venge on
Brooklands, for the new manager, Major Lindsay Lloyd, saw the
possibilities of aviation, and converted the centre of the track into an
aerodrome. There the Roes were welcomed, and there they produced and
flew their thirty-five horse-power tractor triplane. After a visit to
America they settled down to their work and had their revenge on the War
Office by producing the famous Avro machine, so named after its
inventor. In its original form it was a tractor biplane with a Gnome
engine of fifty horse-power, shortly afterwards increased to eighty
horse-power. It became, and has remained, the standard training machine
for the Royal Air Force. It is sufficiently stable, and yet sensitive,
and can fly safely at high or low speeds. It set the fashion to the
world in tractor biplanes. Mr. Roe had never believed in the front
elevators of the early American and French aeroplanes, with the pilot
sitting on the front edge of the plane, exposed to the air; nor in the
tail held out by booms, as it is in the pusher machines, with the
airscrews revolving between the body of the machine and the tail. For
his perfected machine of 1913 he had the advice of experts and
mathematicians, but the general design of the machine was his own,
worked out by pure air-sense, or, in his own words, by 'eye and
experience'. Early in 1914 the German Government bought an Avro
seaplane, which soon after was the first heavier-than-air machine to
make the voyage from the mainland to Heligoland. No machine designed in
the early days of flying can compare with the Avro. As it was in 1913,
so, but for improvements in detail not easy to detect, it remained
throughout the war. Its achievements in the field belong to the
beginnings of the war; it raided the airship sheds at Friedrichshafen,
and, handled by Commander A. W. Bigsworth, it was the first of our
machines to attack and damage a Zeppelin in the air. For fighting
purposes it has had to give way to newer types, but as a training
machine it has never been superseded, and even those aeroplanes which
surpass it in fighting quality are most of them its own children.

The early history of Mr. A. V. Roe has been here narrated, not to praise
him, though he deserves praise, nor to blame the Government, though it
is always easy to blame the Government, but to show how things are done
in England. His career, though distinguished, is typical; many other
pioneers and inventors, whose story will never be written,