On the Merits of Canvas and Wire
After fifteen years of barnstorming and bush flying, I have come to believe the biplane teaches what the enclosed cockpit never could.
I first took the stick of a Curtiss JN-4 over the wheat fields of Kansas in the autumn of 1912, and I have not spent a single year since without feeling that same particular vibration—the taut piano-wire singing at sixty miles per hour, the doped linen shuddering against its ribs. There is a directness to open-cockpit flight that no instrument panel can replicate. You feel the air as a sailor feels the sea.
The Fabric Question
The doped Irish linen we stretched over Sitka spruce ribs in Mr. Stearman's Wichita shop weighed a fraction of what the new all-metal monoplanes carry. When a section wore thin, we replaced it in an afternoon with nothing more than a tacking iron and a pot of aircraft dope. The fabric spoke to you—a rip sounded different from a patch lifting, and both were audible from the cockpit at cruising speed.
“A pilot who cannot hear his wings is a pilot flying blind in a different sense entirely.” — Thomas R. Curtis, workshop notes, Wichita, 1921