Make A Wish

How many of you read Peter Pan as children? Who remembers Chapter 3: Come Away! Come Away! in which Peter teaches the Darling children to fly?

"It looked delightfully easy, and they tried it first from the floor and then from the beds, but they always went down instead of up.

"I say, how do you do it?" asked John, rubbing his knee. He was quite a practical boy.

"You just think lovely wonderful thoughts," Peter explained, "and they lift you up in the air."

He showed them again.

"You're so nippy at it," John said, "couldn't you do it very slowly once?"

Peter did it both slowly and quickly. "I've got it now, Wendy!" cried John, but soon he found he had not. Not one of them could fly an inch, though even Michael was in words of two syllables, and Peter did not know A from Z.

Of course Peter had been trifling with them, for no one can fly unless the fairy dust has been blown on him. Fortunately, as we have mentioned, one of his hands was messy with it, and he blew some on each of them, with the most superb results."

I was very taken with the idea as, of course, have human beings been for millennia. To be able to soar like the birds would be so useful sometimes.

In Greek mythology, Daedalus (master craftsman and architect of the Cretan labyrinth) was imprisoned along with his son Icarus after Theseus, King of Athens, had escaped from the labyrinth. King Minos was convinced that the pair had revealed the labyrinth's secrets to Theseus, so he locked them in a high tower overlooking the sea. There Daedalus fashioned wings for Icarus using feathers that birds had moulted, some threads from their blankets, leather straps from their sandals and beeswax to hold the feathers in place. According to legend Icarus was advised not to fly too near the sea (for water would soak the feathers making them too heavy) nor too high, at risk of the sun melting the beeswax. Off Icarus flew from the window of the high tower, but he became so enamoured of his ability to fly that he forgot his father's instructions, soared upwards, the wax melted, the feathers all became detached and the foolish young man plummeted into the sea and was drowned.

Icarus

Until I saw the film, I always imagined that the Birdman of Alcatraz had attempted something similar. (Silly me).

When I was a boy in Peterborough, there used to be a 'Birdman' competition every year to fly off a bridge over the River Nene using just manpower and home-made wings. I think that many cities around the world have staged such competitions. They are entertaining but the attempts, though often ingenious and vigorous, are all destined to meet a similar wet end to that of Icarus (minus the drowning part, for health and safety is taken seriously).  

Unless one is an angel (I had to get them in somewhere), then something more than mere manpower is required, namely the appliance of science, and Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century famously designed - on paper at least - crafts that might be capable of sustained flight.

The next significant leap came nearly three hundred years later, with the creation of hot air balloons big enough to support manned flight. These were based on a principle that had been known and in use for centuries, the Chinese sky lantern, warm air being lighter than cold air. But balloons only go where the wind wills, and to truly wing it like the birds requires powered flight.

Enter the age of the combustion engine. In December 1903 the Wright Brothers achieved the first manned and controlled powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine when their Wright Flyer (sometimes also known as Kitty Hawk Flyer from the locale) undertook four short flights powered by a 12 horsepower gasoline engine providing thrust to two rear-facing propellors. History had been made, though in truth the Flyer was relatively unstable, difficult to fly and was severely damaged by strong winds when landing after its fourth flight. It never flew again.

A much more credible, though far less famous step forward was taken by Glen Curtiss and the Aerial Experiment Association when in response to a competition funded by Scientific American, June Bug became the first craft to make a public flight (the Wright  flights had all been rather secret events) of over one kilometre, in June 1908. June Bug (so named by Alexander Graham Bell) won the trophy and the $25,000 prize money.  

June Bug

What made June Bug more worthy of a place in the lineage of aircraft development were a couple of crucial refinements that the Wrights' craft did not possess: wheels and ailerons. The Wright Brothers launched their plane by catapult (much like we used to fire balsawood gliders into the air). Kitty Hawk could not take off under its own power and it didn't properly speaking have an undercarriage, just a couple of sledge runners. Landings were precarious at best. June Bug in contrast had a proper undercarriage with wheels. Also Kitty Hawk was not easily manoeuvrable having just the two fixed wings and a rudder. June Bug possessed both a rudder and ailerons (flaps on the trailing edge of the wings), designed by Alexander Graham Bell, making it remarkably easy to control and direct when in the air. Ailerons became a standard feature of aircraft design henceforward. Only just over sixty years later, the Americans managed to land men on the moon.

I absorbed all of this information as a lad, for like many boys, I was plane mad into my teens, visiting airports with school friends on plane-spotting days out, making model aircraft from Airfix or Revell kits and hanging them from the ceiling (see below), writing off to aircraft companies like de Havilland, Handley Page, Hawker Siddeley and Shorts for photographs and technical material, taking out a subscription to Flight magazine. 

Aichi D3A1 'Val'

I even once, in my late teens, took a flying lesson from Cambridge aerodrome in a little dual-control de Havilland Chipmunk training plane. It was a wish come true. However, being at the controls was the most frightening experience of my life and I never repeated it! I do still love flying though, as a passenger. I must have racked up thousands of (now considered not very green) air miles both on business and as a holiday-maker. and will continue to fly as long as economics, health and passport allow. 

I wish to finish this Saturday's blog with a poem which requires a bit of a preamble. I've written before about Lyall's wren, also known as Stephems Island wren. Stephens Island is a small island in Cook Strait, the channel between New Zealand's north and south islands. It was home to colonies of Lyall's wren until near the end of the nineteenth century. Having no natural predators, Lyall's wren over millennia had adapted to its peaceful environment (like several other species in New Zealand) and had evolved into a flightless bird, earning it the nicknames 'rock wren' and 'walking wren'. Flight takes energy, so if you don't have to do it.... 

Lyall's wren

Anyway, these lovely wrens had lost the power of flight hundreds of thousands of years ago and their wings grew stubby and ornamental, which wasn't a problem until 1894 when a lighthouse was built on Stephens Island and a lighthouse keeper took up residence with his pregnant cat. By the turn of the century, and well before Kitty Hawk and June Bug took to the skies, there was not a single wren left alive on the island. The cat and its descendants had killed them all, rendering Lyall's wren officially extinct. Did I mention that Lyall was the lighthouse keeper? 

What a grim legacy. What must those poor little birds have thought? Here's the poem, for what it's worth.

In Our Dreams We Fly

They have finally come, as we were told they might,

in small boats across the narrow sea, our safety zone.

They couldn't do it on their own. Lyall brought them

to be our downfall, to ravage us in our little paradise,

an invasion of killer cats cruel in eye, tooth and claw,

practised and merciless hunters. We will be no more.

In our dreams we fly, as once we must have done but

our stubby wings are useless now. We flap them as if

to rise into the skies and safety, a muscle memory but

quite pathetic. So we scurry round the rocks like mice. 

We're quick but they are quicker, Seems we're nothing 

in the scheme of things and this is a godless universe!

Thanks for reading, S ;-)