Air travel stripped down to the nuts and bolts

Boeing 747? Airbus A380? Tiny, both of them, compared with a plane that was seriously proposed but sadly never built: the Saunders-Roe P192 Queen.

“She is 318 feet long, has a wingspan of 313 feet, weighs 440,000lbs and carries up to 1,000 passengers,” writes Jonathan Glancey.

P&O, alarmed at the way aviation was eating into its core long-haul passenger market, contemplated ordering five of these five-storey flying boats. Conveniently, the craft could begin its journeys on P&O’s home turf, or at least water, in Southampton – and passengers could enjoy the grand dining room as they flew, slowly but magnificently, halfway around the world.

The watery way to Sydney sounds tantalising: “On the passage to Australia, the aircraft will call at Alexandria, Karachi, Calcutta, Singapore and Darwin.”

As you may have noted in the week that Qantas celebrated its centenary, long-haul aviation took a different route – with land-based planes, ideally flying nonstop, the order of the day when the Australian carrier gets back to international business. But Glancey’s formidable new book, Wings Over Water, takes travellers back to an era when, for many aviators, water was the natural starting point for an air journey.

He tells the story of the Schneider Trophy, “the world’s greatest air race” – which was announced in 1912, just nine years after the Wright Brothers’ first successful powered flight. 

The aim of the young, rich Frenchman, Jacques Schneider, was “to encourage a new generation of high-speed civil seaplanes and flying boats that, to him, made more sense than airliners flying over land and cities”. By spurring competition for the art nouveau Schneider Trophy, and more particularly the generous cash prizes, he aimed to encourage long-term thinking about aircraft design.

The races themselves pitted American, British, French and Italian engineers and aviators against each other. Their battles had many military spin-offs, including the Supermarine seaplanes which morphed into the Spitfire – powered by a near-miraculous engine, which now has a book to itself: Merlin.

To get deeper into the nuts and bolts of aviation, Graham Hoyland spent a year taking apart the story of the Merlin and putting it back together in a form that roars beautifully from the very start: “The story of the aero engine is as rich and strange and wonderful as anything found in the science and art of the Renaissance.

“In just 50 years driven by two world wars and intense national competition, piston engines increased from a couple of horsepower to several thousands. In doing so they realised the eternal dream of humanity: the surreal experience of flight.”

The Rolls-Royce Merlin was initially an engineering catastrophe, prone to overheated self-destruction or random shut-down; neither trait is convenient when flying. But trial, error and imagination created a supercharged engine that could be mass-produced.

More than 80,000 Merlins were built, initially to power the Spitfire. “The Battle of Britain was fought on the production lines as much as in the skies,” writes Hoyland.

Later in the Second World War, they powered the Lancaster bombers that led the Allies’ retribution: “The incendiary bombs that turned Dresden into an inferno were lofted into Germany’s night sky by Merlins.”

After the war, some Lancasters were kitted out with cabins and became Lancastrians – used by Qantas and BOAC (now part of British Airways) to launch a joint service between the UK and Australia. The Merlin powered a derivative airliner, the Avro Tudor, which gave the buccaneering Freddie Laker his flying start. But by the time the great airline entrepreneur democratised transatlantic aviation, Laker Airways was flying wide-bodied jets – from Gatwick, not Southampton Water.

To get a Jumbo jet aloft, calculates Hoyland, 116 Merlins would be needed. The never-built Saunders-Roe Queen was designed to use a mere two dozen Rolls-Royce, according to Glancey.

Yet perhaps propeller planes taking off from water have a future after all. In the 21st century, seaplanes are alive and well in some parts of the world, and at the forefront of technological innovation: a year ago, Harbour Air of Vancouver announced the successful flight of the world’s first all-electric commercial aircraft. 

Meanwhile, as 2020 continues its turbulent way towards Christmas, you may wish to treat yourself or someone dear with the inside stories of how aviation was propelled from flimsy machines made of wood and canvas to mighty airliners carrying hundreds of people thousands of miles.

Merlin by Graham Hoyland (William Collins, £20)

Wings Over Water by Jonathan Glancey (Atlantic, £20)