Aerodynamics

Man is jealous of the birds, though he has already learned to fly many times faster. Determined to learn their secret, Leonard W. Bonney, wealthy pioneer of the air, grown middle-aged since his first flight with Orville Wright in 1910, caught two seagulls in a steel trap padded with cloth at Mastic, L. I. For three years he studied them, scrutinizing every feather on their bodies.

Finally, he designed a plane. Inspired by the gull, it looked like the gull. It was named Bonney's Gull. It was fat in body with graceful curving wings. Bonney followed the bird principle, abandoned the aileron, or balancing contrivance which airplane designers have always considered an essential feature of stability in the air. His plane had new features: an expanding and contracting tail, like a blackbird's, for varying loads; variable camber in the wings, so that they could flatten out like a gull's when flying level; a varying angle of incidence to its wings, so that they could turn sideways into the wind on landing, and let him drop onto a landing field "no bigger than a handkerchief."

Last week, at Curtiss Field, Long Island, Bonney tested his finally completed Gull. It flew. For half a mile it traveled in a burst of speed. Bonney waved his arm in triumph. And then the Gull nosed down to earth and dived straight into the ground, a mass of wreckage. Bonney landed on his head 20 feet away, with only moments left to live.