The Fun of It/Chapter 10

by Amelia Earhart

EXPERIMENTING AGAIN

AFTER the airline was organized and comfortably operating, it was time for me again to do some flying of my own and such experi­menting as opportunity might offer.

Just then the autogiro was the very newest thing in aviation, and so naturally enough I found my­self drawn toward it.

Probably no other recent aeronautical develop­ment has created the interest it has, among engi­neers and laymen alike. Miles (I’m sure) of words concerning it have appeared in newspapers and magazines. In fact, so much space has been as­ signed its doings that I am at a loss to know how or where to start another biography. Perhaps if I begin at the beginning, I may find some bit of information not told a hundred times already.

Perhaps the public’s unusually great interest in it is conditioned by its promise of greater safety to the inexperienced flyer. Perhaps the very strange­ness of its design is responsible for the great in­terest displayed in it wherever it makes an appear­ance.

Curiously, the history of the autogiro starts in a book. Before ever a model of one was made, a portly volume had been written about it. Under the title, The Theory of Autorotation, a young Spanish mathematician had described the habits

A. E. and her “Flying Bill-board”

Courtesy Underwood & Underwood

Louise Thaden

and character of a paddle-winged airplane which had never existed.

Juan de la Cierva was the name of the author, and he was a thoughtful, adventurous, inventive person, with an abiding interest in flying and flying machines. He really came to invent the autogiro because of an airplane accident. One day, at a local airdrome, he had witnessed a crack-up in land­ing. Though no one was hurt the incident con­vinced him that aviation would never amount to much unless some of its hazards were removed. The hazard he thought of particularly was that due to fast landings. Coming in at express train speeds, as is necessary in most planes, was to him a serious barrier to future progress. He, therefore, calmly set out to do what no one else had been able to do—think out a contraption which should possess high speed in flight and low speed, with control, in landing.

I cannot say how he evolved his theory nor how long it took him. But a story is told of him after he finished. Gathering up the sheets covered with abstruse formulas, he handed them to an engineer friend and said,

“Now you build it.”

It is not to be inferred from that remark that Señor Cierva leaves the problems of construction entirely to others. On the contrary, for the dozen years that autogiros have been struggling in their present state of development, he has been actively connected with these details. Further, I imagine he will continue to be so until their mechanical per­fection more closely approaches his theory.

For it must be remembered that the autogiro is still an experimental airplane. To compete com­mercially with the other type it still must increase its cruising speed to more than its present eighty miles an hour, carry a larger load on less horse­power than now required, and carry more than two hours’ fuel supply. It must become lower in cost and upkeep, too, to appeal to the private owner who wants a plane he can treat as he does his car.

But such faults will doubtless be overcome as the autogiro grows up. And already it can do many of the things its inventor dreamed of. Like a bird it can settle to earth and stop—with no roll at all on the ground. A passenger I took up once de­scribed this characteristic very aptly by saying, as he got out,

“Well, she lands just like a turkey buzzard.”

The “buzzard” landing obviously requires much less space than does the long roll of conventional fast planes. As would be imagined, the autogiro can get off in less space, too, and climb more steeply than many straight winged craft.

A picturesque example of its ability to land in small spaces was afforded last year when Jim Ray brought one down on the south lawn of the White House, an occasion on which the Collier Trophy was presented to its manufacturers in America. Curiously it was a more historic occasion than most people were aware of. Few remembered—certainly it was in none of the press reports I saw—that a plane had landed in exactly the same place twenty years before. That was when Harry N. Atwood flew a 30 h.p. Burgess-Wright biplane into the White House grounds on July 14, 1911, when he was presented by President Taft with a gold medal given by the Aero Club of Washington.

There should be use for giros as sportsmen pilots’ planes where large airports are not convenient. A smooth pasture or extra sized back yard should suffice for ordinary hopping up and down. Too, they may find a use as ferries about crowded city areas, where airline terminals because of high land values, are situated far from the business centers. Passengers may transfer to a waiting taxi-giro and be deposited much nearer their destination than the transport liners could bring them. By the way, whenever in-town landings are discussed, the possi­bility of making them on roofs of buildings is brought up. It might be of interest to note that finding sufficient space is not the greatest problem. In most large cities area enough could be found. The real difficulty is the eddying of air currents in the canyons of the streets, which may adversely affect all types of aircraft when landing, dirigibles, airplanes and ’giros.

I have spoken of autogiros on one hand and con­ventional airplanes on the other. I do not wish to give the impression that the former are not air­planes because they apparently have no wings. Such is not strictly true. As everyone knows, Mr. Cierva’s brain children have four blades which re­volve above the pilot’s head. When these are going fast enough for a flight (a hundred or more times a minute) they constitute a round wing. So that instead of being lifted by a rectangular surface, as in most planes, the autogiro sails along on a large pie plate, so to speak. The small wing, with the upturned tips, underneath the rotor blades, does not help much in supporting the weight of the plane in the air. Its duty is more to provide cer­tain stability and hold the ailerons. Of course, the principle of the rotating wing type airplane, which is the family name of the autogiro, is not quite so simple as this description may sound. But re­garded in this way, these craft may seem less of freaks than they look.

Now let me tell you of my first flight. It took place near Philadelphia on a bright spring day. Jim Ray, chief test pilot and vice-president of one of the companies which builds autogiros, took me up for fifteen or twenty minutes around the field. He made a couple of landings and then brought his giro to a stop.

“Now,” said he, climbing out, “you take it up.”

“Aren’t you going to give me any dual instruc­tion?” I asked blankly. “I’ve had only a few minutes ride in this craft, as a passenger, you know.”

“That’s all right,” he smiled reassuringly. “You’ll get along. Just remember everything I’ve told you.”

Everything he’d told me! I tried to remember one single thing, as I realized I was being invited to solo without so much as trying a landing or take­off myself.

I looked at the rotors over my head and the un­familiar gadgets before me on the instrument board and I began to feel exactly as I had when I made my first solo in any airplane eleven years before.

Mr. Ray stood beside the autogiro, unbuckling his parachute.

“I’ll wait for you here,” he said, indicating a small hillock in the landing field.

“Just what my first instructor said,” I thought to myself, and wondered that his words should so fit the present situation. For here I was a novice again, with all of the uncertainty of a beginner.

No other person has had so many autogiro hours as Jim Ray. He knows more about the habits of the whirligigs than anyone but the inventor. No wonder I felt self-conscious in his presence!

Thinking over the moment when the autogiro rose into the air, I am at a loss now to say whether I flew it or it flew me. I only know that suddenly I found myself peering down upon some tree tops and sailing along merrily over a country road al­most before I was aware “we” had hopped off.

Rut it doesn’t take long to become used to the autogiro, if it is handled like a regular airplane. I found that out when I came in for the first landing. I also found out there are many tricks to learn, if one wishes to get out of it, all that it is capable of. For experts can make giros do seemingly easy stunts that novices couldn’t possibly duplicate—a truism which holds good for any skilled pastime.

After I had played with the autogiro for several hours at different times, I was given the chance to try an altitude hop. No one knew exactly how high a stock model could climb. So it was suggested that I take one upstairs and keep on going until it would go no farther. The “ceiling” of an air­plane is as much performance data as speed. Auto­mobile, motor boat and airplane manufacturers all find it valuable to check theoretical calculations with practical demonstrations.

Even though simple in itself, any official test re­quires more preparation than might be supposed. For instance, a representative of the National Aeronautic Association in Washington must be called to install the barograph. This instrument registers altitude and also shows the time consumed on the flight as recorded on a revolving drum. The barograph must be sealed and hung carefully on rubber shock cords in the cockpit. After use, it is calibrated by the United States Bureau of Stand­ards—that is, the actual height attained is deter­mined.

For this official test, besides the barograph, Itook along a bottle of oxygen. Beyond sixteen thousand feet it is well to have some on tap if a pilot intends to stay aloft a long time or to go higher. As it turned out, I reached only 18,415 feet and my lungs seemed to do the job unassisted.

Courtesy Wide World Photos

Colonel and Mrs. Charles A. Lindbergh

Courtesy Army Air Corps

Three Stages of a Parachute Jump

I suppose the temperature was about zero at that height, but my heavy flying suit, boots and mittens kept me comfortable.

The higher one goes on a clear day, the more of the world one can see. Distances shrink and cities and town miles apart look as if they were neighbor­ing stops on the Toonerville Trolley line. Possibly in the future, sightseeing tours may be arranged to take passengers not only from place to place but to different “levels.”

SEE THE NATION’S CAPITOL
(and 25 surrounding towns)
From 10,000 feet For 25c.

SEE THE NATION’S CAPITOL
(and 100 surrounding towns)
From 20,000 feet For 60c.

Well, I hope the passengers will enjoy the scenery as much as I do when I fly high.

Not long after the altitude hop, I started across the country in an autogiro. I went definitely on a commercial venture, for I carried a large sign on the fuselage for the Beech-Nut Packing Company. Up to the present writing the most practical use to which ’giros have been put is advertising various products. Everything from coal to gasoline has been sold in this manner. Getting a trade mark before large numbers of people has been done as effectively by means of flying signboards as by those which stay on the ground.

But my personal reasons for making this trip was to test the autogiro on a long trip, under all kinds of weather conditions. I wished to know for myself just what it could do and what its future possibilities might reasonably be.

I made the journey to the coast via the northern mail route where no autogiros had ever been before. When I landed at Oakland, California, mine was the second to reach the west. I started back from Los Angeles, but alas, did not arrive intact. Texas proved my Waterloo for I had an accident there that considerably damaged the faithful ship.

As luck would have it, I had an engagement to appear with it two days later in a middle western city. By unmercifully lashing another ’giro and using his spurs, an accommodating pilot managed to arrive from Philadelphia just in time for me to go on with the scheduled performance. Afterward I went east with the second ’giro, while the pilot saw that my wreck was crated and sent to the fac­tory for repairs.

While I regret any kind of accident, I have found they are sometimes of benefit. So it was in this particular case. I learned a great deal—all of it valuable experience with this new kind of plane.

Speaking of plane accidents in general, I might add that women are often penalized by publicity for their every mishap. Any disproportionate “breaks” they get when they accomplish some­ thing are nullified in crash headlines. Probably the most unfortunate result is that such emphasis sometimes directly affects chances for flying jobs. I had one manufacturer tell me that he couldn’t risk hiring women pilots because of the way acci­dents, even minor ones, were played up in the newspapers.

“A man can damage a plane and hardly a word be said,” he explained, “but that doesn’t apply when sister stubs her toe. I don’t want my prod­ucts advertised by a nose-over or a forced landing. But don’t misunderstand me,” he hastened to add. “I don’t mean women have more accidents than men.”

With flippant inaccuracy the magazine Time re­ferred to my Texas episode under the caption (as I remember it) “First Autogiro Crackup.”

And so it goes.

There is another point to be mentioned in con­nection with women and accidents. That is, every­one should realize there will be an inevitable in­crease in the number of casualties involving women. I do not mean the proportion of accidents to the number of pilots will increase, but only that as more and more women enter into aviation, the number of accidents may be expected to keep pace.

What the comparative accident rate between feminine and masculine pilots is, or will be, I do not know. There are some reasons for saying that women for a time, owing to lack of experience, may have more. A likely example of why I say so is afforded in certain changes in flying conditions today from a few years ago. When some of the veteran men pilots learned to fly there were very few kinds of planes available. Further, they were all slow and with motors of limited horsepower. As the planes were improved and speeded up, the pilots progressed gradually from one type to an­other, learning each.

Now the picture is quite altered. Anyone who has the money can buy a tricky racing plane if de­sired, and fly (or try to fly) it. The long enforced process of gaining experience is gone, and only common sense, when it exists, remains as a safe­guard. Without the background of knowing the full value of experience, I sometimes think women are more apt to attempt a bigger bite than they can successfully chew than are men. (This may apply in more quarters than in aviation.)

In other words, what has happened with automo­biles will inevitably happen with airplanes. More cars on the road have meant more accidents—but not necessarily in proportion. More women drivers has brought about more accidents with women drivers—but not necessarily in proportion.

One more thought. A fatal accident to a woman pilot is not a greater disaster than one to a man of equal worth. Feminine flyers have never sub­scribed to the super-sentimental valuation placed upon their necks. I am sure they feel they can endure their share of misfortune, whatever it be, as quietly as men.

There are still some more things I want to say about autogiros. I am often asked whether other kinds can be built. The answer is yes—big trans­ports are possible, and little fast single seaters. The theory is good for all.

It seems to me whether or not the autogiro ever invades the general field of aeronautical activity that one of its accomplishments—that of hovering in the air under certain conditions—will be utilized for special work. Perhaps it will be found espe­cially adaptable in aerial photography. There are surely scores of special uses to which it might attain. In fact, with the giro as with many new developments, so much is likely to happen that I am planning to return to earth in a couple of hundred years to check up on its doings.