![]() ![]() In production trim, this craft was powered by a normally aspirated Liberty engine with a twelve-cylinder Vee configuration. Late in World War I, a new biplane, the LePere type C-11 entered the inventory of the US Army Air Service. In this plane, Shorty flew to victory.Ĭaptain Schroeder’s high-altitude work commenced in earnest with a series of flights beginning in 1918. Schroeder and Mc- Cook’s engineers and technicians resurrected a moribund Vought VE- 7. In 1919, he was handpicked by his commanding officer to compete in a landmark New York-Toronto race. As early as 1914, Captain Schroeder had made a name for himself in air racing. He was an intense, wiry man with the soul of an explorer. ![]() Schroeder, known as “Shorty.” At six-foot-two, his physical appearance belied his nickname. The first of the high-altitude pilots at McCook Field was Capt. At McCook Field, predecessor to one of the world’s largest military research facilities (Wright-Patterson AFB, located about ten miles from the site of McCook), the earliest experiments in high-altitude flight took place. Fortunately for England, German crews also suffered frostbite and hypoxia, or oxygen hunger, were constant companions of the zeppelin crews, though some primitive oxygen devices were used.īy 1918, the US War Department was well along in creation of the Air Service Engineering Division and its Flying Section, a flight-test organization, at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio. ![]() Few fighters, and even fewer pilots, operated well at that altitude. German zeppelins, ghosting in from the fog and clouds of the English Channel, had presented the first challenges of flying and fighting at high altitudes, about 20,000 feet. What was clear was that military airplanes, especially fighters, were going to have to fly higher than they usually did during World War I. Seventy years ago, none of this was well understood. ![]()
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