Paper Airplanes

 

Driving is serious business.
It requires a person's full attention
with hands on the wheel
at all times.

 

 

This is especially true
when transporting passengers,
as a driver's level of responsibility increases.

 

Of course the rules of the road
always demand even greater compliance
when the vehicle has left the tarmac
hundreds of feet below.

 

 

 

The first driver seems quite capable and earnest as he pilots his aeroplane, or in his case his Flugzeug, high above a military camp situated in a broad valley. His cap marks him as a soldier, in fact a German soldier, assigned to one of Kaiser Wilhelm's regiments. Despite appearances, this soldier is not a real aviator, as his aircraft is just a illusion painted onto a theatrical canvas.

 

The photo was taken by Gebr. (Gebrüder) Schmid, Truppenübungsplatz bei Münsingen ~ Schmid Brothers, Military training square near Münsingen. The airplane is a simple single-wing craft with a pair of bicycle wheels for the undercarriage. The birds-eye view puts the plane and pilot a few hundred meters above long rows of army barracks. The town of Münsingen is situated in southwest Germany in the district of Reutlingen of Baden-Württemberg. An army training base was established near there in 1895, though at the time the military command gave no thought to building an airfield. 

The back of the photo postcard is signed. I can't decipher the first phrase, but the pilot's name was Johanes Pruiz.(?)

 

 

 

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The second group of driver and four passengers are also soldiers flying above a military encampment. The quintet are not German but French, and sit crammed close together, as if riding a toboggan, in the narrow fuselage of a monoplane. The pilot wears a woolen stocking cap to keep his head warm, while his four companions wear their French kepi hats backwards to prevent losing them in the wind.

 

Their aeroplane is powered by a stout four cylinder engine and appears made of wood and canvas rigged with wire. Like the German Flugzeug, their avion is a clever Trompe-l'œi painting that makes them appear to be above a field of conical army tents that look like Lakota tepees. 

This carte postale was produced at the studio of another set of photographer brothers, the Moderne LEFEBVRE Frères, of Sissonne, a commune in the Aisne department in northern France. Sissonne is about 30 miles west of the Belgium border, near the Ardennes Forest, and like Münsingen, was also the location of an army base. The French military established it in 1892, but like their German counterparts, they never expected to need an airfield either. 

 

Only one of the five men signed the back, but fortunately he kindly left a date: 3/4/14—3 April 1914.

 

 

 

 

 

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To judge by the large number of photo montage postcards that used this same trick backdrop, the Lefebvre brothers' aeroplane earned a lot of airtime with hundreds of French soldiers who wanted a picture of themselves taking this plane up for a spin. Here a trio of soldiers relax over the same camp and this time the motor exhaust has cleared enough to see their comrades waving to them from the ground. The entire fake scene is identical except that the number on the tail rudder has changed from 3 to D23. 

 

The back of the card is filled with a complicated message that might be the result of three writers, but conveniently a date is clearly written: 17 Juillet 1914. The 17th of July, 1914, was just 11 days before the German invasion of Belgium followed by the attack on France.

 

 

 

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Back in Münsingen, the little Schmid aeroplane took flight operated by a uniformed chauffeur who transports a rakish gentleman in a civilian suit. The back of the postcard has lengthy message written in a language that I am not entirely certain is German. The date is partly scuffed, but I think it is 9.8(?).13 which is 9 August 1913.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Schmid brother's Münsingen Flugzeug was apparently a very reliable aircraft as it took three enlisted men up for a tour of their training camp.They were allowed to personalize the plane's fuselage with a slogan written in chalk. 

Flucht aus schwäbisch Sibirien
~
Escape from Swabian Siberia

 

The old name for this region of Baden-Württemberg, is Swabia, a place that has little to do with Siberia, but for young soldiers confined to the Münsingen army base, it must have felt like a Russian prison. They may have been disappointed that their little aeroplane was not able to reach the height of the zeppelin far above them in the sky. The clouds obscured it in the previous photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

History credits Orville and Wilbur Wright as making the first successful powered fixed-wing flights in December 1903. But it took them several more years before they produced a machine that was truly capable of pilot-controlled flight. It was not until early 1908 that they secured contracts from the U.S. Army Signal Corps and then the French government to develop their design into a practical machine. 

 

One important requirement was that the airplane have sufficient power to carry a passenger. Since the Wright brothers were talented bicycle mechanics, they quickly added a passenger seat to their Wright Flyer III and demonstrated it twice in May 1908 carrying Charles Furnas (1880–1941), one of their assistant mechanics from Dayton. Later that summer, Wilbur took one of their machines to Le Mans, France where he gave the first public demonstrations of powered flight in August 1908. 

 

A month later, his brother Orville began test flights with a second Flyer for the U. S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia. On 9 September 1908 he set a new record with a flight that lasted 62 minutes 15 seconds. That same day and three days later Orville gave rides on the Flyer to two army officers. But tragically on 17 September 1908 while taking Lt. Thomas Selfridge along as an official army observer, the Flyer's propeller broke at an altitude of about 100 feet (30m) causing the plane to crash. Though Wilbur was severally injured, he recovered. Lt. Selfridge however suffered a fractured skull and died from his injuries, the first passenger victim of an airplane accident. 

 

By 1906 several European competitors began matching the Wright brothers' achievements in powered flight, but it was not until 1909 that their collective aeroplane inventions became a viable aviation industry. It's amazing to me that in a very short time span, less than 6 years, humans literally broadened their horizons to produce so many varieties of flying machines giving reality to a real birds-eye-view, that it inspired countless people to have their photograph taken behind the wheel of a fake aeroplane. 

 

It was a novelty to be sure. For all I know, the Schmid and Lefebvre brothers also offered customers in their studios a different theatrical set that created the photographic illusion of driving a fancy automobile, sailing a grand yacht, or tooting the whistle on a locomotive. Yet until 1908, the very idea of operating your own aeroplane was an impossible folly to imagine. It must have been an awe inspiring experience to witness Orville and Wilbur operate their first Flyer. I think we see some of that wonderment in the expressions of these men behind their mock aircraft. The world added another dimension that people had never been imagined before. A world where UP no longer had any limits.

 

 

 

 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
where the weight of history is never light.