My friend Javier Arango, for whom flying a 1917 Sopwith Camel was as routine as flying a Skyhawk is for the average CFI, wrote that “…control forces in pitch and yaw are minimal throughout its wide range of speeds. They are, in fact, so light that the airplane has no elevator trim. Our modern airplanes require constant use of a trim tab to adjust control forces with a deviation of even 20 knots. The Camel can extend its speed through an envelope of 100 knots or more without need for trim.”
No trim to worry about, light control forces—sounds like a nice-flying airplane. But there was a catch. Because the center of gravity (CG) was located, by design, unusually far aft, the Camel lacked longitudinal stability. The nose was always starting to wander up or down, and so the Camel had to be hand-flown all the time—foot-flown too, since its tiny vertical fin and aerodynamically balanced rudder provided only the bare minimum of directional stability. Initially unnerving, this randomness became second nature to Camel pilots, who, after a harrowing first few hours, were no more consciously aware of supplying the missing stability than a bicyclist is. Some pilots claimed that the Camel’s proclivity for uncoordinated flight became an advantage in aerial combat: Enemy pilots had a hard time getting a bead on a Camel because they could not figure out where it was going.
