>> for our complete schedule two to c-span.org. >> each week american art facts takes you to museums to learn about american history. located in virginia beach, virginia, the aviation museum is one of the largest collection of artifacts from world war i and world war ii. we went through the aviation hangar to learn about pilot training during the war. this is the first of a two-part series.

robert powell: welcome to the virginia beach aviation museum. i am boom powell. i will explain a few things we have. the museum has a complete collection, and it is about 60 airplanes here. we have restorations coming and going and others he maintained as time goes on. i am standing in front of one of the oldest airplanes here at the museum. this is a 1911 wright brothers flyer, the right model b. t is not the same as the kitty hawk airplane. there is an act elevator. the engine is offset. there is a chain drive changing to propellers.

the wright brothers were geniuses with coming up with the secret to flight was not be able to be stable and not do anything but to be able to maneuver and have a little bit of an stability in the airplane. they came up with many developments that are now standard. with the pitch of the airplane, the elevator moved up and down. they did develop a rudder. you have to roll the airplane to turn it. their solution was simple, take a box structure and twisted. his called wingwarp. liquid cooled fuel tank up on top, very early stages. in a few minutes, we will go up to the other hangar where we have a curtiss pusher built the same year as this airplane was. you will see the big

differences especially when we talk about the ailerangs. the wright brothers were very exact. they were involved with the patent against curtiss for his invention, claiming it infringed on their patent. the rights had taken the airplane over to europe in 1908, demonstrated it there, and europeans who had flown efore were amazed. as the war, as world war i began, the startup of the thing, the u.s. looked upon it as their development, very quiet to what had been going on in europe recently. the wright brothers fight in he courts. the u.s. government bought the right patent for the flying machine for one dollar, and

after that, the patent flight for wing warping went away. and then it began from there on in. this particular airplane, it was a tight like this. this is a replica. they could fly coast-to-coast. there was a big contest with a lot money involved for the first airplane to make it in 30 days or less. it didn't make 30 days by the way. it was sponsored by a fizzy grape product. he was provided with spare parts and his mother and wife went across the united states as he went through. flying was very difficult and rough. you could not go very far. you were subject to weather and wind. and there was always the crash landings. there were as a few of those things. he didn't make it in 30

days. they say, keep on going, we will pay your expenses. he got to santa monica california, literally taxied his airplane into the pacific ocean. when he finally got there, the only original parts of the airplane where the two wing struts and the elevator. the rest of the airplane had been completely replaced at the crossing. that we have taken a look at the wright flyer, let's go back. the hangars to either side, we will see probably in a later show, the world war ii section. we will go back to the world war i section where we have a curtiss flyer from 1911. let's look at aviation as a develops throughout the end of world war i. now we are in the world war i hangar in virginia beach aviation museum. kind of continuing the sequence as we go through the

development of aviation. we look at the curtiss pusher airplane. curtiss invented the ailerons, a big difference. i was sure you how it works. the difference is significant, and is the first to land and ake off of a ship. it is rather open, the pilot has a simple seat in front of it. there was a wheel well in front of him. it is to elevators. the first is the canard, up in front, and the other is well behind and it picks up like a normal elevator. the problem with the canard is they are very difficult to fly. the real point that counts is the fact that has the curtiss aileron on it.

they were the same principle in between. curtiss did not know whole lot. he was learning as he went along. one of the things he did was putting the ailerons between the wings. he did do it, and it worked out. it was exhausting to fly. a lot of these were. they did not understand control harmonization. in other words, you are flying this airplane, you are doing it constantly in pitch with your hands around. you can see how the structure was. they did have fuselages, things going on from here. and this is the way many airplanes were up until world war i began. let's go a look at the bleriot. bleriot was one of the few ombat airplanes that started

the wing warping principle. the french had eight training airplanes. the open structure, the carpeting along the side is very realistic. the observer in the back, called them observers with fire and people in the air. it was impossible to break eight big machine gun fire over the propeller. it has got a tail skid on t. nearly all world war i airplanes used a skid. some of our replicas have a ail on it. a normal type elevator, the big thing to watch is this is what wing warping looking like. fairly ineffective, this was the state of the war in

1915. let's go take a look at another curtiss, compare that to the curtiss pusher we looked at before. we will look at the famous jenny, which became a standard trainer all the way through. people in the cockpit with control. the particular one is a true jenny. it is one in the world war i collection, a restoration rather than a replica or reproduction. the painting on this, we stay local all the way through. this is the first airplane that landed in the big field on the orth side of james what became an air force base. this is the first army air force plane to land there. the jenny is on a better biplane structure. the cockpit is now enclosed, the fuselage is now enclosed. there is still a lot of wires on these early airplanes.

it is one of the things they had to do to keep the structure rigid. an old joke was you took a pigeon with you, you would store it somewhere inside the wing and let the pigeon go. if it escaped, you are missing a wire. it gets its name from the designation jn4, and pilots tarted calling it jenny. very popular, it was a trainer, then it became a trainer not only for the military but civilian pilots as well. when you read the history throughout the roaring 1920's and the barnstorm going through, this is one of their favorite planes. after world war i, many work available as surplus aircraft, and they were flying all over the place. lindbergh had one trying to earn an extra dollar. fully controlled, one can start

-- the instructor sits in one cockpit, the student in the other. you had to holler over the wind have the person. you can see they are close enough together that the guy in fact to lean forward and actually cap the shoulders of the guy in front. there wasn't the -- there was a device invented that was nothing more than a garden hose with a funnel on one end for the instructor to talk into. instead of earphones, another one for the student, but the student couldn't talk back. it was better than none. instructors would throw it into the slipstream, that would really get your attention. this is the way they trained into the 1930's using the jennys.

that wasn't the only way. we looked at the big bleriot over here, we have a smaller bleriot over there. the americans that learned to fight in france, later on, the early american air service guys trained with the french. the french method is they put you in a little bleriot with the wings tapped out and would let you run up and down. the second training flight, they give you more wind and more engine, you would hop up and down the field. take off, get airborne, do some turns, land on the final side. turn you around, do more. when you are ready for the big day, you are talking to your instructor on the ground, pass you on the shoulder and goes, bonne chance, you make your real first solo flight.

you can see where they considered the dual control ethod kind of sissified. to back to the war, this is not really a warplane except as a trainer. it trained a lot of americans before they went over and became popular throughout the 1920's and 1930's. i can't imagine doing loops, roles and spins with this, but they did. let's look at the fokker e1, does not look like much of a arplane right now with the teddy bear, but this is the first with a machine gun on the front. a revolutionary idea at the time. instead of trying to aim a gun in the wind, just point the whole airplane at your enemy, fire your gun. it was a relatively simple thing. there was a camera going round and round, going through a

series of rods up against the machine gun. the cam was saying, shoot, don't shoot, shoot, don't shoot, that is how they managed to avoid shooting their own propellers off. it was revolutionary. the war started december 14, but it wasn't until the summer of 1915 that it was getting hot, and the folk are was one of the reasons. it wasn't until the u.s. -- the french and british came up with the newport gliders that they could get over the fokker skirts. we now look at one of the ultimate fighters of world war i, and that is the fokker 7. some of them had bmw engines in them. this was written in the versailles treaty, the germans would give away all of their fokkers to the french and

british and even the u.s. very rigidly built, strong structure, fast airplane, reasonably maneuverable, not as fast as the other plane, but it ould maneuver. this airplane's secret to success was it was easy to fly. i mentioned earlier how hard it was. if you want to keep it spinning, it is hard to pay attention to where the enemy is answered him down. this could do all of that. you could go up and hang and pull up under the enemy aircraft and stay there for a minute. other fighters would fall into a horrible spin, they could shoot for a while and then fall down. it made a mediocre pilot into a ood one, good for an airplane. there was a lot of discussion on the pilots. they start out pretty young. there was a famous saying about

life expectancy was two weeks. that was exaggerated. some of the campaigns were about that short, but staying around for a long time was rare. most of them were 19, 20 years old. tech flying was also a different world, being a compact would be different. one of the problems, you always have wind coming over. some have small windscreens, others didn't. you see the machine guns are mounted in your face, you get gunpowder in your face. and the other problem, there is no heaters and air-conditioning, and they weren't pressurize. you were out there in the elements. and we give rides and open cockpit biplanes. see how bad the wind buffeting s, you are constantly living

in the wind. summertime wasn't too bad, but think about wintertime and how cold it was up there. they had with the big furry suits even subzero temperatures. this airplane was capable of sustained flight above 20,000 feet. they could do that, but there isn't enough air to breathe. there was a lot of speculation some of the losses were not because they did something, that an enemy outsmarted them, but they did something stupid because of lack of oxygen when they were flying up there. they normally had a warm suit, everybody flew in uniform in those days. you see the big brown suits, baggy coveralls, but that was something to keep you warm and keep the oil off of you. they all wore goggles. some of them would take the

powder puffs and strap it to their hands to the could wipe dirt and oil off of their goggles. white scarves are a hollywood invention. they eventually, as the war went on, they started to relax the uniforms and the neckties and stiff collars are not necessarily. you need to find the bad guy. you are always moving your head around. they did start wearing silk scarves. i understand purple with polka dots was very popular, and there were white ones. many a time a guy would come back from london or paris and he would have a ladies silk tocking. the subject of parachutes always comes up. parachutes were not used well into the german side until the very end of the war. reasons changed radically. there was never a good explanation.

the rational ones that they were too heavy, adding to the weight of the lightweight airplanes. others, you are cowards. that turned out to be bogus. one of the other things jen's used to carry was a small sidearm, a service pistol. use probably on the ground to fight someone behind lines if you land, but more important than that, your airplane is on ire, you could jump over the side or put yourself out of your own misery. many people ask about the crazy camouflage for this fokker d7. this one has the same, this is the authentic way. this is manufactured with this pattern on it. you can see it. they flipped it over the wing, and the way all the fokker aircraft were manufactured, they stitched it down, and it

shrinks and drives and puts a nice surface and good waterproof surface, and that is why it has a unique sound if you touch it. the germans on the other hand, this was their standard and they did cover most of their planes with camouflage, but they were big on individuality. we are over here. it is an unusual wing structure, but the significance of this airplane, it was the first designed around a forward firing machine gun. the forward scourge i talked about had a machine adapted to an air gun. it began off with camo, from the 1.5 strider. we were talking about markings and the germans and how they glorified individual

pilots. the u.k. was always drab and difficult to see from underneath. you think of it as kind of boring. they will allow a squadron marking, a checkerboard pattern on the stripe and round which lasted into world war ii. the british treated their pilots like almost anybody else. it was late in the war when they realized the publicity of the individual guys that were doing well was worth to keep more out of, so they started glorifying their pilots more. the first part of the war was interesting. we have gone through development for the war and wing warping and the fokker d7 which lasted into the 1930's. when world war i ended, there was stagnation in aviation. everything looks like a fokker d7.

engines were bigger and faster, but no real development until combat. in 1939, all of a sudden there were model planes, of mention -- big machine guns, that is where real development came. the guise of world war i set the original up. there was a famous german, early days of working, and the real organization was tactics. there is a bunch of rules for ir combat. the modern guise of the u.s. navy and united states air force still pull out his rules. it is hard to imagine that world war i for the united states started over 100 years ago, and this day we are at now. things changed dramatically, some things have changed, some have it. come to the virginia beach and see airplanes through

history. you can hear stories i did not have the chance to cover this time. nnouncer 1: you can watch this and other american artifacts programs by visiting our website at -span.org/history. >> so you can see too that women have a means of reinforcing either the best in their husbands or the worst. and that's what this study is. >> at 10:00 on reel america,

the 1953 film american frontier. >> they flashed the word from field to the production office and from there to the central office in oklahoma. day and night our little telephone board was lit up like a christmas tree. calls from new york, california, houston. bit by bit we began to realize how big a thing this was. >> the film promoted the financial benefits for farmers leasing land for oil exploration and was funded by the american petroleum institute. the life and legacy of novelist, photograph, social activist jack london and how his book the call of the wild influenced. >> he always looked back to the natural land to his ranch to the beautiful scenery in california and eelings where in the south pacific to center himself and to find release and

relief from the rigors and the depredations of the cities. >> at 6:00 we visit the military aviation museum in virginia beach. >> this airplane among a couple other type basically taught all the military aveyailtors how to fly. many guys never even saw an airplane coming from the farms and anywhere you can think of. and the first airplane they saw was the boeing steerman. >> for our complete american istory tv schedule go to -span.org. >> next, a look at pittsburgh, pennsylvania.