Authors: Nevil Shute
In March 1933 we moved the company from York to
Portsmouth, into the new factory built for us by the Portsmouth Corporation. By that time we had over a hundred men employed in the bus garage in York, but of these I think only about fifty elected to make the move south with us. Some of the others were to join us again later on, for we were to find that the Portsmouth area was attractive to labour. As spring came on, men working in the grey industrial towns of the Midlands and the North would begin to think about the sunshine and the seaside, and would take the opportunity of moving down to a job with us thinking that they would go back north in the autumn. When autumn came, they usually stayed on. The transfer of the company to Portsmouth was probably a wise move on those grounds alone; it enabled our struggling little company to get a good staff together more quickly than otherwise we could have done.
For the first time in Portsmouth we were all under one roof, a tremendous help to Tiltman and the design office. We had nearly three times the area to work in, with the aerodrome immediately outside the door, giving promise of lower costs and more effective work. The first Courier for Cobham was practically complete when we left York and only the final erection and inspection before flight remained to be done in the new factory.
This was the first retractable undercarriage machine to be produced in England for many years, and in the test flying therefore we should be breaking new ground. There were, of course, no proprietary hydraulic components already on the market that we could make use of; Tiltman and his drawing office had had to design the manual hydraulic pump and the jacks and the change over cocks and the indicator lights entirely from first principles with little expert help because the design was a new conception. It was inevitable that teething troubles would occur, sometimes in flight, and this would mean that the pilot might
well find that he could not lower his undercarriage. To meet this point the design was arranged to retract the undercarriage legs completely but to leave half the diameter of the wheels exposed below the under surface of the wing. In this position the axles were up against a firm abutment and a belly landing could be made upon the wheels with little damage to the aircraft. In fact, a belly landing on the Courier only involved a bent metal propeller and minor damage to fairings, and was normally put right for a repair cost of about twenty pounds.
The choice of a test pilot for the first flights of the Courier was a serious responsibility, complicated by the financial situation of the company. In the first flight trials trouble with the undercarriage was quite likely to arise and if that happened a first class pilot would be required to use all his experience and skill if the aircraft were to be landed safely, but we had little money to pay the fees of a first class consultant pilot nor had we any great confidence in the civilian pilots who were available.
In these circumstances we made contact with F/Lt. G. H. Stainforth. George Stainforth was a serving officer in the R.A.F., employed at that time as a test pilot in the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. He was one of the best test pilots in the country; he had been a member of the Schneider Trophy team and held the world’s speed record for seaplanes in the Supermarine S.6B. George Stainforth was keenly interested in the Courier and wanted to fly it, and I think his superiors in the Royal Air Force wanted him to fly it, too, for they made no objection when he requested permission to carry out this test flying for us while he was on leave. Married flight lieutenants in the R.A.F. are not particularly affluent as a class and George was glad to do the job for us for the pitifully small fee that I could offer him; on our part we could have got no better man.
I have found that it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalise about the mentality of a good test pilot. George Stainforth was a fine character, a big, humorous man, generous to the point of having little sense of money so that he seemed to be in the habit of giving any that came into his hands to his wife lest he should spend it too quickly. When standing a round of beers at the bar he would ask his wife for five shillings, and give her back the change. On the ground he was mentally slow to grasp a technical point, but he had immense tenacity and would never leave a technical matter till he had mastered it in every detail. Before the test flights of the Courier we had the machine supported on trestles and jacks in the hangar in the flying attitude so that the pilot could get the feel of the machine before he left the ground; the open hangar doors in front of the aircraft permitted a full view of the aerodrome, and the undercarriage could be raised and lowered as in flight. In our innocence we had supposed that an hour in the machine in this condition would be sufficient for the pilot, for the Courier was not a very complicated aeroplane, but it was not so. George Stainforth sat in the machine in this condition for five solid hours, all through one working day, with Tom Laing or the chief inspector at his side, asking and re-asking the same questions and receiving the same explanations, or just sitting, feeling the controls and staring at the aerodrome, in an apparent daydream. I think his one deficiency was that he was not a very quick pupil and I think that he was very well aware of it, so that he required this prolonged study before he could feel that he really knew the aircraft to the extent that he would not have to stop and think in an emergency.
In the air he was masterly, of course. So far as I remember he did about five hours’ flying on the machine, establishing preliminary performance figures which were
practically identical with those established later in the official trials. The undercarriage gave no trouble in these early trials, but he had to cope with an emergency of another sort. Taking off in to an easterly wind from Portsmouth aerodrome the mud flats and tidal water of Langstone harbour lie immediately beyond the confines of the aerodrome, with no possibility of landing undamaged. George Stainforth suffered a complete engine failure at an altitude of about three hundred feet just after taking off in this direction, due, I think, to a defect in the petrol system. The machine was climbing steeply with the undercarriage already up when this happened, and I have never seen an aircraft handled so expertly. Within an instant the machine was forty, five degrees nose down to keep up speed, and turning, while the undercarriage came out in record time; then she flattened out neither too high nor too low and landed neatly and perfectly back in to the aerodrome down wind. In the hands of a lesser pilot the machine might well have been lost; perhaps the long wearisome hours spent in the cockpit in the hangar had paid off.
George Stainforth was killed in the second world war flying a Beaufighter in the Western Desert, a great loss to the R.A.F. and to his country.
The Courier went to Martlesham for trials, which were extended, because this first machine to have a practical and a reliable retracting undercarriage was to exercise a considerable influence on the design of military aircraft. The Air Ministry got all the leading aircraft designers in the country down to Martlesham while the machine was in their hands, presumably to rub their noses in it. At Portsmouth we were completing the last Ferry for Mr. John Sword and commencing the production of a batch of six Couriers, but the finances were again in a serious condition. By the middle of May the guaranteed overdraft was £8,450 and there was an unsecured overdraft above
this limit, making the total debt to the bank well over £10,000. We also owed about £1,700 in the form of trade invoices, some of them going back to January. In spite of our considerable technical successes a cautious man might well have hesitated to support such an unfinancial company further. Yet in the middle of May Lord Grimthorpe turned up, unasked, with a cheque for £1,000 to take up a thousand more shares.
In spite of the financial picture the prospects of the company were encouraging, because when the official performance figures came through; the Courier was seen to be a technical success. With an Armstrong Siddeley Lynx engine of 240 horsepower the machine had a maximum speed at sea level of 163 m.p.h., about eight miles an hour faster than our forecast, when carrying a pilot, five passengers, and three and a half hours’ fuel. About 20 m.p.h. of this speed was probably due to the retraction of the undercarriage. In its day this was an outstanding performance, and the prospective orders for the machine were promising, a promise tempered by the fact that most of the small airlines that were then coming into being had little or no money.
By the end of August the overdraft had risen to £12,847, over £4,000 of which was unsecured, and the bank manager was getting very unpleasant. Trade creditors, too, were showing signs that their forbearance was near its end. In these circumstances Lord Grimthorpe came forward again with a personal bank guarantee of a further
£5
,200, and by this act produced a situation amongst our working shareholders which deserves a record.
These shareholders got together in the office without consulting either Tiltman or myself to debate the financial situation of the company which employed them on their trivial salaries. Most of them had access to a little more money, and they came forward after consultation between
themselves with a proposal to support the company further to the extent of £12,000 between them, in the form of 6% debentures or bank guarantees. This offer from officials of the company who were not members of the Board was generous and a great encouragement to the directors, for these men, led by Tom Laing, knew all the seamy side of the business and could not be deceived about its prospects. Accordingly the company took powers to issue the debentures, and with this encouragement went cracking on.
By the beginning of September we had delivered the first production Courier as a demonstrator, paid for, to the Aircraft Exchange and Mart Ltd, to whom we had given the selling agency for the British Isles, and the machine had already made a very fast return flight between London and Edinburgh to demonstrate the possibilities of internal airlines. We must have paid a lot of invoices, because debtors and creditors were about equal at £3,000. Having got the financial situation more or less under control a prudent Board might well have hesitated before a further expansion, but both Board and shareholders were of one mind; the company must get big quickly or it must inevitably perish. It was resolved at the beginning of September to double the floor area of the factory, making the best hire purchase deal we could with the Corporation, to lay down Couriers in batches of not less than six, and to press ahead with the design of a new twin engined machine based upon the Courier.
This new machine was the result of sales experience. In the provision of aircraft for the little airlines that were coming in to being our chief competitors, as always, were our old friends the de Havilland Company. Their Dragon and Dragon Rapide machines were slower than the Courier and, I think, less economical in operation by virtue of the high performance of our aircraft, but they
had twin engined reliability to offer as well as low price and a first-class servicing organisation. Price we could argue about because all speed costs money, and we were making every effort to provide a first-class service for our aircraft, but already the single engined aeroplane was becoming out of date for airline use; already legislation was in sight to restrain operators from flying paying passengers over sea routes in single engined aeroplanes. We therefore set ourselves to consider whether we could not develop a twin engined version of the Courier using the extension planes and many of the other components of the single engined machine to lower the development costs of the new aircraft, later to be christened the Envoy. We specified Wolseley A.R.9 engines for this machine, a very promising new engine of modern design backed by all the resources of the Nuffield organisation.
That autumn Sir Alan Cobham was hard at work on his refuelling experiments, using one of the old Handley Page W.10 biplanes from National Aviation Day Ltd as a tanker. Squadron Leader W. Helmore was normally his co-pilot on these flights and was to go with him on the projected flight to India, but on one or two occasions I flew with Cobham upon these experiments. The Courier was provided with a hatch in the top of the fuselage which the co-pilot could open in flight and stand up in, his body above the waist exposed to the air stream at about 90 m.p.h.; a hose was then let down from the tanker flying a hundred feet above the Courier to pass the fuel.
The chief difficulty lay in making the first contact between the machines. The hose could not be lowered at once, for it waved frantically and could have whipped the tail off the Courier if it had hit it. The first method tried was to lower a little bag of sand on the end of a light cod line; Cobham would fly the Courier so that Helmore (or myself) could reach out and catch the line. The cod
line was then pulled in to the Courier, pulling down a heavier rope, and finally the hose was pulled down, the nozzle poked into an appropriate funnel leading to the Courier’s petrol system, and the juice was turned on. All this demanded very accurate formation flying by Cobham, impossible in bumpy weather, but it worked fairly well till one day the little bag of sand jammed between the aileron and the wing of the Courier and put the machine out of control, and gave Cobham and Helmore a great fright. After that they used a child’s toy balloon filled with water as the weight, which would burst if anything of the sort happened again, and it was on the basis of this system that they set out for India early the following year. I shall always remember standing up half out of the Courier trying to catch this thing as we flew in formation below the Handley Page, and how frightened I was; my respect for Air Commodore Helmore has not diminished with the passing of the years. Now, of course, a totally different system has been developed by Cobham’s organisation for the refuelling of aeroplanes in flight.
These Courier refuelling flights were valuable to us, because all aeroplanes have initial teething troubles to be rectified by modifications to the design, and with the first Courier operating in Cobham’s hands upon short local flights in this way we were able to get through this stage of the development with the minimum of trouble; this was not the least of the many benefits that Airspeed owed to Sir Alan.