Inside A British Bristol Scout WW1 Airplane I THE GREAT WAR Special

[Music] i'm indy neidell and this is another exciting episode of the great war on the road now today we're at stole mary's aerodrome in Essex in England which is the best preserved World War One aerodrome in Europe and we're going to talk about this plane behind us and by we I mean this gentleman next to me mostly now could you tell everybody out there who you are and what you do okay my name's David Bremner and over the past 15 years we've been researching and then rebuilding the Bristol Scout aircraft that my granddad flew in the eastern Mediterranean in 1916 and here it is now can you tell us about the Bristol's the the Bristol Scout in general before we get into your specific story okay so the riskless car is not a particularly well-known airplane which is a shame because it was actually a very important part of military aviation development it was available right from the beginning of the war there were just a couple given to the RFC you said they actually ordered they came out in July of 1914 before it first flew in February 1914 designed in basically in late 1913 first flew in February 1914 and it was one of two aircraft that were considered to be for the first time the best best aircraft in the world it was the first time that the British had produced an aircraft design that was better than anything else in the world how they better than the Blair e Allison yeah yeah yeah up to that time the French had been absolutely preeminent they had the best airframes they had the best engines they had the best pilots and while they still had the best engines and the best pilots this together with a sockless tabloid were regarded as being no better than any other French airframe design now we hear more about sup wits than Bristol's today now why is that probably because sup was from day one were always better at PR and marketing the Bristol aeroplane company was a family affair it was started by the White Fang he pointed out something about the white family here on the propeller okay the signature here is Sir George white he is the the current baronet his great-grandfather started the British British laney aeroplane company in 1910 and it was very much a philanthropic exercise he was extremely rich he'd set up all the the the tram system in in Bristol and in York and London and Dublin and so on so he was a very rich man and he recognized that Britain was going to need an aircraft industry so when he set the British and colonial airplane up company up it it was set up on a proper sort of company lines unlike most of the others which were which are set up by enthusiastic people like Handley page and shorts and soft with and and so on ok and it said that they that the family invested half a million pounds into the British income I mean in pounds at that time pounds at that time and I can't do the conversion to today it's more than that it's a lot more than that before they saw a penny back wow oh wow that was so real labor of love yes it was and of course what it meant was that we had a nascent aircraft industry at the beginning of the war which we would not have done otherwise otherwise and but it's funny that you know just because of the PR of act I mean we today still hear much more about the soft wits than the Bristol's yes and of course to some extent the the Sopwith aircraft became more important later on in the war Sopwith Pup the Sopwith Camel are the stuff of legend because there were so many more pilots flying them later on in the war the Bristol fighter was was revolutionary it later on in the war but but no the Bristol Scout it was was was the best aircraft probably the first 18 months of the war and if it's if this went into production in 1914 how when did they stop producing this I think in late 1916 okay and what kind of numbers were they looking about 374 total but because that they didn't really know when it was never designed as an armed aircraft I some people say was as a sport as a racing machine okay my personal view is that they always had in mind the army stipulation for a fast single-seat reconnaissance machine for for tactical reconnaissance and that's what this was desired this specification if you like that this was designed around but it was always designed as an unarmed machine okay because they didn't they didn't realize they were gonna need no Hale's to have a war sure and well yeah yeah but I mean that what they thought was that that the aircraft at that time was so unnerved not you really couldn't throw them about too much and so you're fighting aircraft was going to be a pusher with the engine at the back yeah a pilot in the middle and a gunner at the front so that he could he could aim the gun at the target what this aircraft proved was that it was possible to aim the whole aeroplane because it was so new verbal clearly you had to be able to go fast enough to catch up with the NR airplane but with this airplane it was it was it was the first aircraft that was fully aerobatic and so you you you could sensibly try to aim at another enemy airplane and so the pilots who got hold of them initially started flying with a pistol unbelievably they then tried with a handheld rifle so they must have been holding that the stick between their knees and China but they very quickly realized that wasn't much good and so they devised any number of different experimental engine mounts on the bristol scout sometimes they mounted them you you needed to be able to get out the butt of the gun to change the drum and also to clear jams so it you you needed the bat mounted fairly close to the to the to the cockpit yeah but they tried to aim the aircraft that aim the bullets going outside the propeller here of course because and then of course now you're flying here and the bullets are going off out there which that wasn't very easy yeah having said that one of the one of the exponents of that was was Elana Hawker who's a very famous First World War ace and he got the first VC for aerial combat in a Bristol Scout with a gun doing exactly that I think he caught three Germans Wow without on the hop synchronization yeah and just sort of firing out sideways I think they they don't know they weren't expecting that at all now in terms of like like speed how would this rank compared to a German flame like the I'm decorating it would have been faster I think I can't do an exact comparison but I think it would have been faster the eindecker wasn't a particularly good aircraft the only thing I do know is that my granddad when he flew this aircraft he's only air-to-air combat was with a nine Decker and he made a first pass at it and then when the eindecker dived away he couldn't keep up okay so clearly in a dive the eindecker was faster now let's walk around the plane a little bit and once you tell us about your grandfather's actual experience and then we can talk about rebuilding the plane so he he served in in which front where was he serving my granddad served in the eastern Mediterranean he was posted to number two wing RNAs that were based at Imbros off the Gallipoli coast one of the things that always makes me admire him is the fact that for us in a modern light aircraft if we want to cross the English Channel which is about 15 miles we take all sorts of preparations we have immersion suits and life jackets and all this stuff yeah well every flight he made involve crossing 15 miles of water to get to Gallipoli Wow how long was he at the front did he he he went out in December 1915 just after they had decided to evacuate okay on his seventh operational flight he was actually shot down over the Gallipoli Peninsula in of weather aircraft and had to land on the Cape Helles Peninsula just as the evacuation was taking places is on the very evening of the final evacuation so I don't think he was flavor of the month because of course as you know they had to keep it all top-secret so he describes how he he he had to land and they they moved the aircraft into a revetment but all the while they were being shelled by six-inch Turkish and amazingly there's an aerial photograph taken which shows the aircraft in their event with the six inch shells that he was dodging and then he was on the second-to-last boat off and then when he got back to him brass again they said we want to put you onto the onto the riskless car which was the the top machine at the time it was the it was absolutely the bee's knees and then where did he go after Gallipoli one of the things that I've never quite understood about the the Gallipoli campaign is that the RNAs as far as I know remained a Tim Bruce for the remainder of the war okay certainly he was he was involved in in gunnery spotting and bombing and submarine hunting and all sorts of different things based attenborough's from the evacuation the middle of January right way through to the end of May and then he had to fly this aircraft 90 miles across water to they are not a fascist in support of the the Salonika campaign because by that time the Bolivarian campaign bigger the Bulgarians had occupied Macedonia and Tasos was a Greek held island from which they could attack the Bulgarians and so that's how they took the water the Bulgarian so how long did he serve on in Salonika and he was there for only about well till till about August when he like so many others got malaria dysentery or whatever and was invalid at home okay and at about that time this particular aircraft which was his favorite was being sent for major refurbishment on HMS Ark Royal and he took the opportunity to help himself to some of the the bits as souvenirs so in his workshop after he died we found the stick and the rudder bar and the Magneto and when did you think hey I want to rebuild grandpa's plane how did the how did this process come to be this is my my colleague Theo Wilfred who grew up on Biggles books and had always wanted to fly a First World War aircraft and he knew that the only way we'd ever be able to do it would be to build his own okay so it was he that suggested we look into it and it took us five years of research and I had to do this calculation every single time that the whole thing took 13 years okay to research it and then build it and now this isn't just a rebuilt Bristol Scout it is a rebuild your grandfather's Bristol scale correct so there's a whole lot of parts on this that are either unique or very rare so most of the Bristol Scouts had an oil tank yep that they had an oil tank here on the early right through this yeah yeah for sure yeah yeah please don't ya okay and but having said that we're forever dropping screwdrivers to it there all sorts of little holes and things all over the place yeah on the whole please don't know they had an oil tank here and it didn't feed the oil tank well enough so they moved it up to here okay and the tail end of the first batch was built like this with nothing behind the the the pilot yeah and then when they got the order for the next batch of scouts they've they built a little cupboard here I don't know what the cupboard was used for it was too small even for a cap I think but but the Volkhov have a little cap so so that was a factory modification that's fairly unique for 1264 okay the armament that's fitted to this aircraft was fitted let's go around to the key okay that's fine yeah we'll just we'll walk around and check out the gun it's beautiful plain okay so the RNAs did a homemade mount for the Lewis gun here you'll see it's just bolted onto the side of the fuselage so that you can get at it in flight you can change a drum if you want to it's probably not a very good idea because it's an unsynchronized guy I can I was just looking at that and think so on the original aircraft you had a strip of fabric on the propeller to stop the splinters coming off in your face right okay it's one of the favorite talking points when keep people come to look at this airplane and they said oh gosh you know he must have been barking mad or no very brave or something but it actually wasn't it wasn't quite as quite as brave as you might think because even the synchronizing the early synchronizing gear was very unreliable maximal man died by shooting his own propeller okay still Halas you'll have in some of the guns you'll have minor variations in occasion the gun and the cell which will throw off the whole synchronization and you're gonna shoot the propeller current yeah yeah absolutely and the other benefit of this of course is that you get the full 500 rounds a minute whereas with a synchronized gun its firing a lot slower so when you've only got a second or a half a second you know when you're actually on target yeah that that rate of fire is critically important and in a granddad emptied a drum of ammunition at a nine Decker yes and he obviously survived because I'm the living proof fair enough so that that was a no a local variation by the RNAs the other thing that they did was to mount bombs under the front of the fuselage because he did actually quite a lot of bombing with this aircraft and we have some that we have a look we do have some we've got a couple of months there's a famous British children's TV program called blue Peter and the quote foam that he is here is one I prepared earlier because they do know the things that you can make on TV for children and they know so here's one I prepared earlier so the bombs here are just on the floor at the moment but in practice they were they were mounted just under here yeah and they cut a hole in the bottom of the fuselage for grandad to aim through aha we haven't got the hole because we think it's quite oily enough inside there without without Eddie I think extra yeah what's the spray like when you're actually flying this it's not that bad okay clearly if you're flying for long periods of time I'm sure it must have been them quite a distressing and certainly you know the stories that's why everybody wore a silk scarf was to keep the goggles clean yeah because you absolutely cannot fly this airplane without goggles because of the spray well because of the wind rush oh yeah of course how cold is it when you're I mean is that's why you got the whole gear yeah I mean for what I do which is quarter an hour flying just at low level it's not particularly cold but most of granddad's combat sorties were done at eight nine ten thousand foot and for sure that would have been really and how how what kind of distance K what kind of range would would this plane have how long and how far could you fly okay well he as I say that the he flew certainly for two hours at one point that's one above the the sorties he'd been in 1914-15 that's a fairly it's not too bad that they always wanted more later variants of the of the scout had had more bigger fuel tanks to try and give it more range but he flew the ninety miles across the water which are always things but it's not something I would like to take a minute Sarah played and that took him about an hour and a half and how often do you take this this your plane I suppose probably a half a dozen to a dozen times a year something like that and takes a bit of organizing because you need three to two people on our ground crew to get it started and the wind conditions have to be absolutely perfect and all that kind of stuff now is that a rotary engine this is a rotary engine you can see here when I when I turn that the whole engine rotates and this was the this was actually that this concept of a rotary engine was what a VA ssin going in 1908 okay up until that point you were using usually water-cooled engines that were heavy and this gave you a combination of good power at slow speed this only does maximum of 1200 rpm and so it enables you to turn this wonderful beautiful great big propeller very slowly that that's very efficient and so that that was what made flying practical in 1908 and it stayed really the sort of the best format for an aircraft engine right up to 1918 so but does this pull to one side like rotary engine yes it does you don't notice it at under normal flying with sort of fairly shallow banks and so on where you would notice it is when you do a like a vertically banked okay and that's when it starts to pull this is a relatively low pile this is an 80 horsepower one so the rotating mass isn't too huge but when you get to something like the Sopwith snipe with a 230 horse rotary engine then the effect is much more marked and how how how I want to talk about how wind affects it like the takeoffs and landings how strong a wind can you say I can't fly in this today the critical thing actually is the turbulence because when you when you land it you have to land exactly in to win and if you get low level turbulence and know the aircraft's being rocked about like that as you're coming down that's the the critical thing but having said that I certainly wouldn't fly in winds are more than about 15 miles an hour okay and you do check yes I do remember grandad certainly flew in wind conditions that were stronger than there he had but yes and they had quite a lot of spare aeroplanes in case he bent one yeah which we don't just get the line okay so and this map what is this okay the map is the one that my granddad used to fly the 90 miles from Imbros too fast and there's a little red dot that the little red dot is the only information he had about the landing field that's it if you've been prepared about two days before it had just been cleared of the worst of the stones and that was the only information he had it's funny because we saw when we talked about flying on the Western Front people don't realise that you didn't have lots of navigation okay you'd have to fly along railway lines and try to read the names of the stations to find out where you were and you didn't have that here okay girl did people get lost quite often I mean I think what they did it certainly my granddad's case that they they flew non-combat missions to start with to familiarize themselves with the area in some ways here with islands it's not quite so bad because you know that you can tell the difference between the blue bits and the sort of dark bits it even helps yeah well yeah not so good at night but but otherwise it now this stick is a bit longer than the standard it is we only discovered this two years ago my granddad was my height I'm six foot three and it for me it's a very very tight fit inside the cockpit as it was for my granddad and when we took the the grip off to get it repaired we found that he'd extended it by two inches to help his fiscally his knees all right yeah because it's a I mean it's not incredibly roomy for me and I'm not astonishing and actually it's one of the reasons why the Scot was never developed into a full-blown fighter with synchronising year because that cockpit is just so small there wasn't room for a permanently fixed gun with no ill synchronizing gear they did try but it just it was so crowded in there it was never going to work I'm trying to picture myself actually like you know trying to fight that's it's really difficult yeah you know you don't really realize it till you're actually sitting in the plane though and I was I mean I'm about average height now but a hundred years ago I'm taller than a lot of it yeah we haven't let you use the cushion actually there is a cushion I have to take it out and again this is advice I got from granddad's log book because he or log book memories because that was what he found that he had to do that for his knees to clear the bottom of the instrument panel here and we've forgotten to put the cushion back in view so it was slightly easier but it's still it's not straightforward at all and I can see on the board here their date of dispatch July 30th 1916 correct well that's yes engine number and all those things yeah probably number yeah yeah that's very cool and I like the like the instruments yeah all of those instruments are genuine first world war instruments dating from the correct period and that that would have been supplied to the RNAs so so far as we know we don't have no photographs of Charles 64 the instrument panel but but we think that's about as accurate as it would have been okay so how can people find out more about what you've done and how you've done it okay well for the last four or five years we've been followed by film makers team Saunders who's BAFTA nominated and he's now completed a TV film which he's he sold to Greek TV to American TV and it's available from his website either as a DVD or as a Vimeo download I know I'm biased but I think it's a really good film and I know people who who watched the film say that it's a tearjerker as well because we made quite a journey with the aircraft last year we were able to take this aircraft to the very same airfield on fascist that grandad was and I flew it from the exact same spot exactly a hundred years after he did and then a week later we took it to the Somme and I flew it over the the TPL Memorial and the Newfoundland Memorial on unfortunate on the 2nd of July the 1st of July the wind wasn't suitable Howlin but I flew it over there on the 2nd of July and I've always wanted to do that because my granddad's first cousin who I'm named after was fatally injured in that first assault at Beaumont Hamel Wow he was only about a hundred yards from the UN and regiment so he's actual trenches preserved in the Newfoundland park and I was able to fly over the top and just talking about it now it still sends chills down my spine thinking about what he did well will will give links so that people can actually watch this themselves in our description so you guys can all look down and see that thank you very much for taking the time to show us around it's an amazing plane and it's amazing what you've done to recreate it and everyone out there if you'd like to see our episode about the evacuation of Gallipoli you can click right here over this gentleman for that do not forget to Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and we'll see you soon

Channel: The Great War

Views: 201,944

Keywords: History, History channel, Documentary, Footage, Great War, First World War, World War I (Military Conflict), WWI, 20th Century, 1914 to 1918, British Pathé, Indy Neidell, Wilhelm II, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Winston Churchill, Mediakraft, Original, Battlefield 1, Aviation, WW1 aviation, biplane, flying aces, Bristol Scout, Bristol Aeroplane Company, 1264, David Bremner, Stow Maries Great War Aerodrome, RFC, RNAS, Royal Air Force

Id: mbGqz7045hs

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 28 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/jasta6]

I'm surprised this hasn't been posted yet. I'll gladly do it!