all hoped it would swing into the wind at the right time.
The next morning the ship left the Navy Yard in a fog so thick she rammed a channel buoy before anchoring with the Fleet off the Ferry Building. That night the weather turned bad and for a week the ship logged rain in almost every watch. So they had to wait for better weather.
Curtiss, Ellyson, and Ely visited the ship one stormy day. As they left, reporters asked Glenn Curtiss for his opinion. “This is the first time an aviator has attempted to land on a battleship,” he answered. “Ely will alight on the Pennsylvania. I’m willing to guarantee that much. The only question is, can he do it without damaging his machine?”
No one had yet been killed in a Curtiss machine. Glenn wanted to keep it that way. Until he left town, he kept on urging Ely to give up the stunt. Bad weather automatically extended San Francisco’s air meet because its promoters had signed the pilots for ten flying days. Curtiss was bored. Even though exhibition flying was almost his only source of income, he did not like it. Since he did not drink and gamble like his daredevils, this waiting for exhibition weather was even duller. He wanted to work on his hydro down in San Diego. Furthermore, he knew he could not stop Ely, and he did not want to be there if he failed. So he left town.
On the seventeenth, the weather improved and Ely announced that he would land on the Pennsylvania at 1100 the following morning. Eleven o’clock had been picked so as to give any morning fog time to burn off and because the flood tide would then head the ship into the usual light west wind from the Golden Gate.
This forecast was only partially accurate. The next morning, the ships, anchored south of Goat Island (now known as Yerba Buena), rode to the flood tide but, by 1100, a light wind out of the east was coming from behind them. High clouds hid the sun. This 3-knot breeze filled the Pennsylvania’s canvas backstop like a mainsail running free. The sandbag lines were taut and evenly spaced along the platform’s guide rails. Captain Pond put crews in lifeboats alongside and stationed strong swimmers at the ship’s rail. Then he took Mrs. Ely to the after bridge. Launches and chartered tugs carrying several hundred people surrounded the ship. Thousands of spectators crowded the San Francisco docks and peered at the ship through the haze.
7. Sailors came running to give Ely a hand, while the crowd cheered wildly, and the harbor whistles announced the successful landing aboard the Pennsylvania.
8. Gene Ely was calmer than anyone else aboard the ship “. . . there was never any doubt in my mind that I would effect a successful landing on the deck,” he said “. . . had the ship been in motion and sailing directly into the wind, my landing . . . would have been made considerably easier. . . .”
Twelve miles south at Tanforan, infantrymen helped Ely’s mechanics ready the plane. Ely wore an inflated bicycle tube over his stained leather jacket. The tube left his arms freer than the life jacket he had worn on the flight from the Birmingham. He tied on a padded football helmet, hung his goggles around his neck, and climbed to his seat.
Everything clicked. At 1048, right on schedule, he was off, the engine purring smoothly as the plane climbed to 1,200 feet and swung across the green San Bruno hills. Below, San Francisco’s waterfront zigzagged from Hunter’s Point to the Ferry Building. Off shore, scattered craft smudged the bay with smoke. Beyond them, haze hid the anchored fleet.
A couple of minutes after Ely turned east out over the dull, green water, he made out the line of ships. He nosed over toward the nearest one. When he rounded the West Virginia, and headed up the line toward Goat Island, he was down to 400 feet. The steam trailing from each ship’s whistle as he swooped by told him that he would be landing with the wind behind his shoulder. It was fortunate that he had practiced cross-wind landings along a chalk line.
The plane passed the Pennsylvania’s stern at topmast height, and Ely checked the platform as he flew along her starboard side. Rounding the bow, he flew aft along her port side. One hundred yards astern he banked steeply, throttled his engine, and headed for the platform. The nearest planks were 50 feet ahead when he cut his switch. In the sudden quiet, he heard himself say:
“This is it.”
It looked good. But suddenly, just as he expected to land, an updraft boosted the machine. He saw the weighted lines scooting past, ten feet below. He pushed the wheel, dove at the deck. Then the spring hooks snagged the eleventh and succeeding lines. They stopped him easily with room to spare.
Cheering people surrounded the plane. Ely slid from his seat and his wife, bursting through the crowd, flung herself into his arms, kissed his cold face, and shouted:
“Oh, boy! I knew you could do it.”
Captain Pond started pumping Gene’s hand and then, for the benefit of the photographers, he kissed Mabel. He declared it the most important landing since the dove flew back to the Ark. Then he maneuvered his guests down to the quarter-deck; at the cabin hatch, he turned to the officer of the deck and gave an order that was destined to become historic.
9. Mabel Ely, the flier’s wife, kissed him and shouted, “I knew you could do it!” Captain C. F. Pond announced it was the most important landing since the dove flew back to the Ark.
“Mr. Luckel,” he said. “Let me know when the plane is respotted and ready for takeoff.”
Thus originated the order—“respot the deck”—that would later start many a carrier’s crew into action.
In the captain’s cabin, officers and guests lifted champagne glasses and toasted “Ely” and “the birth of naval aviation.”
In a short while the gay party was interrupted by a report from the officer of the deck that the plane was gassed and ready. It was a few minutes before noon when Ely climbed into his seat. This time he was confident. At the same time, he remembered the cold spray that had hit his face on the first occasion. The engine roared and, for a second time, a plane rolled off a ship’s ramp. He climbed away from the deck in a wide spiral, leveled off at 2,000 feet, and headed south. Thirteen minutes later he landed at Tanforan.
Later, aboard the Pennsylvania, the navigator, Lieutenant Commander W. H. Standley, approved the log with its matter-of-fact recital of this unique event sandwiched in with the routine without adding any comment of his own. Was he unimpressed? Thirty years later, would his thoughts return to Eugene Ely? In December 1941, Admiral W. H. Standley, U. S. Navy (Retired), was a member of the commission sent by President Franklin Roosevelt to evaluate and report on what Japanese naval aircraft had done at Pearl Harbor.
Captain Pond’s report of the experiment was enthusiastic:
I desire to place myself on record as positively assured of the importance of the aeroplane in future naval warfare, certainly for scouting purposes. For offensive operations, such as bomb throwing, there has as yet, to my knowledge, been no demonstration of value, nor do I think there is likely to be. The extreme accuracy of control, as demonstrated by Ely, while perhaps not always to be expected to the same degree, was certainly not accidental and can be repeated and probably very generally approximated to. There only remains the development of the power and endurance of the machine itself, which, as with all mechanical things, is bound to come. There will be no necessity for a special platform. The flight away may be made either from a monorail or from a stay, and either from forward or aft, but preferably forward, while the return landing may be made on the water alongside, and the aviator and his machine afterwards brought on board.
No responsible naval officer of that day, not even Captain Chambers, envisioned an aircraft carrier. Chambers knew the 1911 “bamboo tails” needed a lot of improving before they could be used for operations at sea with the Fleet.
The Pennsylvania flights were the last Ely made for the Navy. He never wore a uniform, never drew a nickel of Navy pay, and he never liked the sea. But he tried to give aviation to the Navy because he believed it would strengthen his country. That fall he died in a crash while stunt flying at Macon, Georgia, after a career that had lasted less than two years. On the day he would have been 25 years old, he was buried near his Iowa birthplace.
The next steps toward aircraft carriers were made by the British. Early in 1917, the Royal Navy tried flying Zeppelin chasers from a platform on the bow of a former ocean liner. Since more pilots survived than when the practice had been to fly from the turret tops, a “fly-off” deck was built in place of the forward 18-inch gun of the new battle cruiser Furious. Then a Royal Navy flight lieutenant, E. N. Dunning, talked her captain into letting him land aboard. With the ship steaming into the wind at 30 knots, Dunning brought his Sopwith Pup in from astern level with the deck, made an S-turn in front of the bridge, and slowed enough so that men were able to grab his wings and drag his plane to a stop. It was the first shipboard landing since Ely’s. Five days later, Dunning tried it again. This time the plane got away from the deck crew and skidded over the side. Dunning was killed.
10. While the Captain entertained at lunch and the guests toasted Ely and the birth of naval aviation, the sandbags were removed from the platform, and the plane turned around for the return flight.
11. At 11:58 A.M., 57 minutes after his landing, the plane rolled off the ramp, and under Ely’s skillful handling the second flight from a ship’s deck was accomplished.
Shortly thereafter, the Furious had a “flying-on” deck added aft, where an American naval officer saw them experimenting with sandbags on lines like those Ely had used. Off-center landings caused planes to swerve. So they discarded the cross-deck lines, and the Furious went to sea in March 1918 with her flying-on deck covered with taut fore-and-aft wires high enough so that a plane’s axle skidded along them with the wheels clear of the deck. Anchor-like hooks protruding from the axle snagged the wires and kept the plane from bouncing.
Fast landings and rough air from the stack ahead of the landing area caused discouragingly frequent fatalities. Nonetheless, in 1920, the United States paid the British $40,000 for the right to use this gear on the Navy’s first carrier, the Langley. It was installed first on a big turntable set up at Chambers Field in Norfolk.
Commander Kenneth Whiting and Lieutenant Commander Godfrey deC. Chevalier, the captain and the officer of the Langley, respectively, turned the turntable over to a young aviator, Lieutenant Alfred Melville Pride, and told him to develop an arresting gear for the Langley. When Pride landed on the turntable, axle friction on the wires was seldom enough to stop him safely. Several times he ended up beyond the end of the wires with his plane on its nose or its back. Navy experts suggested that he wrap something around the wires in order to increase their drag, but Pride had other ideas. He knew all about Ely and, for sound engineering reasons, he liked his cross-deck lines. However, planes had changed so he could not use the little hooks on a slat.
His planes landed on two wheels and a tail skeg. His first problem was to find out how to attach a hook so the plane would not flip over on its back and also how to keep it on the deck until it caught up a cross-deck cable. He hung a weighted line across saw horses and practiced making passes at it with an Aeromarine, a plane so slow he could drift it backwards across the field when flying into a moderate wind. After a practicable hook was perfected, he replaced Ely’s dragging sandbags with weights that could be lifted in a tower. In this way the energy absorbed could be calculated. His first weights were 13-inch shells for obsolete guns, bridled so that several were picked up in succession as a cross-deck line ran out.
12. The plane dropped almost to the water, then rose and leveled off at 2,000 feet. Thirteen minutes later Ely flew back over Tanforan.
Thus the arresting gear developed by Pride and used in the early Langley operations consisted of lowered British fore-and-aft wires, superimposed on Ely’s cross-deck cables connected to lifting weights. In landing, the hook caught a cross-deck wire; the plane came to a quick halt and was held down by the fore-and-aft wires.
A few years later, L. C. Stevens, a flying naval constructor, demonstrated that the fore-and-aft wires merely slowed up operations. Although they had been installed on the carriers Lexington and Saratoga, they were all eliminated in 1929. Since then the U. S. Navy’s carrier arresting gear has been an improvement of Eugene Ely’s system adapted to larger planes. Heavy steel cables have replaced his cross-deck lines, and they are attached to higher-capacity energy absorbers than his jury-rigged sandbags.
In 1933, the President of the United States posthumously presented the Distinguished Flying Cross to Eugene B. Ely for showing how to make carriers practicable. The existence of the U. S. Navy’s carrier arresting gear was then a closely held military secret and it could not be mentioned. So the citation read in part:
. . . for his extraordinary achievement as a pioneer civilian aviator and for his significant contribution to the development of aviation in the United States Navy. . . . His feat of flying aboard the USS Pennsylvania in 1911, assisted by retarding gear of primitive design, called attention for the first time to the possibilities of landing airplanes on shipboard. He had previously flown an airplane from a cruiser. These acts were the forerunners of our present aviation forces operating with the surface fleet.
By that time the U. S. Navy had named a ship honoring Langley, who could not, and the Wrights, who would not attempt to fly an airplane from a ship. Later it would name a ship for Curtiss, who did not want anyone to fly from a ship. But there has never been a ship named for Eugene Ely, who first did the trick. As the world’s first naval aviator and the man who pointed the way for unnumbered carrier pilots, Eugene Ely deserves to be better remembered.
