The Flying Cavalier by Gilbert Morris

Author:Gilbert Morris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781441270481
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2006-06-01T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“No Man Can Shop for a Girl!”

Far beneath the flight of planes, the emerald earth rose and fell in undulant swells, much like an ocean, but only a brighter green. Lance leaned over the cockpit of the Nieuport and felt a mixture of pleasure and disgust. Below him the Fourteenth Squadron was spread out in three flights. Each flight was an inverted V with one plane in front and two behind. The pleasure came from watching them as they kept close formation. “At last they’re getting to where they can stay together,” he muttered. “It was like trying to drive a herd of bees across the desert when we first started formation flying.”

The disgust that followed this pleasure at the sight of the squadron moving along through the blue skies keeping station almost perfectly evaporated, and he looked back, his eyes narrowing, as he studied the squadron. They were all painted a dull olive and had the honor of being the first British squadron to come to full strength in France. But it was a sorry selection that made up the squadron. His eyes went from B.E.2s to Morane-Saulnier Parasols, Blériots, B.E.8s, one Avro 504, a Farman, and only one other Nieuport beside the one that led B-flight.

I wish they were all Nieuports, he thought with longing. Ever since he had been in France, he had tried to mount a squadron with top quality planes. But every squadron in France was screaming for better airplanes, and the excuses for planes Winslow received from England were not enough to fill the gap. He himself had shot down six planes, but the rest of the squadron together only accounted for three. Most of the pilots were all green. None of them had ever seen any real action, and some of them had less than two hundred hours of training. The planes were only a step or two removed from the early experiments of the Wright brothers in America. One of them actually looked like a flying bedstead, which is what the pilots actually called it.

Feeling the eyes of the flight leaders on him, Lance raised his gloved fist, pumped it twice, and then moved the stick so that the Nieuport banked and fell into a dive. There was something comforting about the roar of the nine-cylinder rotary engine. It only produced up to 110 horsepower, and the propeller, which was on a rotary, was bolted directly to the engine crankcase. Everything, including the cylinders, revolved around a stationary crankshaft. There was no carburetor, and the fuel was sucked from a hollow portion of the crankshaft. The smell of castor oil, which was mixed with the gasoline, was sickening even now at full speed with the wind whipping around his head.

There’s got to be a better way to build an engine than this, Lance thought. The engine had to be cut in and out with great frequency, and it sounded like an enormous hornet as it sped through the skies.

There were no Germans in sight, but Lance half rose from his seat, reached up, and pulled the .

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