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Knights of the Air and the Great War

As short-sighted as the Laurier government’s interest in Baddeck No. 1 had been in 1909, it was still years before the British Army took aviation seriously. As early as 1905, the Wright brothers had unsuccessfully tried to interest the British War Office in their Flyer. It was worse when they toured France with it and were denounced as hoaxers and liars. Since they weren’t French, how could they be aviators?[1] Not until 1912 would the British government purchase 25 flying machines for the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers, the battalion to be renamed the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). Soon after, Lieutenant Edward Hotchkiss and Lieutenant C.A. Bettington became the first RFC officers to die in an aircraft accident when their Bristol-Coanda monoplane crashed on takeoff on September 12, 1912. The British secretary of state for war then banned all military flights of monoplanes, stating that two wings were safer than one.

When the First World War began in the summer of 1914, governments considered aircraft to be a “fringe” weapon — at most the “eyes” of the army. Balloons and especially dirigibles held greater promise for gathering military intelligence and, in the case of German Zeppelins, for bombing the British fleet at anchor. But elevated in the eyes of the public from circus performers, pilots were now romanticized as eagle-eyed “spies in the sky.” In Canada, as in Britain, civilian flying was prohibited and foreign aircraft forbidden to overfly the country.

Other than the Canadian Aviation Corps and its ill-fated Burgess-Dunne aircraft (both owing their short existences to the influence of Colonel Sam Hughes, the erratic minister of militia and defence), the Canadian government showed no interest in creating its own air corps until late in the war. Besides, Prime Minister Robert Borden had enough to contend with: the firing of his minister of militia (the same Hughes), wartime profiteering, and dwindling enlistment in the army. It took the full weight of the British War Office leaning on the Canadian government for help in enlisting candidates for the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS).

Initially, only trained aviators were accepted in the RFC and RNAS. In Britain applicants had to have Royal Aero Club aviator certificates (the “ticket”) acquired at their own expense. Canadians who wanted to fly for the RFC trained at the Curtiss aviation school in Toronto before going overseas. Run by the ubiquitous J.A.D. McCurdy, the school operated seaplanes at Hanlan’s Point, Toronto Island, and land planes at the city’s suburb of Long Branch, site of Canada’s first airport.[2]

In the absence of any governmental authority concerning selection and training, the Aero Club of Canada stepped in to fulfill a role similar to that of its British cousin. The club’s president, Adam Penton, and secretary, Norman C. Pearce, were appointed to the examining board for students obtaining their pilots’ licences. Once awarded their Aero Club licences, the pilots then had to pay their own way to England to join the RFC.

Some Canadians went directly to Britain to be trained there. Flight Sub-Lieutenant Redford Henry Mulock (Certificate No. 1103), the first Canadian to qualify for a British pilot’s licence, was to become the RNAS’s first air ace. Another was Lieutenant William F.N. Sharpe of Prescott, Ontario, the first Canadian wartime air casualty when he was killed on February 4, 1915, in a training accident.[3] Then there was Lester B. Pearson, the only Canadian prime minister to serve in the air force, fly, and crash a plane. While in training in England, Pearson crash-landed his aircraft, a Graham White box kite, suffering only cuts and bruises.[4] The future prime minister enjoyed flying and hoped to continue it, but fate intervened soon after when he was hit by a London bus and sent home.

Because of the war, aviation, and consequently safety, matured almost overnight. If aircraft were built in bicycle sheds and garages before 1914, the war meant that the entire economies of nations were mobilized into creating aviation industries. Governments that had previously treated aircraft manufacturers with condescension were now intent on inflicting harm on the enemy and ordered machines by the thousand. Custom-made in 1914, four years later, aircraft were being mass-produced like Ford’s Model T cars.

The conflict also consumed so many aircraft so quickly — through usage, the weather, and enemy action (a British fighter aircraft had on average a “shelf life” of six months) — that new designs went from drawing board to prototype in three months and to a front-line squadron six months after that. The most famous instance of this was the birth of the Liberty engine that eventually powered so many aircraft well into the 1920s. Designed in a hotel room on May 29, 1917, it was assembled by Packard Motors and shipped to the U.S. government on July 3, with the first Liberty-powered aircraft flying on August 29 that year. By the Armistice, the Americans alone were turning out 500 aircraft per week. Because of the war, the “flying observation platforms” evolved into specialized machines — fighters, bombers, naval seaplanes, torpedo bombers, and even aircraft with folding wings to be launched off ships.

The struggle of air superiority over the front lines grew with each year and meant better aircraft designs, more efficient engines, higher speeds, and heavier payloads. The first and only instrument a pilot had was his wristwatch to measure flight times for navigation and fuel consumption.[5] But by 1915 other instruments started to appear in the cockpit: the airspeed indicator, compass, tachometer, altimeter, fuel and oil pressure gauges, and, on an experimental basis, radio. Similarly, the earliest safety research into wing stress, fire-retardant paints, self-sealing gas tanks, and the glimmerings of aviation medicine owed their beginnings to the Great War. Too late to help Germany in the conflict was Dr. Hugo Junkers’s J9 aircraft, a metal monoplane with a corrugated external skin and thick wings that foretold a safer era in aviation. Its first flight occurred only 15 years after the Wrights’ initial foray into the air.

Early in the war all aircraft in Britain were delivered by manufacturers to the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, a town in northeast Hampshire. Here they were inspected and test-flown before being passed on to the Military Wing or Central Flying School, where they were formally “taken on charge.” Since this could take up to six months, by 1915, inspectors from the Aircraft Inspection Department were posted to the manufacturers, and “aircraft-acceptance parks” were established nearby for the receipt and inspection of aircraft. But as fatalities in the air soared, there was less time to test new aircraft designs before they got to the squadrons, and aircraft with fatal structural flaws such as “wing flutter” eventually killed more pilots flying Nieuport and Albatross fighters than the enemy was able to eliminate.

With flying already such a dangerous occupation, attrition in wartime was expected to be very high. The RFC estimated that it would have to replace all of its pilots every six months. That didn’t happen, but by 1915 the corps was losing on average one pilot (killed or missing) for every 295 flight hours flown. Two years later this had fallen to 92 hours. Combat-loss rates were one pilot for every 100 sorties. Supplementing German bullets were weakened wooden structures, unreliable engines, doped fabric that was inflammable, and no parachutes. Made impractical by the carnage in the air, the acceptance of only trained pilots into the RFC ended in July 1916.

Parachutes, the ultimate safety device, were disdained by the RFC. The Germans supplied their pilots with parachutes, mainly because most of the aerial combat took place over their territory and their air aces could thus be saved. The RFC discouraged the use of parachutes, reasoning that if pilots were supplied with them, they would use them rather than attempt to bring their aircraft home. The Royal Canadian Air Force would only make the wearing of parachutes mandatory in 1925.

If the German military was the first to employ photographic documentation of all accidents to understand why aircraft crashed, in March 1915 at Farnborough airfield the RFC formed an Aircraft Inspection Department dedicated solely to accident investigation. Now an authority on the subject, the Royal Aero Club’s George Cockburn was appointed inspector of aircraft. His office was to be notified of all accidents so that inquiries could be held into the causes and reports published. A year later Cockburn was promoted to become Britain’s first inspector of accidents, reporting directly to the director general of military aeronautics in the War Office.

In Canada, aviation on a relatively large scale began in the summer of 1915 when the first production aircraft, the Curtiss JN-3, was no longer built by Curtiss Aeroplanes & Motors Ltd. at Buffalo, New York, but in Toronto. Slow and dependable, sturdy and ubiquitous, here was a well-constructed aircraft that, although powered by an unreliable liquid-cooled OX-5 engine, was safer to fly than the temperamental Blériot or outdated Wright Flyer. The Curtiss “Jenny,” the JN-3, was so easy to fly that in the summer of 1917 Lieutenant Ervin E. Ballough, an American RFC recruit, performed stunts over Deseronto, Ontario, even getting out of the cockpit in flight. With the prompting of the British government, the Curtiss plant was nationalized in December 1916 by Ottawa to become Canadian Aeroplanes Ltd. By the end of the war, 1,260 JN-4 Canucks, the Canadian version, had been built for the RFC in Canada, to be followed by 2,812 JN-4Ds.[6]

Trainees crashed JN-4s with regularity. Since the aircraft crashed nose down, smashing the pilot into the hot engine, the instructor, who was immensely more valuable than the student and in short supply, sat in the safer rear seat. Library and Archives Canada.

The second catalyst to pilot training in Canada was Lieutenant-Colonel (soon to be Brigadier-General) C.G. Hoare. Returning from the front in 1916, he ordered flying instruction to begin in the Toronto suburb of Long Branch on February 28, 1917. Training was for six months on average, starting with military drill and discipline, to flying with an instructor, to solo. Trainees crashed JN-4s with great regularity. There were no regulations to prevent dangerous flying such as dipping low enough to harass farmers’ cows or bumping the roofs of passing railway carriages. Since the JN-4 usually crashed nose down, smashing the pilot into the hot engine, the instructor (who was immensely more valuable than the student and in short supply) was ordered to sit in the safer rear seat.

The first casualty occurred a week after flying began when Cadet J.C. Talbot spun his JN-4 into the ground at Camp Borden on April 8, 1917, fracturing his skull and dying in the Barrie, Ontario, hospital. Safer and more dramatic was another JN-4 pilot who attempted a forced landing on Oshawa’s main street on April 22, 1918, but became entangled with the electrical wires and was suspended on top of a storefront for several hours. Because that accident ended all power in the city, stores, restaurants, and offices had to close and business was lost. When the pilot was finally rescued, his name, for obvious reasons, wasn’t revealed.[7]

Although Canada had no mass-training facilities for air personnel in 1915, by the war’s end in November 1918 there were aviation schools in Hamilton (Armament School), Toronto (School of Military Aeronautics, recruiting depots), Long Branch (cadet ground training), Beamsville (School of Aerial Fighting), Armour Heights (pilot training, School of Special Flying to train instructors), Leaside (pilot training, Artillery Co-operation School), Deseronto (pilot training), and Camp Borden (pilot training).

Of the 21,957 pilots who were trained in the First World War for the RFC, RNAS, or later the RAF, an impressive 52 percent were from Canada, a contribution double that of the Mother Country and three times more than that provided by other dominions and colonies. It was inevitable that on returning home Canadian pilots would expect their government to be more air-minded.

Attempting a forced landing on Oshawa’s main street on April 22, 1918, the JN-4 pilot became entangled with the electrical wires and was suspended on top of a storefront for several hours. Library and Archives Canada.

However, just as would happen after the Second World War, newspapers and scientific magazines all predicted that those fighters and bombers developed to wreak destruction on the foe also had peaceful, commercial, and even humanitarian possibilities. The postwar battlefield was for the hearts and minds of the public, government departments, and investors — all had to be convinced that flying was actually a safe, reliable, and even profitable means of transport.

From the Wrights’ first flight in 1903 to the Armistice in 1918, the safety focus had been on engine reliability and airframe design. The war brought standard operating procedures to aviation, a quality-assurance program in maintenance, and, above all, pilot training. That so much progress was made in so short a time is the debt we owe those dreamers and engineers, all brave men who above exhibition grounds or the Western Front often paid for advancement with their lives.