WAR

a
General Sir Herbert Plumer, Commander of the British Second Army holding
the Ypres salient, cited Collishaw to their Lordships in the following terms: "An
excellent day's fighting—results remarkable. Lieutenant Collishaw of Naval Squadron
No.
10 did splendidly, as he always does."
it was ironic that the Rittmeister should have been brought down by the gunner
of an obsolete Fee when one of the best British fighters of the war was entering
the arena.
The Camel, next descendant of Sopwith lineage after the Triplane, was the
first British machine to be equipped with twin synchronized machine guns—
year after the Albatros. The guns, Vickers, were mounted atop the fuselage in
front of the cockpit, their breeches enclosed in
that gave the Camel its
name.
a faired metal cowling, the "hump"
Nearly 5500 of these hornets were built, and between July 1917 and the
Armistice, Camel pilots scored 1300 victories.
Although it carried a generous spread of plane surface—top and bottom
wings were equal in span and chord—the Camel was extraordinarily manoeuvrable.
This quality was chiefly the result of the combination of rotary engine and short
fuselage.
The short fuselage made for a short "moment"; the machine could turn or
loop on a small radius. The rotary engine imparted considerable torque, or
twisting action. A rotary is an engine that literally rotates—the propeller is bolted
to the engine and the crankshaft is bolted to the airframe. With the engine and
propeller turning together a considerable twisting force is
developed. In the Camel,
this force expressed itself in the tendency of the aeroplane, in
a right-hand turn, to
drop its nose abruptly and go into a spin. Conversely, in a left-hand turn, the
tendency was for the nose to rise. If the engine stalled on take-off the results were
usually serious, for the loss of power meant loss of flying speed with a consequent
loss of control effectiveness. Unless the pilot wrenched the controls hard the other
way to counteract the torque, the dead but still spinning engine would pull the
aeroplane around into a spin, and at take-off, there is no height in which to
recover from a spin.
This is not to say that the Camel was tricky or dangerous. It certainly was
no aeroplane to be treated casually. It had to be flown every minute in the air,
and no daydreaming. In the hands of any pilot of average competence, the Camel
Rotary engine — this one
being an 80 horsepower Lc Rh<
installed in a Sopwith Pup.
was a first-rate fighter; in the hands of an expert, it could out-manoeuvre anything
except the Fokker Triplane.
The standard synchronizing gear for Allied machines from the spring of 1917
to the end of the war was the Constantinesco gear or a variation of it. Constantinesco
was an industrial designer of Roumanian birth and British citizenship
whose specialty was hydraulic drills. Working with various armament experts he
had developed an excellent hydraulic system that could be fitted to any engine
and was simple enough as to be easy to maintain or repair. The engine itself
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