Volunteers spent 25 years building a WWI replica plane. It just took flight.
'Every single nut and bolt has been checked, every single bracket has been checked, every single piece of wire has been checked. You don't cobble these things together. When you're going to fly it, it has to be done right,' chairman Mike Harper told the BBC. 'If it was for a museum, if it was just going on display we would probably have finished it within a few years. But the meticulous attention to detail to get this thing in the air is what's taken the length of time.'
The plane is a Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter, a biplane (a type of aircraft with two stacked wings) fighter aircraft the British designed in 1914, built in 1915, and tested in 1916 in response to Germany's monoplane aircraft, the Fokker Eindecker. Though the planes were 'modestly successful,' they quickly became obsolete in the face of Germany's new Albatros aircrafts. The name Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter comes from the unique arrangement of its struts (the thin beams that support the top wings), though the society's volunteers have more sensibly nicknamed their replica 'Sophie.'
For now, Sophie is undergoing test flights. Once it completes the test phase and accomplishes five flight hours, it'll be allowed to carry an additional person in the passenger seat behind the pilot, per the BBC.
'I'm used to flying modern aeroplanes from the 50s and 60s—the classics—and they're very different from this aeroplane to fly. This is very much more of a challenge,' aircraft inspector Tim Rayner, who pilots the test flights, told the BBC after May's 15-minute flight. 'The controls are nowhere near as responsive as they became as we developed better technologies. This is 1915 and it's not that many years since the first flight so you've got to look at it as flying as you would expect for an aircraft of that era.'
Talk about an ambitious hobby.
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