Twitter
Facebook
“Dr.” William Whitney Christmas was one of the interesting and eccentric pioneers in the early days of aviation and, almost certainly, a charlatan. He was well educated and attended medical school, but never was licensed to practice medicine. In the early 1900s, he moved to the fledgling aviation industry, where he showed a flair for self-promotion.
Christmas designed and built the “Red Wing” aircraft, which first flew on March 12, 1908, from the frozen surface of Lake Keuka near Hammondsport, N.Y.
Casey Baldwin, the pilot, became the first Canadian to fly a heavier-than-air machine.
The Red Wing was later lost in a crash, but in 1910 Christmas founded an aircraft company that underwent several name changes until it became the Cantilever Aero Company of New York in 1918.
Christmas had unique and untested ideas about aircraft design. He believed that struts were unnecessary and that an airplane’s wings should be free to flap like a bird’s. In 1914 he patented the idea for use on a biplane fighter, the “Christmas Bullet,” designed with another aviation pioneer, Vincent Burnelli.
The single-seat “Bullet” — also known as the “Christmas Strutless Biplane” and “Cantilever Aero Bullet” — was an all-wood biplane with a veneer-clad fuselage and cantilevered wings, which were unusual because the of the upper wings had anhedral (downward slope) and lower wings dihedral (upward slope) with no braces between them. The unbraced wings were designed to flex during flight, and the aircraft was controlled by linked ailerons and by warping the horizontal tail surfaces.
Christmas claimed that the veneer fuselage was original, ignoring the fact that the German Albatros fighters and most of German two-seater aircraft used for bombing and reconnaissance in World War I had veneer fuselages.
The “Bullet” was powered with the prototype 185 horsepower Liberty 6 engine, provided by the U.S. Army with the proviso that the prototype engine was to be fitted into an airframe for ground testing only. Christmas chose to ignore the restriction.
Vincent Burnelli, now the chief engineer of Cantilever, tried to institute changes prior to testing, but at Christmas’ insistence, the “Bullet” was completed with the original design features intact. Burnelli was also concerned that the construction materials were scrounged from available wood and steel stock and were not “aircraft grade.”
On its first flight on Dec. 30, 1918, the wings of the “Bullet” flexed as planned and then peeled from the fuselage. The aircraft crashed, killing the Army test pilot. It was clear that Christmas did not understand aerodynamic stresses and the wing/fuselage join of the wing was not strong enough to allow the designed flexing of the wing.
Christmas did not tell the Army about the loss of the prototype Liberty engine and the second “Bullet” prototype was powered by a different engine, the Hall-Scott L-6. The second prototype was also destroyed on its first flight on May 1, 1919 — again with the loss of its Army test pilot. Not surprisingly, the project was abandoned before its Army Air Service evaluation.
Christmas continued to campaign for funding for further projects from private and government sources, claiming that he was swamped by orders for “Bullets” from Europe and that he had million-dollar offers to rebuild Germany’s air forces. He claimed “hundreds” of patents or patent submissions, among them the aileron (also claimed by the Wright brothers and Glen Curtis) and claimed that the U.S. government bought the rights to his movable ailerons in 1923 for $100,000 to avoid a copyright infringement suit. This claim and most of the others were never substantiated, though he is credited with 10 to 15 aeronautical patents.
(Dr. Michel’s articles appear twice a month in the KA. For questions or comments, e-mail Dr. Michel at marshall.michel@spangdahlem.af.mil.)
