FASCINATING INTERVIEW WITH THE FOUNDER OF THE SOPWITH AIRCRAFT COMPANY

**usmc1855** · 10-19-2011 07:13

I found this a great, and enlightening read. Enjoy.

Sir Thomas Sopwith on Britain's Early Aviation Models

http://www.fathom.com/course/10701016/session4.html

This is from the Columbia University, Early Contributions to Aviation, Oral History Research Office.

Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-98159Sir Thomas Sopwith, winner of the de Forest prize for the longest flight to the European continent from England.

Question: The actual formation of your [Sopwith Aviation] Company was in 1912?

Sir Thomas Sopwith: Yes.

Q: What were your ambitions, your plans at that time? You formed the company with what ideas in mind?

Sopwith: We were designing aircraft for the Navy and it was entirely due to a very strong Royal Naval Air Service that had just been formed at the Admiralty that there was any British aircraft industry at all because the Army, who was by way of being the comparatively big spender in aviation, decided to make it a nationalized job and all their work was done at what is now the RAE--it was then the RAS, the Royal Aircraft Sector at Farnborough.
I think the British aircraft industry owes a very deep debt of gratitude to Murray Sutter, who was the first director of the Air Department, who was entirely responsible for supporting two or three of us in the very early days. It didn't take a lot of money, but it just made the difference.

Q: Could you perhaps take one of your First World War planes and tell me the problems involved in the design and the testing of it?

Sopwith: Well, we started the First World War; there were no fighters. The small, rather high performance--for their day--aircraft that we were building were really built as scouts, and from the scouts they developed into fighters literally from going up with revolvers and rifles to the day when we first of all learnt to fire through the propeller. Before we had the interrupter gears, we fitted deflectors on the blades and that developed into the interrupter gear firing. We then managed to shoot two guns instead of one through the propeller. In other words, we were adding to the firepower all the time. And it ended up, in 1918, with very efficient fighters indeed.

Q: The 1 1/2 Strutta was the first plane that could climb a thousand feet in a minute, is that right?

Sopwith: No, I don't think--it had the highest performance of any two seater at that time.

Q: Did you go out and test them yourself?

Sopwith: Oh, yes.

Q: Did you ever have any accidents in the testing?

Sopwith: No. Nothing serious.

Q: When you look back at those days, perhaps it seems easy, but I'm sure that in the testing of them there were so many problems that seemed tremendous at the time. Can you recall any of them?

Sopwith: We lived with those problems. One really didn't bother very much about them. We grew up with them.

Q: Just a constant development, rather than any strictly new innovation?

Sopwith: Well, we were always trying to improve efficiency. And I think we succeeded pretty well.

Q: How, for instance, did the 1 1/2 Strutta that you developed at the end differ from the ones that you made at the beginning, in efficiency?

Sopwith: Well, the 1 1/2 Strutta was the first two seater to have a proper rear gunner, with a swiveling gun, to protect the tail. And it happened to be very efficient, so the French took it over. They built about 5,000 in France.

Q: When the [First World] war was over, I suppose there was a doldrums period.

Sopwith: Oh, awful. I mean, the bottom dropped out of everything. There was literally no work. We tried to keep the factory going by building motorbicycles and all sorts of odd jobs, but it was quite impossible to keep a number of people employed, or even any reasonable proportion of them, on aviation. And so I decided to close down while we were still solvent. It's just as well we did, because if we'd hung on another few months I think we should have had nothing left at all.

Q: What about commercial aviation at that time?

Sopwith: Well, there wasn't such a thing. That began to grow soon after the end of the war, with converted war machines.

Q: But soon after, you joined with Hawker, is that right?

Sopwith: No, what happened is, we closed down the Sopwith Company--I told you about that--and we were still wedded to aviation. We started a new little tiny company, really, inside the old works, and we called it the Hawker Company so that it shouldn't be confused with Sopwith Company, which was in liquidation and obviously was going to take six months or so to clear up, or probably longer. We cleared it up all right but we started that, and we called it the Hawker Company after Hawker, who was our chief test pilot. I taught him to fly in the First World War. We thought we'd just keep it very small, but things happened and look at the damn thing now, it's grown into the Hawker Siddeley Group.

Q: The specialty was always military planes, was it?

Sopwith: Yes.

Q: And of course, the most famous of your planes was the Hurricane.

Sopwith: Yes. That was the kickoff of the Second World War.

Q: This was designed by--

Sopwith: Sidney Cam. He joined me in 1923.

Q: Could you tell me about the development of the Hurricane?

Sopwith: The Hurricane was the latest design for a single-seater fighter, just before the start of World War II. It was originally designed to have four guns in the wings. They didn't fire through the propellers; they fired just outside the props. Very shortly after the first few were produced, we doubled that up to eight guns and an alternative arrangement, still a little later, of four large caliber 30-millimeter guns, 20-millimeter guns.

Q: Do you recall anything of the testing of it performance-wise? I mean, as opposed to the--

Sopwith: Well, it was a little like the Pop. It was a nice airplane to fly, had no vices; everybody liked the Hurricane. We took a big chance, actually, with the Hurricane because we put it on the production line without waiting for an order, and if we hadn't gotten an order it would have cost us a lot of money. But actually, if we hadn't done that it is quite doubtful whether we could have won the Battle of Britain, because it was due to that that we had a great many Hurricanes available when they were vitally needed.

Q: This was a gamble on your part.

Sopwith: It was a gamble, yes. Oh, yes.

Q: How was the coordination with the government?

Sopwith: It was always very close and very friendly, but you know what long time officialdom can take when it doesn't know quite how to make up its mind.

Q: When did you first have any association with jets?

Sopwith: We built the first jet aircraft to fly in England. I remember going down with Whittle to see the original jet running in a tin shed, and so much fearsome contraption; it didn't look at all like the modern jet, but it worked all right.

Q: Do you recall some of the problems involved in that? There must have been so many.

Sopwith: Well, there were a lot of problems, but one thing that surprises me was that first the E-28-29, which we designed for the first Whittle jet, came out absolutely bang on its estimated performance, which I thought was pretty good. Because after all, all our previous experience had been with propellers when we had to switch over to a type of thrust we knew very little about. But it came out absolutely bang on--a very nice little airplane. That was the Meteor.

Q: Did the Meteor ever get into action during the war?

Sopwith: Just. I think there was one squadron of Meteors, there may have been two, that were in France just before the end of the war.

Q: Then it went on to break several world speed records.

Sopwith: Oh, yes.

Q: Could you talk a bit about the current and postwar status of this Hawker Siddeley Group? It is now the biggest group association in England, isn't it?

Sopwith: Oh, yes. But then we've got very big interests now. Aviation interests account for at least half the British aircraft industry, and we've got very large interests outside aviation altogether. We're building electric main locomotives. We've gone into Canada, into the steelmaking business in Canada. We had a good aviation business in Canada, but that's rather gone when the Canadian government decided in effect to put the knife through the Aero-Arab production problem.

Q: You were telling me over dinner about the air race in the United States, and how everyone was trying to build some kind of a plane or other in the area around. Would you repeat that story?

Sopwith: Well, this was pretty early on. When we were flying at Garden City we had a little field there, which we used as an aerodrome. I was trying to find where it is, but I can't find it--I think it's all houses now. But then there were seven or eight sheds that we kept our aircraft in, and I think every other shed, except the couple that we used, were occupied by amateur enthusiasts who were building their own aircraft on a sort of do-it-yourself principle. And they were nearly all Curtisses--copies of the original Curtiss biplane.
I remember the fellow next door to me, I think his name was Rogers, who had one of these machines with a six cylinder in line Roberts two-stroke engine, which if it ever did run on six cylinders gave quite a lot of power, but it never did run on six. So he took it out, put it on the chalks, started up every morning, and it would run on two or three and sputter all the rest. But one fateful morning all six went together. So he went and put the chalks away and he ran along the ground and he climbed until he was nearly vertical, and then of course stalled and fell over sideways and crashed.
We went over to pick him up, splattered in blood, and put him on a stretcher. On the way back to the shed, he turned around to me and he said, "Say, what's the matter with the old bitch? I kept pulling her up." Well, I mean, he just obviously hadn't the slightest idea of what he ought to do.

Q: Do you remember any of the other rather peculiar types of planes that people were trying to build at that time? In England, perhaps, there must have been many people trying--

Sopwith: Oh, yes, we had all sorts of mad people who tried to build ornifactors--flapping wing machines--and, of course, they were pretty safe because they never got into the air.

Q: Do you remember seeing any of these?

Sopwith: Oh, yes, I saw one or two of these.

Q: Sir Thomas, you had so many successful designs in your career and so many successful moments as a pilot too. Which one do you look back upon with the greatest feeling of satisfaction? Which ones do you take the greatest pride in?

Sopwith: Oh, I'm afraid one becomes rather nostalgic to have to answer a question like that. I think one automatically goes back to the World War I period, where development was so fast. We literally thought of and designed and flew an airplane in a space of about six to eight weeks. Now it takes approximately the same number of years.

Q: Going back to that period, would you talk about the rapid development of one of the models, the idea and the fast development of it, and the problems that the idea posed?

Sopwith: Oh, the problem was really basically first with sketches; from sketches it went to chalk on the wall. There was no--until about the middle of the war, there was no stressing at all. Everything was built entirely by eye. That's why there were so many structural failures.

Q: Which models particularly had the structural failures?

Sopwith: Well, we were very lucky. I don't think we had any, but I can think of a great number who did. We didn't start to stress airplanes at all seriously until about the Camel period.

Q: The Camel was used a great deal by Americans, wasn't it?

Sopwith: Yes.

Q: This was the first model that had stress analysis?

Sopwith: Well, it came in--I would say it was about Camel time that we started to take stressing seriously. And now, of course, every individual part of every airplane is so gone over by the stress watchers that any one of our several large aircraft companies employs several hundred stress people alone.

Q: Why was it at that particular time that you started it?

Sopwith: Because flying in those days was empirical. We weren't really structural engineers at all. We just flew by the light of nature. Some of us were lucky and some of us weren't.

Q: It was a constant gamble, in a way.

Sopwith: Oh, entirely.

Q: Conversely speaking, do you recall some disappointments in your career? Certainly among all the successes, there may have been some models, perhaps, that you had your hopes on?

Sopwith: I think the greatest failure that we produced was the machine that we built to fly across the Atlantic, which Hawker and McKenzie Grieve flew three-quarters of the way across, and then they had engine trouble and they had to land. But we had taken an infinity of trouble to make sure that they wouldn't have to ditch. Eventually we were knocked out by a failure in the water-cooling system, which blocked the passage of the water and the engine overheated and they had to land. Luckily they found a ship and ditched alongside of it. That was just before Alcock and Brown made the first proper nonstop flight across the Atlantic.

Q: Do you think of anything else, in the way of anecdote or story, background story, to any of the successes in your career?

Sopwith: Well, there was one stupid little one. Supposing you asked any pilot today how long it would take, with nobody helping you and the engine stationary, to get into the aircraft, start the engine, run along the ground and become airborne, because we boiled that down in America at the Boston meeting, to nine seconds. Now, that could not be done in a modern aircraft today. It would be quite impossible.
The only way we did that was flying one of the Wright brothers' airplanes, which, you remember, had two propellers, and the rules of the competition said that nobody must be nearer to the airplane than the distance of the wingtip to the pilot seat. Well, the distance from the wingtip to the propellers, for the Wright, was only three paces, and as long as the engine started first pull--and it did--the pilot could be ignored. He had to find his way into the aircraft literally as it was running along the ground, jump on board before it started, settle as it ran along the ground; then we got this thing down to nine seconds, which I think is going to take a lot of beating, ever.

Q: Do you have any comments about the future of aviation that you think would be interesting to make for the record?

Sopwith: Well, the future is just as fascinating now as it was 30 years ago. We're now in the supersonic era. We shall undoubtedly fly supersonically in a civil aircraft, but I hope not too soon because there are a lot of problems involved. But undoubtedly we shall all be flying supersonically--as we fly today between, say, London and New York--without thinking any more about it than taking a ticket to go on the steamer.

"The Reminiscences of Sir Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith," in the collection of the Columbia Oral History Research Office (31 leaves). Interview by Kenneth W. Leish, 1960.