partakes of the nature of research work. An airship is
comparatively slow in manoeuvring, and is an instrument of knowledge
rather than of power. For swift assault on submarines, once they are
located, the seaplane is better; but the seaplane was not seaworthy. The
need for some kind of aircraft which should be able to search the North
Sea far and wide for submarines, and, having found them, should be able
to destroy them without calling for the assistance of surface craft, was
met by the development of the flying boat. There was a flying boat in
use by the navy before the war--the small pusher Sopwith Bat boat. It
had a stepped hull, like a racing motor-boat, about twenty feet long and
four feet in the beam. This was the only flying boat used by the Naval
Air Service when the war began; when it ended they were flying the
_Felixstowe Fury_, a giant boat triplane which, with its load, weighed
fifteen tons, was driven by five 360 horse-power engines, and carried
four guns in addition to a supply of heavy bombs. The development of
this type of aircraft for the purposes of the war must be credited
chiefly to the late Lieutenant-Colonel John Cyril Porte, who had been an
officer of the Royal Navy and a pioneer of aviation. As early as 1909,
when he was a naval lieutenant, he had experimented with a glider on
Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth. Two years later he was invalided out of
the service, and devoted his enforced leisure to aviation. He learned to
fly at Rheims, on a Deperdussin monoplane, and in 1912 was appointed
technical director and designer of the British Deperdussin Company. The
first British-built monoplane of this type, with a 100 horse-power
Anzani engine, was of his design, and was flown by him at the Military
Aeroplane Trials on Salisbury Plain in 1912. After the trials he flew to
Hendon, a distance of eighty-two miles, in one hour and five minutes.
During the following summer he spent some time experimenting with a
waterplane at Osea Island in Essex. When the British Deperdussin Company
was broken up he went to America, and joined Mr. Glenn Curtiss at
Hammondsport, New York, in the task of designing a flying boat to cross
the Atlantic. Then the war came; on the day it was declared he sailed
for England, re-entered the navy, and was at once made a squadron
commander of the Royal Naval Air Service. For a time he was in command
of the newly-formed naval air station at Hendon, where he trained pilots
for the servi