Would You Pay $1.5 Million For The Only One Out There?
"After the turn of the century, in the clear blue skies over
Germany, came a roar and a thunder like you've never heard, or the
screaming cry of a big war bird" - The Royal
Guardsmen
If you're old enough to remember that song, and I am, you
remember Snoopy mounting his faithful Sopwith Camel to take on the
Red Baron over the western front. Indeed, a real Sopwith Camel was
the real Red Baron's nemesis, although few debates in aviation
history are testier than those between the Ball-got-him and the
Australian-infantry-got-him camps.
Of course, Snoopy didn't have a real Sopwith Camel... except for
a very few museums, nobody does... or do they? It turns out that
yes, Virginia, there is a real Sopwith Camel in private hands, and
it's for sale, and it's not made of pure unobtainium -- it's just
really expensive.
The Sopwith is for sale on eBay with an opening bid of $750,000
-- Jim has already warned Rob that his Christmas bonus ain't gonna
cut it -- but I digress. If you can't live with the suspense of an
auction, the owner has thoughtfully provided a "buy it now" button
for $1,500,000 -- which is what he himself paid for the machine, he
says.
What's so special about this wood-and-fabric machine that makes
it cost as much as an Eclipse? Well, scarcity, for one. Twentieth
century fighter planes were, to the nations that built them and the
aerial armies that employed them, as disposable as the tin helmets
of the infantry (or the heads under those helmets). And they
weren't built for durability, either. 5,597 Sopwith F.1 Camels were
thrown together by a veritable squadron of British light industrial
firms. (For example, Boulton Paul, which was previously best known
for making the Scott Antarctic expedition's tents, got its start in
aviation by building Camels and other aircraft under license).
They were prone to crashes. The machine was fiendishly unstable,
a double-edged sword that made it difficult to fly but highly
maneuverable, especially in right turns assisted by the torque of
its rotary engine -- and it was flown by pilots with little
training. RFC, RNAS and RAF records recount the loss of 413 pilots
to the enemy, and 385 due to accidents.
After the end of the Great War, those Camels that were not
expended as firewood or sold to scrap dealers were often passed on
to other nations, including Belgium, which had suffered badly in
the war, and the new nations of 1918, such as Greece, Poland and
Latvia. Camels fought on both sides in the Russian Civil War and in
the Russo-Polish war, and the sketchy records of those campaigns
indicate that the plane's character didn't change -- combat
effectiveness teamed with non-combat crashes.
"The trouble is stunting too near the ground," the introspective
Canadian ace Roy Brown wrote home. "The number that are killed that
way is awful but that is one thing I never do under any
circumstances, as I have seen too much of that."
The Camel is associated with aces, especially Canadians, such as
Billy Barker and Donald McLaren (who flew Camels from the
same batch as this survivor; that's Barker in front of the crashed
Camel) and Roy Brown (who did, or didn't, shoot down von
Richthofen. I'm inclined to give Brown credit, for even if the
ground fire got the Baron, he ran into the ground fire in his
attempts to solve his Roy Brown problem). But above all, the Camel
is, along with the Fokker Triplane, the most evocative aircraft of
the Great War.
Is there anyone who does not remember this cliched movie
scene?
"How man hours do you have, kid?"
"Eight, sir."
"In Camels?"
"Uh, one, sir."
"One hour in Camels, he says! Great Scott, what are they doing?
They're sending me lambs to the slaughter!"
But there is an essential truth in it, that long before today's
insurance companies would consider a pilot seasoned enough to take
the 172 around the pattern while a nervous instructor paced at the
base of the tower, young boys of 1918 were horsing Camels off
uneven grass strips to joust with the kaleidoscope colors of
Richthofen's Flying Circus.
It was hard on many things, including the Camels.
The Camels were hard right back, shooting down the staggering
figure of 1,294 enemy aircraft.
After the war, the Camel was quickly obsolete, and thousands of
them were broken up and burnt as firewood, their engines and other
metal parts tossed aside to be consumed in the scrap drives of the
next war.
There are only four other original F.1 Camels left, one each in
Brussels, Krakow, Chicago, and at the RAF Museum in Hendon, and
none of which will ever fly again. (There are also three F.2 Naval
Camels, similarly situated in Little Rock, London (IWM) and at the
Canadian National Air Museum). That gives a total of eight original
Camels anywhere, full stop.
So an original Camel is a special thing. There are a number of
replica Camels flying, but there are no originals in airworthy
status -- this machine was carefully restored by British Aerospace
in 1989, on behalf of a previous owner.
The owner's people also take great pains to point out B6291's
history, which has been meticulously researched. They have
determined that it is:
- The only well-documented original flyable Camel to survive
- The only surviving complete Camel with documented history
placing it in an operational squadron on the Western Front during
WWI
- The only surviving Camel to have its original Data Plate
- The only survivor built by Sopwith Aviation
This last point is worth treating in a bit of depth, because the
widespread industrial mobilization of the 1914-18 war made total
war possible, but its output was not popular with pilots of the
period.
Pilots tried hard to avoid flying airframes built by licensees
or behind engines that were not built in the original plant of the
designing firm. This was true in every service; an American who
drew a SPAD built by Breguet or Nieuport would be long in the face,
especially if its engine was license-built, too.
A Sopwith-built Sopwith would have been quite the sought-after
ticket for the fighter pilot of 1918.
Now, this aircraft has been rebuilt a couple of times, not just
with the BAE 1989 major reconstruction (in, as it happens, the same
factory where it was built in 1917), but also during the Great War,
after two crashes that injured the pilots. Somewhere during that
process, the engine listed on the data plate, a 9-cylinder Clerget,
was replaced by a Le Rhone. So the plane is not entirely as it was
delivered by the Sopwith factory.
It's just the most original Sopwith Camel in the world. And the
only one to have flown in recent decades.
So... if you want a truly unique piece of aviation history, buzz
on over to eBay. But don't expect the owner to take your '71 El
Camino in trade. Even if it does have a new alternator.