Brace for Impact. Peter Pigott

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.

      3

      Barnstormers, Flaming Coffins, and Death Mockers

      The first years of peace promised much for commercial aviation. Civil flying had been prohibited during the war, but at its end, with so many unemployed pilots and surplus aircraft, utilitarian roles for aviation first appeared. Across Canada in the summer of 1919 makeshift aerodromes sprang up for companies such as the International Aerial Transport Ltd., in Toronto’s Leaside, which equipped itself with bargain-priced JN-4s that had cost the government $5,000 each to build the year before.[1]

      Throughout the conflict, rivalled only by the ferocity they showed the enemy, the RFC and the RNAS fought each other over policy, manpower, and aircraft procurement. To overcome this, the British government set up the Air Board on May 15, 1916, which proved spectacularly unsuccessful, since officers from either service resented their rivals being invited and subsequently refused to show up at meetings. Fed up, the British government merged the RFC and RNAS on April 1, 1918, into the Royal Air Force (RAF), to be overseen by an air ministry. A year later