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Early European Flights: Sir Thomas Sopwith's Aviation Career
From: Columbia University
| By:
Kenneth LeishColumbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In 1910, Britain's Sir Thomas Sopwith taught himself to fly, and later that same year he went on to win the de Forest prize for the longest flight to the European continent from England. But this was just the start of Sopwith's career in aviation and aircraft design. In this excerpt of a 1960 interview conducted by Kenneth Leish on behalf of Columbia's Oral History Archive, Sopwith describes his early interest in aviation and his de Forest flight, which he made with only the sun and the English Channel to guide him. |
Question: I gather then that your first interest was in ballooning, prior to any work with planes, Sir Thomas? |
Sir Thomas Sopwith: Yes, that's quite right. |
Sir Thomas Sopwith describes his early interest in ballooning and recounts his famed de Forest flight.
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Q: How did you get into ballooning? |
Sopwith: As a comparatively small boy, I went for two or three rides in balloons with Charley Rolls and Frank Hedges Butler, who incidentally between them formed the Aeroclub. Then I got Short brothers, who were the official balloon makers to the Aeroclub, to build me a balloon. |
Sopwith: I think that must have been the first case of subcontracting in the aviation industry. |
Q: What kind of a balloon was it, Sir? |
Sopwith: Thirty-five thousand cubic feet. Roughly a three-seater. |
Q: What was the longest trip you could make with it? |
Sopwith: Nothing very long, because we did all our ballooning from London, and unless the wind's in the right direction, one's apt to bump into the sea rather quickly. |
Q: Did you ever have any such close calls? |
Sopwith: No. We had one very fast flight, though. We made a trip from London to halfway between Bath and Bristol at an average speed of just under 60 miles an hour. That meant landing rather fast. We dragged three fields with a ripped balloon. |
Sopwith: No. No bones broken. |
Q: It was Moisant's flight that first really perked up your interest in aviation? |
Sopwith: Yes, I think it was. We were cruising about in the channel in the yacht I had a half share in and we put into Dover Harbor just after Johnny Moisant had flown across from Paris on his way to London. It took him a hell of a time to get there. It took him, I think it was, 22 days altogether because he had one or two misfortunes on the way. We went to see him flying at Dover, and I began to think there must be something in this flying after all. |
Q: What year was your first flight at Brooklands? Was that the same year? |
Q: And you paid, what? A fiver to you is five pounds? |
Sopwith: Yes, I paid a fiver, that's five pounds English, to Mrs. Morris Hilliard. She is the wife of a very well known author. |
Sopwith: No, she didn't, but she owned the airplane, and it was flown by a Frenchman. Actually she created history a little later by teaching her son to fly. |
Q: The first plane you owned was the Howard Rice plane. |
Q: Can you tell me a little about the performance of that? Why did you decide to buy that plane as opposed to any other? |
Sopwith: Chiefly because it was the only one on offer. I bought a little monoplane, which I duly crashed. I stalled it. You know--the ordinary inexperienced pilot's fate. None of us were taught to fly; we had to teach ourselves as best we could. |
Q: You had no instruction? No special training? |
Sopwith: None at all. None. We just rolled about, and tried to control it and make it go more or less straight on the ground, and one went faster and faster. I think the same thing happened to most people in those days: one looked over the side and suddenly found one was in the air! |
Q: This had no dual control? |
Sopwith: No. It wouldn't have lifted two people into the air. |
Q: Do you remember your feelings, your emotions, on the first solo? |
Sopwith: Well, a certain astonishment, when one looked over the side and found the ground had gone. It hadn't gone very far. |
Q: Did you have any misadventures? |
Sopwith: I stalled it and crashed. No personal damage. |
Q: Was the plane repairable? |
Sopwith: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. |
Q: This kind of crash was just the ordinary thing in those days? |
Q: It never made anyone think of giving up aviation just because they'd had a couple of crashes? |
Sopwith: Oh, no, you wouldn't do anything like that. I remember two other great friends of mine--we used to call him "Daddy" Sassoon, he's now Sir Victor Sassoon, and a fellow called Otto Ashley--they had a two-seater Bleriot at Brooklands. Well, Daddy Sassoon was rather shortsighted, and he was flying this thing one day and he made a lovely landing--from about 20 feet up in the air--and of course crashed. So it took some weeks to repair. |
When it was repaired, he went for another fly, and Otto Ashley was seeing him off and he said, "Now Daddy, fly the bloody thing right into the ground next time before you flatten it out." And he did--an inevitable crash but no bones broken. |
Q: Did you ever have any trouble on the flights? |
Sopwith: Not very much. I took the old Howard Wright over in what we used to call the family tank. I piled that up once on twice, but not badly. The sort of damage you could repair in a week. I had a nasty crash on a Bleriot I took over--two-seater Bleriot. I was flying it on Long Island with Milton Doubleday, the publisher, as passenger, and we spun into the ground. Of course, we didn't know it was a spin, but it was a spin all right. We both got away without any serious damage. He told me afterwards it was his fourth crash in five flights. So he was doing pretty well, doing better than I was. |
Q: When you first got into aviation, what were your thoughts for the future? Did you see yourself in it as a permanent career, as a pilot? |
Sopwith: No, I think that gradually developed. |
Q: At the beginning, more of a lark than anything else, then? |
Sopwith: Oh, I got to the state where I just couldn't get out. |
Q: But within a week of getting your certificate, you were setting endurance records. |
Sopwith: Yes, that is true. But then, things happened very quickly in those days. |
Q: What was the motivation for this endurance record of-- |
Sopwith: Sixty-horsepower NB engine. That's a. Z-8 water-cooled engine. |
Q: What made you decide to try to set a record? |
Sopwith: Oh, I was competing for a prize of 500 pounds put up by the Missionary Company for the longest flight in England before the end of 1910, for a British machine. |
Q: Were many people trying for this at this time? |
Sopwith: There were two or three. I think Ogilvie was having a crack, and Rye, and Cody was also having a go at Farmborough. Well, there was another prize also open at that time for the longest flight out of England in an English machine and that was very much--that was put out by Baron de Forest and the prize was 4,000 pounds. Well, there wasn't very much time left. We got well into December and we'd only got a week or two so I concentrated on that, and didn't have time to improve on my original Michelin performance, which I think was 107 miles. Cody eventually won that prize with a flight of about 140 miles. I got away with the de Forest [prize] with a flight of 170 miles into Belgium. |
Q: Could you tell me about that de Forest flight? Was it a smooth flight or did you have trouble along the way? |
Sopwith: Oh, it went slowly for a bit. I took off from East Church on the Isle of Shepley and flew over Dover. My compass was not very cooperative--in other words, it was quite useless--so I came straight on in a straight line, as near as I could. I couldn't see the other side of the channel until I got about halfway across, and it was a very pleasant sight! I carried on--I never discovered yet where I crossed the French coast, but it can't have been very far from Grenot, and I was steering by the sun. Then that went out and the clouds came up. |
I was trying to get down to the sort of Rheims, Challon country, but I must have worked a little bit too far to the East and got around into Belgium. By then the wind had got up and it was getting very bumpy. I'd been thrown out of my seat once and I didn't like that very much. We had no straps or anything. So I decided to come down while the going was still good. I had enough petrol to go about twice as far. |
Sopwith: Oh, yes. I got away with it all right. |
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