Piggyback Airplanes
Ten of aviation's most famous hitch-hikers.
- By Lynn Keillor
- Air & Space magazine, July 2012
Rob Leigh
Hitchhiker: de Havilland D.H.53 Humming Bird
Mothership: R33 airship
England, 1923
Royal Air Force pilot Rollo Haig was not a man to shy away from a challenge, which is likely how he found himself a few thousand feet in the air, descending a ladder from a dirigible into the cockpit of a small monoplane.
Once in the tiny cockpit of the de Havilland D.H.53 Humming Bird, Haig pulled a lever that released the airplane from the bottom of the R33 airship. As the Humming Bird went into a dive over Pulham, England, Haig fired up the engine and leveled off.
The D.H.53 was originally built as an entrant to the 1923 Motor Gliding Competition, sponsored by the Daily Mail newspaper. It didn’t win, but its aerobatic potential caught the attention of the RAF, which was looking for a way to protect its airships from enemy fighters. The service modified two Humming Birds to work in tandem with the R33.
It was a perfect early October day. Launching the Humming Bird was easy compared to Haig’s real mission: to become the first parasite pilot to reattach to the host ship.
The Humming Bird’s fuselage attached under the R33’s keel via a complex gantry, which onlookers compared to a trapeze. Re-connecting proved a challenge. As Haig maneuvered the Humming Bird into position to snag the trapeze, his propeller hit some of the trapeze wires and the apparatus broke. He managed to attach, but because of the damage, he was forced to release again and land on his own.
Later attempts over the next few months were more successful, but when testing resumed in 1926, the RAF decided to replace the D.H.53 with the more powerful Gloster Grebe.
One of the Humming Bird’s biggest drawbacks was its engine, explains Don Goodsell, a former de Havilland employee who helped restore a Humming Bird to flightworthy condition. “The Daily Mail played a part in encouraging ‘air-mindedness,’ [so] one of the rules limited engine capacity to 750 cc, the size [for] a touring motorcycle, to encourage entrants to use an engine that people could afford,” Goodsell says.
Because of its feeble engines, “It was never much more than a curiosity.... As long as the engine was working, [the Humming Bird] was easy to control. But it was impractical.
“The D.H.53 was one of de Havilland’s few less successful ventures,” he adds, but it did help spawn the company’s more popular Moth series. “They realized there was a market for light planes.”
The Humming Bird, nevertheless, goes down in history as the first parasite to detach from and re-attach to its mothership in mid-air.
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Comments (8)
In 1957 I was the co-pilot on a SA-16A (Grumman Albatross)
Air Rescue Service amphib for a trans-Atlantic crossing, with a stop half-way across in the Azores. We were ferrying the aircraft from Wheelus AFB, Tripoli,back to the Grumman factory where the A/C would be overhauled and upgraded to a B model. If my memory is correct, the leg from the Azores to Argentia, NewFoundland took about 14 hours. That airplane could carry a lot of gas! That was the longest flight I can recall, with the possible exception of a LHR-LAX or a JFK-TelAviv nonstop when I was a TWA 747 Captain.
Posted by William Polk on May 23,2012 | 04:21 PM
I've read in some sources about an alleged fifth operational D-21 flight? Is there any truth to this? If so, what happened to it?
Posted by Gray Stanback on May 23,2012 | 06:41 PM
In the late 1950's I was in SAC 92nd bomb wing. On our base we had a reconnaissance squadron flying B-36R's. The B-36 was towed over a pit in the pit was an F-84R. The F-84 was attached to the bomber and raised up partially into the special bomb-bay. The F-84 was launched and retrieved in flight on the trapeze. The F-84 could be refueled and the film canisters changed in flight. There was even a film processing lab in the rear of the B-36.
We later had U-2's and the need for the tandem B-36 and F-84 was no longer needed.
Posted by JIm Fling on May 24,2012 | 05:14 PM
A specialized aircraft was designed and built to be uniquely carried by the B-36 internally, supposedly for defensive purposes. My recollection was it was built by McDonnell and designated XF-85.
Posted by Kendall Russell Maj Gen USAF (ret) on May 25,2012 | 04:44 PM
In the summer of 1953 following my Midshipman Cruise to Rio, I worked as Assistant PR Director of the first Dayton Air Show. When the Show began, I squired around Howard Sochurek and Marshal Lumsden of Life Magazine. I was able to get the three of us on board a modified B-36 that had its own fighter escort (F-84) join up at 10,000 feet, hook it to its boom and pull the fighter into the bomb bay. Howard and I took many pictures of the event from both the bomb bay and the blisters in the aft fuselage. The Air Force insisted on processing the film and the pictures never appeared in Life as the Air Force claimed that they showed too much secret equipment.
Posted by John B. Neff on May 26,2012 | 11:50 PM
There was also the German Mistel piggyback project that saw limited operatons late in WWII.
In a sense, the X-1, X-2, X-15 and some other experimental aircraft followed the piggyback concept. Only the X-1 was capable of taking off from the ground (and it did it only once) so they needed to be carried to altitude by a bomber.
Posted by Larry J on May 31,2012 | 01:20 PM
I was born in Dundee, and remember my Dad telling me how he had seen Mercury and Maia on the Tay. He could only have been 11 at the time, but was still excited at the memory. I was delighted to find a compilation of Newsreels on You Tube showing the aircraft, including them taking off from Dundee for the flight to South Africa - wonder where Dad was watching them from, and if he's in the background somewhere.
Link to the newsreels:
http://youtu.be/bYtazEBQ1K8
Posted by Mike Brand on June 17,2012 | 07:49 PM
Well, I'm not sure if this could be a piggyback "airplane", but the shuttle Enterprise was piggybacked to a 747 and a least one time separated in flight to test the feasibility of the landing procedure of the space shuttle.
Posted by Fernando on January 23,2013 | 04:35 AM