Cockburn-Lange Controversy

Familiar to U. S. aviation enthusiasts is the collection of aerial warfare photographs exhibited the past three years by a Mrs. Gladys Cockburn-Lange, reputedly the remarried widow of a British Royal Flying Corps officer shot down in France. The pictures, some 60 in all, are amazing views of British and German planes in close combat. A few show such spectacular views as two planes colliding in midair; a German pilot falling from his flaming plane; most extraordinary of all, a British plane losing its wings as its pilot looped in exuberance over a victory.

According to Mrs. Cockburn-Lange the pictures were taken by her late husband with a camera mounted in the cockpit of his plane and operated by a shutter attached to the machine-gun trigger. She has refused to tell her husband's name because, she says, his superior officer is still in the R. F. C. and might be punished for permitting the pictures to be taken "against army regulations.

Two years ago Sportsman Pilot began publishing a series of the prints, dropped .them when the editors suspected their authenticity. Last autumn Mrs. Cockburn-Lange sold a set to Illustrated London News which printed striking full-page reproductions for several weeks. Thus publicized for the first time among British airmen, the Cockburn-Lange pictures aroused a controversy over their legitimacy finally aired in the issue of The Aeroplane which reached the U. S. last week.

In a four-page discussion, long-winded Editor Charles Grey Grey of The Aeroplane reviewed the arguments, appealed to Mrs. Cockburn-Lange to submit the negatives to experts. He answered her reason for secrecy by noting that Sir Philip Sassoon, Under-Secretary for Air, had announced in the House of Commons that "the Air Ministry did not consider any disciplinary action would be called for" by disclosure of the photographer's identity. Arguments summarized by Editor Grey: P: No British pilot is known to have made enough patrol flights to account for so many pictures. The 60 perfect pictures were said to be the fruit of "several hundred" exposures. The photographer, unable to reload his camera in the air, could make only one exposure per flight. P: No pilot has been heard from who saw so many astonishing sights in the air as this man's camera, pointed at random, caught perfectly. (The camera was supposed to be pointing not always parallel to the machine gun; sometimes toward the side or rear.)

P: The shutter was said to be operated by the first pull of the gun trigger. In normal combat practice a pilot would fire a burst from his gun to make sure it was in working order long before approaching as close to an enemy plane as the pictures indicated.

P: If any pilot took pictures consistently with a 5"x4" camera of 16 in. focal length (such as this camera was supposed to be) he could hardly keep it a secret from the entire R. F. C.

Some critics opine that several of the pictures are genuine, that others were printed from superimposed negatives of single planes.

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