Wacht Am Tyne

(From BBC News)

The RAF today marked the centenary of powered flight in the UK, and it’s always events connected with military aviation that bewilder me with the contrasts between modern air power and the machines that these ‘birthdays’ and anniversaries intend to commemorate, no less so in this case where even the the decade following the flight of British Aeroplane No.1 saw huge changes to military aviation.

Well, I say ‘changes’ – the whole concept of the aeroplane as a weapon of war was perfected and vindicated during those years, and at the end of the First World War (an event which we will be marking less than a month from now) the machines that made up the first, established air forces of the combatant countries (except Germany, of course, as they weren’t allowed one) were technologically leaps and bounds ahead of the first aircraft to make aviation a serious concept – they were still mostly canvas-and-wood biplanes, yes, but four years of a mass-production, mass-slaughter war created tremendous requirements to the military aircraft that led to such determined development (War being the engine of change and all that).

But anyway, I was talking about how commemorations inspire thoughts about contrast. Just look at a flypast at these events with any degree of imagination and you’ll see what I mean: The aircraft in these flypasts could probably take off, fly to ceiling height and come back down to the airfield before Biggles could even have finished his tea and tiffin. Even H.G. Wells – the prophet-eugenicist sci-fi writer who first envisaged practicable examples of air and tank warfare in his novels – would have called anyone who described a Harrier or an F-15 a drunken loon and had him ejected from the premises.

Even if we look at the birds of the next war along – ‘World War II: This Time It’s Atomical’ – there was another massive leap forward in the technology and design; monoplanes were now the established and refined norm, airspeed and maneuverability vastly increased, and the first jets had not only come off the drawing-board by the end of hostilities but were airborne, armed and already had a great many kills under their collective belts. In Britain, even the institution had changed, with the Royal Flying Corps having become the Royal Air Force (incorporating also the Royal Naval Air Service) in 1918 and, through the experiences of the Second World War, once again done much to reaffirm air power as a necessary arm.

What would really save me a lot of hot air and repeating a lot of things you all already know would be a fly-past of all the prominent designs of the past 90 years, in order to see side-by-side the gigantic strides that air technology made. Have the Sopwiths alongside the Spitfires, Hurricanes and Harriers, Tempests, Typhoons and Tornados. It would be astonishing, and beautiful.
But then that would also be a bloody disaster: the juddering biplanes would probably run out of fuel trying to keep pace with the Merlin- and Rolls-Royce-engined thoroughbreds of the second War, which would fall out of the sky if they slowed down enough to let Biggles catch up, and then when turning back to refuel (Sod’s Law stating that the airfield is on his left, which in the Camel means banking right in a 270-degree turn because of the notorious torque off that rotary engine) the little Camel would be sucked into the engine of the fast-approaching Tornado – whose pilot had only left the base five minutes before, partly due to the distance he could cover in that machine and partly because Flt-Lt. Wainwright had the new Squad Action Stamp Death Kill game for the mess PS3 – and the biplane is spewed out like canvas confetti over the assembled onlookers.

But, like those magnificent men in their flying machines 90 years ago, we can dream. In the meantime, raise a glass of your finest to British Aeroplane No.1 and Samuel Franklin Cody who, alas, was killed during a test-flight in those embryonic days of aviation.