A Summer Bright and Terrible by David E. Fisher

emerge from it and would claw itself into the air, roaring
over their heads, turning and coming back around the course. Again and again
the gunshot would sound, and one after the other, the competitors would flash
around, bewildering the senses as they flew at very nearly two hundred miles an
hour!
    Though the competition was originally set up in
France, the winners usually came from England, Italy, or the United States. By
1922, when the race was won by England with a flying boat designed by Mitchell
and built by Supermarine, Mitchell had begun to realize that the necessary hull
design of a flying boat was aerodynamically inferior and added too much weight
to the airplane. He decided to sidestep the original intentions of M. Schneider
by designing a sleek monoplane, basically a land-based airplane, but fitted
with floats to fulfil the letter if not the spirit of the competition.
    He got to work immediately but wasn’t able to
get a machine ready for the following year’s race, which was won by a Curtis
flying boat from America. The organizers decided to run the races only every
other year, so that no competition was held in 1924. By the summer of 1925,
Mitchell’s revolutionary S.4 was in the air: a sleek monoplane, virtually a
flying engine mounted on a pair of floats. At 226 miles per hour, it
immediately broke the British speed record, but it crashed before the Schneider
event took place.
    The airplane nevertheless impressed His Majesty’s
government so much that they saw the future and provided funds for seven more
such aircraft, three to be built by Mitchell and four assigned to a design team
at Gloster Aircraft. The next Schneider race was in 1927, and by then the
Supermarine design, Mitchell’s S.5, was clearly the better. It dominated the
race, taking both first and second places; later that year it broke the world
speed record by nearly a hundred miles an hour, with a run at 319 miles per
hour.
    With enthusiasm high, work began immediately on
an improved design for the 1929 race. This time the airplane was constructed
entirely of metal (the previous winner had wooden wings) and it had a new
Rolls-Royce engine. Two of them were built, and once again they took both first
and second places. A week later, they set another world’s speed record, raising
it to 357 miles per hour.
    Mitchell’s group at Supermarine was ecstatic,
but His Majesty’s government was less so. Evidently feeling that good enough
was sufficient, it withdrew all support for another seaplane. At the last
moment, Lady Houston came through with a hundred thousand pounds, and the S.6
was built. The race itself was an anticlimax: Mitchell’s designs were so
clearly superior to anything else, both the Italians and the Americans gave up,
and no one else even showed up for the 1931 competition. The S.6 cruised around
the course at 340 miles per hour, winning the trophy for the third time in a
row and, by the rules, retiring it permanently.
    Everyone concerned with airplane development
now felt that England should sponsor another such race. Rut Dowding realized
that the emphasis on seaplanes was misplaced since the large floats they
carried would always render them inferior to land-based planes. He also
understood that the fantastic speeds achieved in the races meant that without
the floats, Mitchell’s basic design could produce a fighter plane much faster
than the Luftwaffe’s bombers. He argued that it was time to forget seaplanes
and trophy races and instead use the technical knowledge that had developed
during the years of competition to build faster fighter planes.
    Reginald Mitchell felt the same, but the Air
Ministry did not. In the fall of 1931 they issued Specification F.7/30,
inviting firms to design a new fighter to replace the Bristol Bulldog, a
traditional two-gun biplane fighter similar to those used in the Great War.
Seeing his chance, Mitchell submitted a monoplane based on his Schneider winners,
but in this competition it lost.