THE SLASHING RAIN had stopped. A largely leaden sky tramped slowly by, revealing golden linings full of temptations to fly. The 1917 Bristol Fighter was there and serviceable, the bodies eager to swing the prop, an empty airfield and nothing else to interfere. A perfect formula, excepting the pilot's lack of preparation.
The Brisfit stood proudly, distinctly British, rocking gently in the breeze. I saw it clearly, perhaps for the first time. A beautiful scimitar, highly varnished propeller with serious brass leading edges heading a curious oval-shaped radiator, with finely-crafted Venetian blinds. Huge cowls in battleship grey cover the most glorious example of Rolls-Royce V12 early combustion engineering. Long black exhausts flank the boxy fuselage, strangely ovoid in plan and elevation. The horizontal stabiliser moves for trim and is surmounted by the prettiest, surely too small, but racy-looking teardrop-shaped fin and rudder. The whole character fuselage is suspended between a pair of enormous thin wings, separated by eight substantial interplane struts. The gear looks somewhat narrow for the wingspan and the tubular steel hoops under the lower wing look ominously as if ready for an inevitable groundloop.
The cockpit sports a nifty little aero screen surmounted by a telescope sight for peering at the enemy. The top wing is crowned with a nautical-looking compass. The cockpit coaming is finished with a substantial leather roll, presumably to stop the pilot breaking a fingernail or being scalped. The panel is dominated by the cocking handles of a fixed Vickers machine gun, which passes through the main fuel tank, the V of the twelve cylinders, a hole in the radiator and thereafter avoids putting shells through the prop by means of an ingenious hydraulic interrupter gear, named after a Romanian gent by the name of Constantinescu.
The wooden dashboard is scattered with exquisite instruments, one of which tells your time, another your height, another your speed and the rest whether your motor is happy or complaining. A viper's nest, posing as a 'fuel selector panel', looks firmly designed to catch the unwary. More like a Victorian petrol experiment in serpentine brass, with a nickel-plated air-pressure relief valve, obscurely scripted engravings indicate this myriad mess of little brass cocks and levers. Surmounting the mystery is a splendid brass fuel pressure handpump with a wooden walking-stick grip, close enough to the cockpit coaming to take the back off your sheepskin gloves.
The pilot is seated on top of an auxiliary fuel tank, in a wicker half-Fortnum & Mason hamper Mark 1 made for the intermediate set of buns. God knows how one got in with the period sheepskin leggings and three-quarter-length coat. With suitable cord bindings and leather straps, the stick and rudder are Bentleyish in construction, as indeed are the throttle, mixture, advance and retard. The trim lever operating the stabiliser is a hefty piece of kit, which would not look out of place in a 1920s' steam locomotive. The radiator shutter lever is equally quaint but effective.
Behind is the gunner, situated in the middle of a rotating Scarff ring with a highly pivotal Lewis gun and its ingenious Norman vane sight. He sits comfortably on a plank of wood, which in turn straddles a reserve ammunition box--battle damage being of minor concern.
After ten years of meticulous restoration work, tramping the world to find the right bits, countless debates to progress the project and continuous assessment of each fine incremental step toward flight readiness, she was now finally ready for me and I was not ready for her.
Perhaps it was the sense of relief that a torrent of hard-earned money had temporarily stopped flowing into this aviation monument... possibly the realisation that I could give an accurate costing of each constituent part of the aircraft and recall each step of the complex negotiations to