The Immortal Beaver. Sean Rossiter

there was some problem with the instrument rather than the engine, which sounded normal. If the engine was losing oil, he knew, that oil would be streaming along the underside of the fuselage, out of sight.

      That small, inconspicuous instrument now had Bannock’s full attention. His eyes returned to it in a matter of seconds. It read 10 psi.

      It no longer mattered whether the problem was with the engine or the gauge. Damaging the engine would put the Beaver program that much further behind Fairchild’s Husky.

      Bannock reached up toward the centre of the instrument panel and pulled the throttle lever back to the bottom of its slot, leaving the engine to idle. He trimmed the Beaver’s nose down, noting that the response from the elevators was not quite what he would have liked.

      As he began a gliding circuit to the left with the engine barely ticking over, he could hear the fuselage skin popping in and out in the slipstream. The Beaver’s thick wing had been formulated to provide the maximum possible lift with the less-powerful engine it was originally designed around, so it was all the more effective when the Wasp Junior was adopted. This wing also made the Beaver a pretty good glider. So much so, in fact, that Bannock regards his dead-stick, or power-off, landing as no more than “reasonable.”

      To the knots of white-shirted men who anxiously watched Bannock approach in near-silence, flying an airplane whose engine tests had been characterized by an unholy racket, this landing was impressive airmanship. Happy to see it on the ground and in one piece, they gathered around the Beaver, asking questions of Bannock as his door opened, then crouched down as the propeller ceased its desultory windmilling and, duckwalking underneath, looked up.

      Ugly streaks of oil defiled the carefully-polished aluminum underside of the Beaver. Some of it began to drip on the concrete apron.

      

      Chapter Two First to fight: Jaki Jakimiuk and the PZL fighters

      Facing page: This PZL P-II was an immediate forerunner of the P-IIc fighters flown by Capt. Mieczyslaw Medwecki and his wingman. Lt. Wladyslaw Gnys, when they took off at first light September 1, 1939, after hearing bombs explode in the distance. A development of the P-7, the P-II was an early product of Wsiewolod Jakimiuk, who supervised the team that designed the Beaver, A.U. SCHMIDT, VIA PETER. M. BOWERS

      Impressive as rest pilot Russ Bannock’s wartime carter as an eleven-victory night-fighter ace was, it was not that much more distinguished than the careers of other members of the team that developed the Beaver. In fact, the chief engineer of the Beaver design team, Wsiewolod Jakimiuk, was part of aviation history long before the Beaver appeared. He was responsible for the first fighters to engage the Luftwaffe ay the dawn of the Second World War.

      There is something Canadian in the Beaver having design origins so far from its Downsview birthplace—in a suburb of Warsaw, Poland, where the most advanced fighter planes of their time appeared in 1929. It is likely that no combat aircraft so advanced at is conception was as obsolete when called upon to fight as the PZL P-IIC Jedenastka (Eleventh) was in the minutes before first light, September 1, 1919, when the German pilots had been at work over western Poland for less than an hour.

      The PZL’s superannuation makes its gallant record in the defence of Poland all the more noteworthy. The 1941 warplanes allocated Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe for Operation Ostmarkflug, the invasion of Poland, were much more modern. The Luftwaffe outnumbered Poland’s air force ten-to-one in aircraft and three-to-one in fighters.

      The many reconnaissance flights that presaged the invasion showed that even Germany’s Dornier Do 17 bomber had a 20-km/hr speed advantage over the PZL. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter had a 150-km/hr edge and 2,000-metre higher ceiling, giving its pilot the oft-decisive advantage of initiating and breaking off combat at will.

      At 05:30 hours, less than sixty minutes into the war, an open-cockpit gull-winged P-IIC piloted by Lieutenant Wladyslaw Gnys of 121 Eskadra, the “Winged Arrows,” shot down the first of 285 aerial raiders that Polish Military Aviation, the Lotnictwo Wojskowe, would destroy during the brief but intense resistance by the first of Hitler’s victims to fight back.

      In his little P-IIC, Gnys—old for a fighter pilot at one week past his 29th birthday—had scarcely more firepower at his disposal than his World War I forebears. In fact, his mount was conceptually similar and nearly identical in layout to the Fokker D.VIII, the epitome of combat aircraft development in 1918. Through such advances as all-metal construction, structural detail development and the use of up-to-date licence-built engines developed in England, the PZL series established “new standards of aerodynamic cleanliness”¹ when the PZL P-I prototype first flew on September 25, 1929. (PZL stands for Panstwowe Zaklady Lotnicze, or State Aircraft Factory, which still exists.)

      So rapid was combat aircraft development in the previous few years that, although Lieutenant Gnys’s P-IIC may have been built less than four years before, it was at least a generation behind Germany’s Messerschmitt Bf 109E and Britain’s Spitfire I, which were conceived in 1935 and had been continuously developed ever since—the Messerschmitt spurred by its operational testing during the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, the 175 P-IIC fighters of the Lotnictwo Wojskowe claimed the vast majority of the fighter force’s 126 confirmed victories during the sixteen-day invasion. This figure is thought to be only half the number of Luftwaffe aircraft the PZLS actually shot down.²

      The opportunity for a leap forward in fighter design occurred, as it often does, because of the recent availability of advanced engines. Poland’s Skoda works had begun licence-building the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s Mercury radial engine in 1930.

      Radials, so named because their cylinders radiate out from a central crankcase, are air-cooled engines. Their advantages include dispensing with the weight of liquid-cooling plumbing and the coolant itself, thus increasing payload. As fighter powerplants, radials are less susceptible to battle damage; a stray bullet through a radiator could disable a liquid-cooled fighter’s engine in seconds. The radial’s drawback was its need to be open to the air, causing drag. At that time, suitable methods of smoothing the airflow around a radial’s cylinders were only just being developed, so the liquid-cooled engine, which allows a nearly pointed nose profile, still held the aerodynamic advantage.

      The Mercury was a de-stroked development of Bristol’s well-proven Pegasus radial; its shorter cylinders formed a smaller-diameter, if still blunt, nose.

      On the airframe side, PZL, an expansion of the previous Central Aviation Workshops, was founded with a specific purpose in mind: to undertake the next step forward in aircrait structures by taking advantage of the lightness and strength of all-metal construction.

      The series forerunner, the P-I, was designed under the leadership of Dipl.-Ing. Zygmunt Pulawski, who appears to have been a talented designer. He had produced a glider while at Warsaw Technical University, had won an apprenticeship at France’s Breguet plant by designing the third-place finisher in Poland’s 1924 contest for a combat aircraft design, and had learned to fly when the PZL organization was founded by Poland’s government the first day of 1928. But Pulawski, not yet thirty, died in an airplane crash March 31, 1931.³

      With Pulawski’s death, the PZL fighter’s development was taken over at an early stage by his assistant, a big, cultured and worldly engineer named Wsiewolod J. Jakimiuk (pronounced Jaki-mook). Jaki, as he became known much later at Downsview, was a natural team leader. Physically imposing at over six feet and 200 pounds, with fine engineering credentials of his own, multilingual and an opera buff, Jakimiuk had easy social graces and was married to a talented French-English wife, Mary.

      In 1931 the P-I was the most advanced