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Show Bif Gofdam B&uuvid Bbaakel BASIC FLIGHT INSTRUCTION jump into the air. If he takes off from a low position and wants to rise he flaps his wings, and the up-rush up-rush of the disturbed air raises him. He repeats the flapping until he has reached any height he desires, and then he begins to soar. Birds are seldom still in the air; they are usually usu-ally circling or doing intricate figure eights. Some God-given Intelligence teaches them that when they lift one wing higher than the other and hold their wings steady, the air currents will swing them 'round in circles. And the take-off and flight processes of birds established the principles on which the glider was conceived and developed. Hank But how come Germany went all out for gliders and nobody else did? Robinson That statement is not altogether correct that Germany went all out on gliders and nobody else did. ... Of course the situation in Germany, was peculiar. The treaty provisions after the World War forbade the Germans to develop an air force, to which they didn't pay much attention. But quite within with-in the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles they could go in for glider building and glider flying, and that glider piloting was a first-class way of training future pilots of airplanes. Hank Oh, I see getting ready to start something. Robinson Let's not get into that we might start something. But Hank Gee! 7 can't help wishing that same American had been doing something some-thing about it. Robinson Some Americans were. By 1932 we had some very accomplished accom-plished glider pilots. There was the pioneer Lewin Barringer, and Richard Rich-ard Du Pont, and Jack O'Meara, who were doing things that equaled if not surpassed any German record. Then there was Ralph Barnaby, who 'way back glided off from the dirigible dirigi-ble Los Angeles, and Frank Hawks, who in a glider was towed by an airplane clear across the continent. HankWell, that does look as though we were keeping up with the procession. Robinson We were keeping up. And don't forget, Hank, that wherever wher-ever and for whatever reason America Amer-ica drops out of the line of march, it doesn't amount to so much in the long run. We're sprinters, we Americans, Amer-icans, and if ever we temporarily drop out of the march, we make a sudden sprint ahead and before anybody any-body knows what we're up to, America Amer-ica is the drum major heading the show, and everybody else is trailing behind. . . . What woke all the world up to what the glider means in war, was the German performance. In 1940 they used gliders over Belgium and Holland, where gliders came down from great heights and landed as far as 20 miles behind the Allied lines. Each glider spilled out ten or more men armed with machine guns Greater Up-Currents of warm " air will lift the glider. Glider pilots, prolong their flights by " riding these up-draughts. Down Currents of air occur over .null areas of water or over land condi- tions that absorb the heat of the sun i i rather than reflect it. They increase the normal sinking speed of the glider. LESSON NUMBER THIRTEEN GLIDERS AND GLIDING It is late afternoon and Hank has Just brought his "trainer" plane in after a solo flight. He climbs out and sees Robinson coming in with another student, whom he has had up on an instruction flight. Hank watches the other plane land and then runs over to Robinson, just as he has climbed out and sent his newest new-est student, Jimmy, off until next morning. Hank Hey, Bill! Robinson (turning at the sound of Hank's call) Yeah? What's bothering both-ering you now? Hank Bothering me? Nothing. Just tvanted to ask you something. Robinson The best thing you do, ' young fellow, is ask questions but go ahead. That's what I'm here for to take the flying game to pieces and put it back together, so you youngsters can see what makes it tick. Hank It's about gliders. Robinson And what about glld- Oers? Hank 7 saw something in the papers this morning something about gliders and the Germans and all and say, Bill, did the Germans invent gliders? Robinson (leans back against the plane, plants his feet firmly, rams his hands deep in his pockets indications indi-cations that he knows he's in for a "session" before Hank's ever-present appetite for Information will be satisfied) You want to know, Did the Germans invent the glider? The answer to that is, In a manner of speaking, they did. And it's about the only thing they ever worked out for themselves. Tanks, armored cars, even the airplane, all started in America, and all were used before the Germans adopted them. Got to give 'em credit. Somebody comes along with a brand new idea, the Germans look it over, find out what use they can make of it, add a few little adaptations or improvements, and suddenly the rest of the world wakes up to find that something they created has been found useful and generally deadly by somebody else, while we've gone off after some new idea. . . . But back to this glider business. In a manner of speaking, development . of the glider can be credited to a German, Otto Lilien-thal. Lilien-thal. He'd been experimenting with gliders for several years, and had learned to glide for something like a thousand feet and to manipulate his glider into perfect circles, when In 1896 he crashed in an attempted take-off and was fatally injured. Hank But what kind of glider had he worked out? Robinson Oh, like all early experiments ex-periments in flying, it was pretty crude. He put some slender willow wil-low rods and some waxed cloth together to-gether to form a reasonable, large reproduction of a pair of bird-wings. He fastened them to his body, and by kicking his legs and shifting his weight he could, with fair accuracy, manipulate them. Hank But was Lilicnthal the first and only one to try that? ' Robinson When you begin to ask about first and only ones, Hank, you run back a long way, and always the farther back you get the dimmer the record is. Man had been trying to conquer the air for a great many generations before the Wright brothers broth-ers down in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Caro-lina, proved definitely that man could fly by means of a man-made contraption. . . . And as for that, the Wrights got a lot of pointers from what Lilienthal did and they experimented experi-mented first with gliders a number of the first airplane designers worked on making and flying gliders before they went in for motor-driven a airplanes. The Wrights, however, j were the first men to develop an ef- fective glider, which they demonstrated demon-strated at Kitty Hawk in 1902. That glider was the basic design for their airplane. They added a motor and a propeller, and the airplane was achieved. Hank But 7 still don't understand this glider business. I can't see how it works. Robinson I know. All your experience ex-perience has been with a motor which you control and which creates cre-ates the lift on the wing surface to maintain heavier-than-air flight. . . . Well, a bird hasn't any motor, except ex-cept his fluttering little heart, and he does a magnificent job of take-off, soaring, circling and landing. Hank Yeah, I knoiv, but a bird Robinson A bird's different. He's different only because God gave him 1 wings and man has had to make his own. And it was the flight of birds that made the pattern and Idea for flying. And especially it was the bird that made the pattern for the glider. Ever watch a bird take off and fly? Hank No, I don't think I ever did. Robinson That's probably because be-cause you're what we farm boys used to call a "town kid." Every boy who has lived and worked uider open skies has watched birds take off and seem to hover high in the blue sky, and wished he could do that. . . Watch a bird next time you have the chance. You'll see that what he does is to suddenly pull up his clp'.vs Ins landing gear and and grenades, to promptly attack a predetermined objective. It was more than effective. . . . But when it came to the attack on Crete in 1941 the Germans had greatly improved im-proved their technique, so much so that glider pilots were able to land at almost the exact spot where they intended to land. . . . Why, one of them dropped down in the garden of the Royal Villa, and the only reason they didn't carry out orders to capture cap-ture King George of Greece was that the king wasnjt there. He was in the safety of a mountain hideout. Hank But what was the reason the Germans went in for dropping gliders loaded with soldiers after they had been so successful at dropping parachute troops? Robinson They found the glider process was far better for the simple reason that a glider, being motor-less, motor-less, is actually soundless. The hum of a motor warns even the unaided human ear of its approach, and the detector system gives abundant time warning for the anti-aircraft forces to go info action. That gives everybody every-body the "alert" for parachutists." . . . But the glider comes down from ten or twelve thousand feet, quickly whatever they had in mind, they went a long way with their experiments. experi-ments. The first manipulation of a glider necessitated that it take off from some high elevation. The glider glid-er catapulted off the hill, the air currents cur-rents surged under it, and the pilot, like the bird, knew that if he shifted weight and one wing above the other, oth-er, he could have a wonderful time floating about. ... It was discovered discov-ered that gliders, or sailplanes as they came to be called, mechanically mechanical-ly catapulted into the air same idea as the bird's dart Into the air if the operator had an understanding of air currents or wind breaking against hills, mountains and cloudbanks, could rise to unimagined heights, and still greater heights, until they were above all cloudbanks. Then there was nothing to do but circle about or come down. . . . That got to be monotonous and it wasn't getting get-ting anywhere no development, no utilitarian or military purpose was being served. . . . But the Germans weren't the only people trying out motorless flying. . . . The record Orville Wright made nine minutes and forty-five seconds in the air stood until 1920 and was broken by the Austrian Robert Kronfeld, who by 1930 had made a flight of 85 miles and reached a height of 7,500 feet. . . . From that time on the distances of un-motored flights steadily increased in-creased until a record of just under 500 miles was made. Honk Was anybody in the United States giving any attention to gliders? Robinson Oh. yes, definitely. During Dur-ing the last ten years a number of glider clubs had been organized In different parts of the country and they held exhibitions and competitions. competi-tions. But glider flying was a sporting sport-ing proposition. Nobody took it seriously. seri-ously. No. that's wrong. The members mem-bers of the glider clubs did take it seriously. They believed they were developing something that might be useful In the future of aviation. But the practical minds, as they were regarded, were not interested. Hank But the practical minds of Germany were interested! Robinson An eminently practical people, the Germans, Goering. head of the German air force, picked up a lot of ideas, and by 1938 he had 300.000 qualified air pilots who had got practically all of their training as glider pilots. One of the biggest ideas he got was from Kronfeld, the Austrian who had proved the practicability prac-ticability and usefulness of gliders towed by airpl.incs. Tachometer indicates speed revolutions of motor and silently, and with uncanny precision. pre-cision. Parachutists come down singly and may land at comparatively comparative-ly widely separate spots. Glider troops land all together. Hence, they are less liable to capture, and can put up a better fight. Hank Looks to me like the glider is a pretty important part of air warfare. Robinson It has proved that, and when you remember that the Germans Ger-mans have perfected the technique of towing a whole fleet of gliders behind be-hind a single airplane, you can see how very important It is. (Ed. Note Lesson on Gliders concluded con-cluded in Lesson No. 14.) |