| Captain de Havilland had other interests
than aviation, and one of them was insects, notably butterflies
and moths. Moths, or most of them, fold their wings back
along their bodies when at rest, and de Havilland arranged
for his pH. 60 to do the same, so you could tow it on the
road behind a car, and keep it in an ordinary garage. All
the DH 60 then lacked was the dignity of a name. But surely
there was one ready-made! The Moth.
The Captain made the Moth's first
flight on February 22, 1925, and even he seems to have
been surprised at how nicely it flew. As was a remarkable
gentleman, Sir Sefton Brancker, not long after. Sir Sefton
was director of Civil Aviation, and he took the powerful
step of starting five government-sponsored flying clubs
and ordering a grand total of ninety Moths to equip them.
It was the beginning of private flying on any appreciable
scale in Britain or, indeed, the world. (The Taylor/Piper
Cub was still ten years in the future.)
The prototype Moth had (I think) a blue-painted
fuselage and clear-doped, gauzy, dragonfly-like wings, and
so did the first few turned out thereafter, but soon silver
was adopted as the standard finish, Moth-silver being a
kind of British parallel to Cub-yellow. The eThaust pipe,
which ran along the left side of the cockpit and burned
your left wrist if you weren't careful, was moved to the
right side-I know not why-where it burned your right wrist.
A little of the vertical fin was taken away and given to
the rudder to lighten the load on your feet, and the luggage
locker was moved to behind the rear cockpit, and that was
all. The Moth was now perfect.
Its performance might seem modest enough
by today's standards, but for a private airplane in the
1920's it was progress. The Cirrus Moth cruised at about
80 mph, with a rate of climb of maybe 500 feet per minute,
and a fuel consumption of four and a half gallons per hour.
All this was a giant step forward from the pitiful flutterings
of the ultralight airplanes of the Lympne trials. The Moth
in flight was very quiet and not uncomfortable, and the
purchase price of £830, while far from being within
the reach of all, was certainly within the reach of many.
You could operate a Moth for under a pound an hour, and
this modest expenditure, further reduced by the Government's
generous and enlightened subsidies to the flying clubs,
made flying intensely popular in no time at all. The Moth
was an extremely practical airplane and, more important,
it was quite reliable.
Its development continued steadily. Soon
there was the Cirrus II Moth with the engine lowered an
inch or two to improve the pilot's rotten forward view;
and the Genet Moth, with a rather uncertain 75-hp radial
engine of that name; and the Hermes Moth, with a new kind
of Cirrus uprated to a tremendous, breathtaking 105 horsepower.
But soon there came a problem. Owing to
the Moth's very success, the supply of war surplus Airdisco
engines and, therefore, of the Cirruses that were made from
them began to dwindle. Further, the company making the conversions
found the work not notably profitable and began to lose
interest. The Cirrus was a cornerstone of the Moth's success;
what was Captain de Havilland to do? Nothing for it but
to make his own engine, with Halford's help.
Although General Motors might disagree,
one of the quickest ways to develop an engine, both mechanically
and in the public's eye, is through racing, and this was
the101route de Havilland chose to follow. After his racing
engine had established itself, while putting out some 135
hp, he planned to manufacture it in a form derated to nearer
100 hp. A racing airplane would be needed. Quickly de Havilland
came up with D.H. 71, named Tiger Moth, but no relation
to our later heroine of the same name. Two D.H. 71's were
built in the traditional great secrecy. They were low-wing
monoplanes of the sleekest lines designed to have the smallest
possible cross section that could enclose de Havilland's
test pilot Hubert Broad, who fortunately was fairly narrow.
Halford's new engine was a pippin. For
its 135-hp output it weighed, at three hundred pounds, only
fourteen pounds more than the old Cirrus. The handling of
the D.H. 71 kept Hubert Broad busy, and it was not a notable
racing success, although one did capture a world speed record
in its weight class at 186.47 mph. And it did prove out
the new engine. De Havilland chose for the new powerplant
the name Gipsy, and the airplane thus powered became the
Gipsy
Moth. |
| With the 100-mph Gipsy Moth, the high
tide of success for de Havilland began to be a flood. His
company, which in 1924 employed but a few hundred people
and was capitalized at under £49,000, grew by 1930
to a business worth almost half a million pounds and employing
fifteen hundred people. Production rose from less than one
airplane a week to better than three a day. The Moth was
making de Havilland rich, and he was able to reduce the
machine's price progressively. By 1929 it was down to a
mere £650. Eighty-five out of a hundred private airplanes
in Great Britain were Moths of one persuasion or another.
When His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (now the Duke
of Windsor) purchased one, a Moth became absolutely the
thing to have, and the society glossies were full of pictures
of Sporting Characters and Bright Young Lady Pilots setting
off for weekends in the country in their 103 Moths. Any
kind of private airplane in England became, in general parlance,
"a Moth," in the same way that, later in the decade,
any small airplane in America was "a Cub." |
