Free Marked for Death by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

the face of the Earth. The perplexingmystery was not solved until 24 hours later, when a telegram was received from a hospital at St. Pol, stating that the bodies of Sandy and Hughes had been found in a crashed R.E.8 in a nearby field. It was ascertained that both men had been killed instantly during the aerial combat, when an armour-piercing bullet had passed through the observer’s left lung and thence into the pilot’s head. They had not been injured in the crash-landing, and the R.E.8 itself was only slightly damaged. Apparently, after the crew had been killed, the aircraft had flown itself in wide left-hand circles until the petrol supply ran out. This theory was supported by the fact that a north-easterly wind was blowing and the aircraft had drifted south-west before crash-landing about 50 miles from the scene of the combat. This extraordinary occurrence provided a striking example of the inherent stability in the flying characteristics of the R.E.8 – the aircraft had flown and landed itself without human assistance. 29
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    The R.E.8’s inherent stability regardless, few would dispute that overall it was a bad aircraft. How else describe a machine notorious for burning its crews alive? Statistics seem to bear this out since it sustained the second highest losses of all British aircraft on the Western Front, 661: a figure exceeded only by that for the Sopwith Camel at 870. 30 Debate becomes heated over the issue of which of all these dozens of First World War aircraft were good. Bar-room and internet forum discussions still take place between armchair aviators bickering over which was the ‘greatest’ aircraft of a hundred years ago. Given that few of these people are qualified to fly aircraft of that vintage, and even fewer have ever flown a Fokker D.VII or an S.E.5a or a SPAD S.XIII, the discussion is about as meaningful as those similarly impassioned debates about the greatest-ever Formula One car that regularly occur in pubs between stout and opinionated men who would never fit into one, still less be giventhe chance to drive it. In one sense there was no truly ‘great’ aircraft in the whole of the first air war, and for a very good reason. At the time, the development of aircraft was everywhere so rapid that almost none escaped becoming obsolete after six months’ active service. Thanks to production delays many a type was already outmoded even as the first squadrons took delivery of it, having been leapfrogged in the interim by a new enemy machine: a syndrome that would reappear in both the Second World War and the Cold War. A combination of materials (or engine) shortage, battlefield emergency and administrative incompetence obliged several aircraft such as the B.E.2c to plod on above battlefields long after they should have been grounded.
    The criterion for true ‘greatness’ surely has to reside in something more than a short-lived combat advantage, no matter how impressive that was at the time. A genuinely great aircraft must offer a more enduring quality such as longevity and all-round reliability (like the Douglas DC-3), utterly transcendent performance (like the Lockheed SR-71 ‘Blackbird’), overwhelming aesthetic beauty, like Concorde, or the capacity for constant uprating of its basic design like the B-52 bomber which, by the time the last one is scheduled to leave USAF service in 2040, will have racked up an astounding ninety years’ active service. None of the First World War’s aircraft comes close to measuring up to any of these yardsticks. That being said, a Sopwith Pup might still afford a skilled pilot immense pleasure even today, but the same could be said of a pre-1920 racing car without either machine qualifying for the timeless accolade of greatness.
    This is obviously not to deny that hundreds of WWI pilots often found a new type wonderful and exhilarating to fly, usually because it was so much better than the machine they were used to and which had increasingly been feeling