ULTRALIGHTS FOR THE RAF

Did Establishment ‘spin’ create the myth that popular, non-military light aviation was born at Lympne? Peter Eveleigh reports… Pictures from the collection of Arthur W J G Ord-Hume

In aviation circles, Lympne (pronounced Limm), a former airfield near Ashford, in Kent, is shorthand for a series of competitions held almost a century ago to find the ideal light aeroplane for newly established light aeroplane clubs. They were allied to a government scheme to provide members of the public the opportunity to learn to fly at a subsidised rate. However, the better-informed observer will know that the aeroplane ultimately chosen for the job, the DH.60

De Havilland Cirrus Moth, had not even competed in the two-seater competition in 1924 because its designer,

Geoffrey de Havilland, had considered the aims of the competition to be misguided. The subsequent success of the Moth series of aeroplanes confirmed this view in the minds of commentators and historians, including Terence

Boughton, whose book Story of the British Light

Aeroplane (1963) has been so influential on modern thinking. The conventional wisdom is that as the Moth and its successors proved so successful in the following decades, its selection must, clearly, have been right. The selection of a Lympne Trials winner would thus have been Above The traditional view is that the de Havilland Cirrus Moth was selected for the Light Aeroplane Clubs because it was superior to those which competed in the Lympne Trials. In fact it was chosen reluctantly because it could be supplied immediately. wrong. Although the Moth was far too large and heavy to have qualified for Lympne, it was characterised as the practical light aeroplane, while the Lympne aeroplanes, under-powered, fragile and unreliable, were simply not fit for purpose. Furthermore, the argument goes, if the Royal Aero Club (RAeC) was going to choose a heavier aeroplane ultimately, why did it spend two years searching for something much lighter than was practical? RAeC thinking had been confused, ‘muddle-headed’ and a waste of money, time and effort. The best that could be said for the competitions was that they stimulated creativity in some of the companies involved, which would go on to become legendary, like English Electric, The Bristol Aeroplane Company, Westland, and Supermarine etc. The Lympne Trials were organised by the Royal Aero Club after an aristocrat, the Duke of Sutherland, put up a large financial prize, ‘having realised the possibilities of the light plane’. The Daily Mail put up a substantial prize of its own ‘for the encouragement of flying with small motor power’. They characterised the visionary Duke as

the man with all the right credentials – President of the Air League of the British Empire, and the Vice President of the Royal Aero Club, and he would even purchase the winning aircraft from the 1924 competition for his own use. Far less was made of the fact that he was actually appointed Under Secretary of State for Air, answering to Sir Samuel Hoare, whose own role was the RAF’s equivalent of the First Lord of the Admiralty. The Duke’s ‘representative’, Ralph Bagnall Wild, who was key in directing the part played by the Royal Aero Club, was actually the Director of Research at the Air Ministry. The question which directed my research was: Why would the government, so soon after an expensive world war and, rather topically, a catastrophic flu pandemic, subsidise private flying, and why would it go to such a lot of trouble, over several years, to find the ideal aeroplane for the purpose? Boughton’s book, which has been so influential in the way we think of Lympne, was written when government papers from the 1920s were still embargoed. What they subsequently revealed is that the RAF had become convinced of the merits of the light aeroplane for training pilots. Although only ever referred to as ‘light’ in official papers, these aeroplanes were the first of what Richard Riding tells us would come to be regarded as ‘ultralights’ in the inter-war years – very light single- and two-seat aeroplanes developing less than 60hp. The true intention of Lympne was not, as Pathé News claimed, ‘to bring the day when we shall have our own planes appreciably nearer’, but to find an economical successor for the RAF’s increasingly tired Avro 504, the design of which pre-dated WWI. The purpose of the Light Aeroplane Scheme was to provide the UK’s very young air force with an unofficial reserve of air-minded personnel, at a time when the RAF had recently been largely disbanded. In a report to the Secretary of State, Air Vice Marshal Salmond suggested that if 100 light aeroplane clubs were established throughout Great Britain, each with six light aeroplanes, as many as 3,000 airmen could be trained per annum, economically. The RAF’s director of Training reported to Hugh Trenchard (Chief of the Air Staff) that the development of the light aeroplane was to be encouraged because ‘it costs about 1/8th of an Avro to start with, and subsequently its upkeep is only 1/14th’. I believe there is little doubt that when the Daily Mail popularised the Lympne Trials and the Light Aeroplane Club (LAC) scheme as essentially civilian enterprises, it was well informed about their true purpose. Its proprietor, Harold Harmsworth, later Viscount Rothermere, had been the first President of the Air Council, the governing body Top The English Electric Wren shared first place in 1923. Weighing just 210lb and powered by a 388cc ABC flat twin, it achieved 87½ miles on one gallon of fuel.

Middle The Parnall Pixie G-EBKM, flew in the trials with a 500cc Douglas flat twin as a Mk I and then as a 750cc Mk II (seen here), in which guise it won the speed event at 76.1mph, later upping the speed to 81.2mph.

Above G-EBIL, the ANEC 1, used the first inverted engine in the UK, a 696cc Blackburne Tomtit V-twin. It shared the longest distance prize of 87½ miles and attained the maximum height at 14,000ft.

of the newly formed RAF, a political appointment in Lloyd George’s wartime government. Doubtless Harmsworth will also have been aware that when the Duke of Sutherland announced his prize, he had only been a member of the RAeC for a fortnight and had been hastily elected to be its Vice President (at the proposal of Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation) at the same meeting. Bagnall Wild’s own membership was hurriedly approved less than three weeks before the 1923 Motor Glider Competition started.

Training aeroplanes

The purpose of the Motor Glider Competition was to satisfy the Air Council that aeroplanes of far lighter construction than those that had flown in the war could be operated economically as training aeroplanes, while still covering worthwhile distances, and achieving significant altitudes and speeds. Gliders had been seen to fly with small motors attached at a competition the previous year, and had proved twice as aerodynamically efficient as most commercial types at the time. The Director of Supply and Research at the Air Ministry, Air Vice Marshal Salmond, having witnessed the performances of 25 small aeroplanes over three days of the 1923 trial, had been impressed by one in particular, the de Havilland Hummingbird, which had looped and rolled. He wrote, “I saw at once that this development of light aeroplanes has great possibilities.” The ANEC-1 and the English Electric Wren each achieved 87.5 miles per gallon, the former also attaining the greatest height at 14,400ft, and the Parnall Pixie was fastest at 76.1mph. Salmond’s report recommended proceeding to the second stage of the Ministry’s plan, a two-seater competition for the following year.

Flight magazine’s editorial reported that the Duke of Sutherland had been of the opinion that an aeroplane which carried a passenger, as well as the pilot, would have far greater appeal than a single seater. An internal memo from the Air Ministry to the Treasury was rather more candid about the type of aeroplane sought: I am to point out that the object the Council have in view is the evolution of a successful dual-control light aeroplane as an inexpensive type of training machine for the Royal Air Force.

Above The winner of the two-seat competition in 1924 was the Beardmore Wee Bee, described by The Aeroplane as one of the most astonishingly efficient aeroplanes yet produced. Seen here with Chief Test Pilot Archibald Norman ‘Bill’ Kingmill. Air Ministry soundings among manufacturers had established that two-seaters would need to be quite a lot heavier than single-seaters. As an attempt to restrict the upper weight of entries, a limit on engine size of 1100cc was imposed, but engines of that capacity were to prove unsuitable for loaded two-seater aircraft, as it proved necessary to run them flat-out at the limits of their power for most of their time in the air, leading to reliability issues. For details of the performances of aeroplanes at Lympne, together with the catalogue of difficulties competitors had in the 1924 competition especially, you can do no better than to get hold of Arthur Ord-Hume’s The Lympne Trials; Searching for an Ideal Light Plane, which is liberally illustrated. Countless engine failures were a theme of the competition, as engines designed for small cars and motorcycles, intended only to run at full power in short bursts, were necessarily pushed to their limits when installed in these aircraft. The smaller, maximum 750cc, units in the single seater competition the previous year, had operated so successfully at lower outputs not only because they were lifting less weight, but also because the emphasis of the competition had been on attaining maximum fuel economy. In 1924 they were required not only to lift another person and a heavier machine, but also to attain a high-speed figure involving about two hours at full throttle.

Degree of reliability

An analysis by one of Bagnall-Wild’s assistants, Colonel Fell, suggested that if the 1100cc limit had not been imposed, but instead engines of larger capacity and running at a lower rpm had been allowed, they would have given a greater degree of reliability with a negligible increase of weight. Apparently informed by Fell’s analysis, the specification for what was to have been the 1925 competition, limited the weight of the engine to 170lb (enabling a more realistic and reliable power output). This gave the aircraft industry the freedom to develop more powerful engines, provided it could do so without adding more weight than was considered desirable for the light airframe of their design.

Above The Blackburn Aeroplane & Motor Company’s Bluebird was let down by its cobbled together three-cylinder Thrush engine, preventing the promising design from even making the start in 1924. Fitted with a 120hp Gipsy II, the type went on to become a successful design.

However, this necessitated a delay of a year, the Trials taking place in 1926. Air Ministry files contain annotated clippings from local and national newspapers, reflecting the public’s unhappiness at the announcement of a delay to the Light Aeroplane Clubs’ subsidy scheme, which had ‘burst hope in the breasts of enthusiasts’ awaiting the promise of affordable flight training. The Ministry became anxious that any delay now would lose them the goodwill of the public, and affect recruitment at a later date once the engine problem had been solved. Rather than wait, colleagues were urged to find stop-gap aeroplanes for at least the first few clubs. By then, multiples of the Lympne aeroplanes were on order, or had already been delivered to the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment at Martlesham Heath to undergo trials with the RAF. It was suggested that some of them, equipped with a 1500cc engine then in development, might be supplied to the clubs for the time being. However, this too would mean a delay, as the engine was undergoing proving trials, and few in the Air Ministry were confident these could be completed in under six months. The RAF ruled out altogether the suggestion that for now the clubs might be supplied with the obsolete Avro 504s, the aircraft the competitions had been devised to replace. It was at this stage, no doubt aware of the flurry of anxious meetings between the Ministry, Sutherland and deputations from the flying community, that on 15 January 1925, Geoffrey de Havilland approached the Ministry and offered to supply them with the first two of his DH.60 Moths, the first the following month.

Twice as heavy

The Moth was twice the weight of the aeroplanes built to the Lympne specification, its 60hp Cirrus 1 engine being four times the capacity, and at least twice as heavy. It was also an expensive aeroplane to buy and would be Below One of two Hawker Cygnets in the 1924 Trials, 1100cc Anzani powered G-EBMB, finished second. In 1926, re-engined with a Bristol Cherub 111, it won the event. comparatively more expensive to run. What it had in its favour was its immediate availability. Records show that its selection by the Air Council was a pragmatic if reluctant one, driven more by political than technical considerations. It would do for now. The RAF could bear the extra cost, but what of the ordinary person for whom the subsidy scheme was supposed to have been devised? When a costings exercise was carried out in 1938 to calculate a new subsidy, it indicated that the higher than forecast costs of running the LAC scheme with de Havilland aircraft had made even subsidised flying prohibitively expensive for most. A thousand participants had dropped out in the previous year on account of what, for them, was an unaffordable hourly rate, and those who remained flew too little per year to give a reasonable return on the investment. Most significantly, it suggested that the new scheme should first include those who had ‘hitherto been prevented from joining the Light Aeroplane Clubs on account of the cost of flying’. Having compromised its own ultralight objectives, the Air Ministry thwarted both its stated and actual intentions. It meant, in 1938, that any further recipients of subsidies would have to be put under an obligation to the RAF as Civil Air Guard members of the flying clubs. Also, rather than flying having been made accessible to ordinary people, it had remained, very largely, an exclusive pursuit. ■ The author: Peter Eveleigh is a doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester. He has been invited to contribute the referenced research paper on which this article is based, Aeroplanes for Everybody Soon? The RAF, the Lympne Trials and the myth of governmentsupported popular flying 1923-1938, for a volume in the series Deutsches Museum Studies, to be edited by Dr Artemis Yagou. It is due for publication later in the year. ■