Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/876

 The Hawks of the Royal Flying Corps

��What contact patrol means in the fierce fighting on the western front

��6omb-nelease

��CONTACT PATROL— "A flight of one or more planes over the lines to give General Headquarters in- formation regarding the position of Allied and German troops and also to take of- fensive action against enem^ troops on the ground."

The average reader who sees this definition probably concludes that contact patrol is as unin- teresting as it sounds. Defini- tions are never as thrilling as the things they define. Any fine morning on the sector of the western front held by the British you will find back of the lines at the Royal Flying Corps' air- dromes, squadrons of planes preparing for contact patrol work. The airplanes used are generally of the same type (the F.E.2.B. "Pusher"), two seaters •v\4th one hundred and twenty horsepower Beardmore engines. While not particularly fast, these planes are easy to handle. Be- cause their work is done mostly at a low altitude, they are slow climbers. It takes them about twenty-five minutes to climb ten thousand feet, but in straight- away flight they can do about one hundred miles an hour. With the motor throttled a contact patrol machine will glide sixty miles an hour, which is pos- sible because the plane has a nice gliding angle. The armament consists of one down- pointing Vickers ma- chine-gun, fixed along- side the fuselage or body and operated by the pilot, and one Lewis machine-gun operated by the ob- server. This Lewis gun can fire up or down and also straight ahead. The motor is in the rear, so that it cannot in- terfere with the firing

���The turn of a lever releases a bomb. A slight miscalcu- lation means a miss

���This shows the hook to which the bomb is attached

��of the gun. Under the fuselage are sus- pended several bunches of steel arrows; also two 100-pound bombs, or ten 20- pound high-explosive bombs.

They Carry Bombs, Armor and Machine-Guns

All these missiles of death are released from the observer's cockpit by a bomb-firing trigger attached to a bomb-sight. This bomb-sight is not used on contact patrol, as the airplane has to spend con- siderable time over an objective before it can be used. At a given height there is only one point of space where the airplane must be, if the bomb is to hit its ob- jective. A miscalculation, no matter how slight, means a miss. When this happens, the aviator must turn his plane around and try once more to make the imaginary path of his machine pass exactly through the proper point. These repeated tricks are made for half an hour. The aviator must maneuver at will, unham- pered by other planes. It is obvious that when the bomb-sight is used over a small area, a plane must fly at a high altitude

��120 Kp Beard mor motor

��Arrow release

��Dowrv-poirvti .qur\

���Lewis

��bombs

A "contact airplane" armed for its arduous duties, with teel arrows, and twenty-pound bombs

��machine-guns,

��860

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