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| Aviator Javier Arango at the Controls |
Even though this reviewer has been studying WWI aviation for over 50 years, this fascinating book contains much information and many observations that are new to him. The Nature of World War I Aircraft: Collected Essays by Javier Arango is a memorial tribute to him in the wake of his untimely 2017 death in a crash while piloting one of his WWI airplanes. Over the years, Javier had built one of the world’s largest collections of flying WWI airplane replicas, many of which were powered by original engines. Notably, he had built multiple types from two aircraft designers (Fokker and Sopwith) so he could study how each designer’s type evolved during the course of the war.
Javier’s essays are the backbone of this book. These had been published widely in a number of magazines and journals (including Over the Top), and it’s enlightening to be able to read all of them together. It also includes some of his correspondence with other aircraft builders and historians, plus some of his published research articles. For years, Phil Makanna chronicled Javier's planes in exceptional photographs, both under restoration or re-creation and in subsequent flight. This book features 21 of those photos (four of which are shown here) with Javier delighting in the experiences that inspired and supported his thoughts and conclusions in the essays.
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| The VanDersarl Blériot |
One of Javier’s observations was due to his experience with flying multiple examples of the same plane. It was clear to him how much the same airplane type varied from one individual plane to another even in the same production run. In Europe, engines and planes were not constructed on assembly lines but were built by hand with a small team of individuals working on each one. Javier points out that these differences from one plane or engine to another were overcome by how the plane was rigged and by the individual attention given to the same engine over and over by the mechanics assigned to one pilot/aircraft. The pilot adjusting to the eccentricities of his individual plane was also a factor in dealing with this wide variation in how a particular plane flew. In other words, the ground crew and pilot were indispensable parts of the WWI aircraft production process in ways that no longer exist.
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| Sopwith Camel |
Javier argues convincingly that pilots’ descriptions of their planes’ performance were different then, back at the dawn of aviation, than they are now. Statements by WWI pilots on performance simply don’t match “reality” as we currently define even the simplest of terms. British ace Albert Ball famously said that his (beloved) Nieuport 17 was much “faster” than his S.E.5. If you measure the level speeds of both, however, it is clearly not true as we understand the term. Something about the Nieuport made it feel faster under some no-longer-understood conditions.
This memorial to Javier is full of many other insights—how Anthony Fokker and Tom Sopwith outmaneuvered the bureaucracies of their military customers and the established aircraft production competitors; why biplanes with higher drag were nevertheless more successful than monoplanes; the role of unskilled labor in manufacturing airplanes and how it affected their designs; the rapid and continuous innovations that made Fokker and Sopwith so successful. This reviewer was particularly intrigued by Javier’s comparison of the Fokker D.VII and D.VIII and the factors that made one plane better than the other.
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| Fokker D.VII |
The Nature of World War I Aircraft can be obtained through GHOSTS.COM.
Full disclosure—this reviewer did research with Javier Arango for several years and, along with Kimball Worcester, published a 2016 article that won a Hooper Award for Excellence in Aviation History from the League of WWI Aviation Historians and Over the Front magazine.
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