In the development of aviation there have been numerous disastrously failed designs. Most – not all – concentrate on the heroic years around the First World War. Among them, in a prominent place, is the Christmas Bullet, not only considered the worst airplane in history, but the only one designed by an eccentric, if not psychopathic, fraudster without any knowledge of aeronautics.
The character in question was Dr. William Whitney Christmas, born in 1865 and graduated – just turned forty years old – from George Washington University in the city of the same name. It seems that he exercised it for little time, since his true passion was flying. Specifically, the design of revolutionary flying machines. Which, by the way, would bring more substantial benefits than the practice of medicine.
As soon as he began his career as an aeronautical designer, Christmas claimed that he had built and piloted a device of his invention with which it stayed in flight for three hours, a time much longer than the Wright brothers had achieved until then. Unfortunately, he explained, he had been injured when he crashed into a tree, and he himself had set fire to the remains “to protect his secrets.”
There were no witnesses to such a feat, but the publicity that accompanied it allowed him, in 1908, to create his own company, the Christmas Airplane Company. Under that appearance of respectability, she soon found partners whose capital supported new and ambitious projects.
Perhaps the best known was the Red Bird, suspiciously similar to that of another competitor, even in the name. Despite everything, he applied for and obtained a patent on a “self-balancing” device that, in the event of engine failure, would maintain its center of gravity and descend gently to the ground.
But the “red bird” never took flight. After a year of activity without apparent results, the shareholders demanded the return of their money (they say more than one hundred thousand dollars, a formidable amount). Christmas refused, and the matter ended up in court.
Except for the diagrams that accompany the patent document, which he did not draw, and a blurry photograph that could well have been of another airplane, there are no diagrams or documents that prove that the Red Bird ever existed. The lawsuit ended up being dismissed without the doctor-aeronaut returning a single cent. Maybe his planes weren’t taking off, but his checking account was.
By then, the good doctor was fascinated by one particular aspect of that flight: the flexibility of the wings. If nature had created such an efficient mechanism, it was clear that all the aeronautical designers of the time were wrong when designing rigid wings. The ideal would be to make them swing.
During the following years, Christmas continued to develop fanciful projects, incubating his idea that airplanes should flex their wings like sparrows. The outbreak of the Great War opened new opportunities for the supply of war material, and a few months later, Christmas managed to get the New York Times to publish an article in which he described a colossal bomber, the largest in the world, of which the Allies Europeans had already ordered eleven units. All lies, of course. Neither the plane nor the orders existed except in the author’s imagination.
Without a doubt, Dr. Christmas was completely ignorant of aeronautics, but he had known how to sell himself as a true expert and had an inexhaustible capacity for persuasion. In early 1918, he convinced Harry and Alfred McCurry, two brothers who owned a prosperous brokerage company, to finance his new project: a small biplane of undreamt-of agility and speed that he hoped to offer to the Army for use in reconnaissance tasks.
Before, of course, it had to be built. To do this, the three partners turned to a young company, Continental Aircraft, which had not been successful in offering the armed forces its first prototypes and which saw in Christmas’s ideas an opportunity to recover from its losses. A young and very capable twenty-three-year-old engineer named Vincent Burnelli would supervise the construction, who, in time, would be a pioneer in the design of lifting fuselages. But there was still time for that. Now he faced an impossible challenge.
The construction of the new device, the Christmas Bullet, was an exercise in aeronautical delirium. There were no plans, just the ideas that boiled in the brain of its inventor. The doctor continually recommended using a new type of wood, steel or plywood.
The wings were so heavy that they had to be hoisted into place with a winch, and the rudder was ridiculously small. Burnelli only intervened, despite himself, in the design of the fuselage. Deep down, he was confident that it would never be completed, among other reasons, because it had not even been determined which propulsion plant it would be built and Continental did not manufacture engines.
But that was no problem for the enthusiastic Christmas. A friend – and, apparently, admirer – introduced him to Senator James Wadsworth, who, in turn, put him in contact with the Army Air Service.
It was about obtaining the loan of an engine only for static tests. The officer in charge of providing it was Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Vincent, who years before had been part of the committee that evaluated – and rejected – the previous prototypes that Continental Aircraft had presented. So his attitude was rather skeptical.
Seeing that his relationship with Continental was more harmful than beneficial for his purposes, Dr. Christmas created a shell company that shared his same initials: Cantilever Aero, in whose name he requested the engine. After many hesitation, Vincent accepted. Not that he was convinced, but this strange inventor seemed to have good contacts with the politicians in Washington, so it was better not to upset him.
The engine chosen was a magnificent 170 horsepower Liberty. A gem of its time. Of course, Vincent imposed the condition that the plane would not take off until it had been inspected by Army technicians. Christmas agreed, with no intention of honoring his promise.
On the contrary, increasingly enthusiastic or blind to reality, the inventor assured that his Bullet would be so fast and maneuverable that it could cross the German borders and reach Berlin. A small flotilla would be enough to take a commando there to kidnap the Kaiser, ending the war. A fantastic plan, if it weren’t for the fact that, by then, the armistice had already been negotiated.
In peacetime, Christmas’s airplane was completely useless, even if it had kept all its promises. In fact, the first copy was a small monstrosity.
Constructed of fabric mounted on green wooden slats, its two wings were attached to the fuselage with a single screw (although Brunelli had tried to reinforce them behind Christmas’s back) and buckled fifteen degrees up and down like the birds that had served as his model. General William Kenly, director of the Military Aeronautics Division, as soon as he learned of the project, prohibited any military pilot from flying on it until he had made sure that this monstrosity was safe.
Once again, Christmas lied. He ordered the plane to be taken to the airfield, assuring that Kenly had authorized the flight test. To give a greater sense of verisimilitude, she painted it with the colors and cockade of the Army Air Service.
Meanwhile, the search began for the person who would have the honor of handling it on its inaugural flight. Knowing how the Bullet had been built, the Continental test pilot refused and was fired. Other professionals, warned of the danger, followed his example. Burnelli himself resigned.
Finally, in January 1919, an American named Cuthbert Mills accepted the commission. He had been a fighter pilot in France, and, having graduated, he was aiming for a job in the air mail service when this opportunity presented itself. In any case, the new plane could not be as dangerous as facing the German Fokker and Albatros on a daily basis.
When the day of the test arrived, Mills was so confident of his success that he invited his own mother to watch the flight. The Bullet’s engine roared, lifting it a few hundred meters, and almost immediately a gust of wind tore its wings off. Mills died instantly, and Vincent lost the valuable engine he had lent. Undaunted, the doctor immediately wrote a letter to the Army announcing that he had conceived a new, improved design and would they be so kind as to provide him with a new propeller.
As incredible as it may seem, Christmas – protected by his particular aerial construction company, of which he was founder, owner and sole employee – managed to build a second Bullet. He displayed it in some public display, publishing advertisements in the press promoting it as “the safest and easiest to control airplane in the world.”
He also acquired the services of a former British pilot, Allington Jolly, willing to pilot the new aeronautical marvel. Of course, it would have to take off from a crop field, since no military airfield was willing to be the scene of the test.
The second flight ended like the first. Sure enough, the airplane took off (it was powered by a 200-horsepower Hall-Scott L-6 engine) and its wings flexed as its creator expected, but it crashed directly into a barn. Jolly died on impact. The Bullet had established an unenviable record of lethality: no one who had placed itself at its controls had survived.
Dr. Christmas would still present new ideas before a Senate committee, but fortunately he never built another airplane. He claimed to have received dozens of orders from European governments and even an offer of a million dollars in gold from the Kaiser himself in exchange for his “secrets,” an offer that he had rejected out of pure patriotism.
Such loyalty to his country did not prevent him from filing a complaint against the armed forces themselves, for using on their planes a spoiler similar to a Bullet mechanism for which Christmas had received a patent. The Army preferred not to get involved in a lawsuit that could end in a scandal and paid the amount claimed: another one hundred thousand dollars.
All the money earned in his many and unspeakable aeronautical activities made Christmas a rich man, or, at least, without financial difficulties. Until his last years he continued to explore new and crazy ideas for other flying devices that, fortunately, never saw the light of day. He died in 1960, at the age of ninety-four, leaving behind a healthy checking account.
