Hands Off

Simplest axiom of aviation: "It isn't the flying that's dangerous; it's the coming down." Seated on his father's lap in the cockpit, a 10-year-old could hold a plane on a fairly even course, nearly as easily as holding an automobile to a high way. But to land safely requires judgment and skill born of careful training and long practice. A miscalculation, a false move--and only fate decides whether the mishap shall be trivial or tragic. . . .

At Glenn H. Curtiss Airport, N. Y. last week a great crowd of aeronautical men watched what appeared to be a conventional Waco biplane as it came in for a landing. It did not slant down toward the ground and suddenly level off. It floated down slowly, steadily at the same angle, tail high in normal flying attitude. More remarkable, the pilot's white-gloved hands could be seen upraised above his head as the craft touched the ice-coated surface, bounced a few times and was brought to a stop by footbrakes. The plane had landed itself.

If an observer had remarked that the plane behaved much as an alighting bird breasts the wind with its wings to check its speed, the comparison would have been more than poetical. The wings of the biplane, adjustable in flight, did just that. Lower and upper wings are rigidly connected with struts, remain in the same relation to each other. But by a hand-crank in the pilot's cockpit, the lower wing can be moved fore & aft, pendulum-like, through an arc of 14 degrees, tilting the upper wing to the same degree. About to land, the pilot sets his wings at the maxi mum angle, throttles the motor, and lets the plane settle. Because the centre of gravity is well aft, the plane will not nose over, according to its designers. Also, it is claimed, the plane is incapable of spinning, diving, stunting--of anything except safe, conventional flight. Only visible difference from an ordinary aircraft is the absence of horizontal stabilizers from the tail assembly, their work being done by the adjustable lower wing.

Among the spectators at the demonstration, showing large teeth in a pleased grin, was Designer Albert Adams Merrill of White Plains, N. Y. who studied aero dynamics with Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley before the Wright brothers made their first flight. Spare, spectacled, reddish-bearded and red-nosed; partially deaf; clad in a black overcoat and battered brown hat, his unprepossessing figure was like the popular notion of the hardworking, unfamed inventor.

Designer Merrill has been working on the principle of the movable wing since 1913, as had many another before him. He built a weird craft embodying the idea in 1926 and flew it at Clover Field, Los Angeles. Again in the National Air Races of 1928 he demonstrated another, built by his students of California Institute of Technology. It performed well but was impractical, was dubbed "the dill pickle" for its color and general conformation. Thereafter he obtained the financial backing of Hannibal C. Ford, president of Ford Instrument Co. Inc., a subsidiary of North American Aviation, Inc., which gave rise to the present development and the formation of Merrill Aircraft Co. Also associated with him are Thomas A. Morgan, president of Sperry Gyroscope Co. (N. A. A. subsidiary), Capt. Thomas Bartwell Doe, president of Eastern Air Transport, Inc.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.