CALIBRATED CAMEL

One of the legends clinging to the Sopwith Camel is that it was so reluctant to turn 90 degrees to the right that pilots preferred making a 270 to the left. Now, this is being said about the aeroplane that is widely regarded as the premier dogfighter of World War One. You have to wonder whether such roundabout tactics were practical when you had an angry Fokker on your tail.

THE ALLEGED CAUSE of this alleged misbehaviour was the Camel's rotary engine. The rotary – not the Mazda or Wankel rotary, but the quite distinct type that was used on most of the fighters of World WarOne – reminds me of those light-bulb-changing jokes in which one person of the nationality to be denigrated climbs the ladder to insert the bulb and then several others turn the ladder.

At rest the rotary looks like any air-cooled radial; in operation it becomes a blur, because the crankshaft stands still and the entire engine, crankcase, cylinders, pistons and all, spins around it.

As topsy-turvy as this arrangement may sound, rotaries were ingeniously engineered and fabricated in great numbers with a skill and sophistication at which modern machinists gasp in amazement. They hadremarkably high power-toweight ratios for the time, cooled well during ground operations, and were simple and reliable. Furthermore, nearly all of the fighters or "scouts" of the war used them, and they can't all have been going the long way around to make a right turn.

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