Why, How and When the Sport of Air Racing Was Born
By Alan Smith
Ever since the industrial revolution we have found ways to race every machine of motion that we have built. We raced steam locomotives on the main line, and steamboats on the nation’s rivers. We raced bicycles, scooters, ice skates and roller skates. We race anything that can move. It wouldn’t be surprising if we raced elevators in new office towers.
Yes, the human is a very competitive animal. It was natural that, a little less than six years after Ohio bicycle builders Wilbur and Orville Wright made the world’s first powered airplane flight on December 17, 1903 that competition between pioneer pilots and their aircraft would begin, and begin it did in France in August 1909.
Newspapers and their publishers also had a lot to do with spurring competition in the infant aviation world. The London Daily Mail offered a prize to the first aviator to cross the English Channel. It was won by Frenchman Louis Bleriot who flew his little monoplane across the Channel from England to France at dawn on July 25, 1909. He landed on soft ground and nosed over with light damage to the airplane but, he made it. It’s amusing that his prime competitor, Hubert Latham and his crew with a graceful French Antoinette monoplane overslept that morning and missed the daybreak takeoff time.
Bleriot’s channel-crossing feat set Europe ablaze with excitement. The city of Reims, along with winemakers in the champagne region of France decided to hold a week-long air meet with prizes to be won in various contests such as distance flying, the highest altitude gained, and the highest speed around a course marked off with tall towers. The site chosen for the meet was the Betheny Plain outside the city.
One must understand that pioneers like the Wrights, Glenn Curtiss, Louis Bleriot and others were dealing with a completely new concept with no one’s prior experience to rely upon: they were giving birth to the powered airplane and creating the new world of aviation. They were simultaneously teaching themselves to fly, and deciding what to fly. And they were doing it without much existing technology to help them. Doing this required a mix of courage, creativity, and ingenuity. The Wrights had begun with gliders, but to achieve a takeoff under power, to climb to altitude and be able to turn in the sky were quantum leaps forward. One could only learn so much from watching soaring birds. The best way to test their ongoing experiments was to invoke the human competitive spirit and challenge each other.
James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald and the Paris Herald had long offered trophies and prizes for yacht racing. Bennett was quick to jump on the new aviation bandwagon and offered a trophy and prize money for speed events at the world’s first aviation competition.
The Wrights’ 1903 success at Kitty Hawk N.C. in America sparked interest in the airplane on both sides of the Atlantic. The French went at it with enthusiasm with airplanes built by Farman, Bleriot, Antoinette and Voisin and also built a few copies of the Wrights’ design.
In America, Glenn Curtiss joined the Wrights in pioneering aircraft design. Deciding to compete at Reims, Curtiss hastily modified his own first design, a pusher biplane called the June Bug. He set out to reduce weight and increase power to provide higher speed, and renamed it the Reims Racer. Without time to test fly the result, Curtiss loaded up and headed across the Atlantic to Reims determined to make a good showing in the speed contests. It was the prize money offered by Bennett that Curtiss was after. Despite the presence of several copies of their design at Reims, the Wrights, decided not to enter the world’s first aviation competition. Wilbur Wright, with their Wright Flyer, had been in France for several months in 1908 and had flown many demo flights, including several of long duration. The Wrights were aware of French designs by people like Bleriot and Antoinette and perhaps did not wish to risk the embarrassment of defeat in direct competition.
The meet was scheduled for August 22-29 and was attended by the highest ranking members of European society all the way up to royalty. There were many aircraft there with many pilots and the crowds were fascinated with their first view of airplanes and of the new world of aviation. Fascinated as they were, even a heavy rain on the first day failed to discourage them.
The last day was for the speed time trials and the Gordon Bennett trophy. There were five main contenders, Frenchmen Bleriot and Lefebrve, Hubert Latham of England, George Cockburn of Scotland, and the American, Glenn Curtiss. Bleriot was looking good with his new monoplane, He was very fast on the straights, but Curtiss outperformed him in the turns. The result was Curtiss’ victory by 5.8 seconds at a speed of more than 45 mph. In 1909, that was fast. Cockburn failed to finish, hitting a haystack on his first lap and Latham was well back in the times. Curtiss won the Bennett trophy for the two-lap contest and the French prix de vitesse in the three-lap event. Curtiss used the $5,000 in prize money to set up his own aircraft manufacturing operation in America.
There were five more Gordon Bennett trophy “races.” Glenn Curtiss’ victory at Reims brought the second contest to the U.S. It was held at Belmont Park on Long Island, N.Y. and won by an Englishman, Claude Graham-White. The contest moved to England for the third Bennett trophy event. The winner there was the American Charles Waymann in a French Nieuport with a speed of 78.11 mph. Then World War One stopped all international sports. After the war, the French retired the Bennett trophy by winning the fourth, fifth and sixth contests. The last winner in 1920 was Sadi Lecointe in a postwar designed Nieuport 29 at 168.732 mph. At the time, the Nieuport 29 was the fastest airplane in the world.
The media continued to fuel aviation competition during the airplane’s first decade, Scientific American magazine offered a trophy for the first aviator to meet a three-phased challenge. The first leg was to fly in a straight line for more than a kilometer. Curtis won that easily in 1908. The second leg was for a distance record and that went to Curtiss in 1909 with a flight of 24.7 miles. Then the New York World newspaper added $10,000 for the winner of the third phase, the first flight from Albany N.Y. to New York City. Curtiss won that too, and took the Scientific American trophy home. The $10,000, in New York and the $5,000 won in France plus three trophies made it an excellent two years for Curtiss. With all the media sponsorship, the seeds of air racing as a sport were being sown in fertile soil.
While the Wright Brothers did make the first powered airplane flight in 1903, it was their fellow pioneer Glenn Curtiss who accomplished more “firsts” at aviation’s beginning. For example, while the Wrights used a wing warping method to control the roll axis of their airplanes and enter turns, Curtiss introduced the aileron, a hinged and moveable control surface at the outer trailing edge of the top wing actuated from the pilot’s control column.
The aileron led to a patent lawsuit from the Wrights who said Curtiss was using their control system to operate the ailerons. This battle dragged on until suspended at the start of WWI. Wilbur Wright had died in 1912 and by the war’s end in 1918, his brother Orville had sold out his interest in the company and retired. The suit was never renewed. Ironically the Wright and Curtiss companies merged in 1929 to form the world’s largest aircraft company.
Curtiss also pioneered the seaplane and the flying boat. The Navy NC-4 that made the first flight across the Atlantic to Lisbon, Portugal in 1919 was a Curtiss design.
Air racing continued to grow and became an arena for the development of the airplane and, in 1922, with the start of closed course air racing between several planes at Mitchell field on Long Island, air racing became a primary source of development of the high performance aircraft. It is true that aerial warfare also accelerated this development, but air racing had produced the wing flap, retractable landing gear, supercharged engines, and variable pitch propellers before the start of World War II. It took a combination of creativity and engineering experimentation to accomplish this. During the years between World Wars I and II Glenn Curtiss in the U.S., R. J. Mitchell in England and Mario Castoldi in Italy were prime examples of this ability.
