'Landing strips were usually rough fields, the aircraft were string-bound wooden struts and canvas, and crashes were very frequent'
Hmm - I always thought that canvas was for tents and that doped Irish Linen was used as the covering. Why do we never see reference to high tensile flying wires etc. It always seems to be 'string'. When you see a wreck of an early a/c think 'energy absorbing structure. When you see pictures of the wrecks of modern aircraft why do the captions never (rarely?) mention flimsy structure. Am I suffering from Meldruitis here?