NEWS

Iconic World War I plane may soar again

John Barnes
Special to The Detroit News


Comstock Park — A Sopwith Camel crashed somewhere between Lincoln and Felsted in eastern England on Aug. 24, 1917. The fighter plane was en route to the Western Front.

Tom Kozura has the proof.

Pilot and mechanic Tom Kozura is building an authentic Sopwith Camel. He uses a plumb bob to tune the tension on the wire struts, the same way technicians would have done at bases during World War I.

The engine of another Sopwith never made it to battle; it was crated, kept in reserve during the Great War, hidden from the Germans during World War II. But the .303-caliber twin Vickers machine guns appear to have seen action.

And there is the most important piece — the diminutive dashboard "clock" — the most expensive part of the fighter plane, so top secret a pilot risked court-martial if he was shot down and returned without it.

Tom Kozura has the proof. And the parts.

"It was the space shuttle of its time," Kozura says.

Together, these authentic parts are being assembled in a suburban garage and basement in west Michigan into what Kozura says will be the finest airworthy Sopwith Camel reproduction in the United States.

The F1 Sopwith was fearsome. The British WWI single-seat biplane is credited with shooting down 1,294 enemy aircraft, more than any other Allied fighter. Introduced in 1917, 5,597 F1 Camels were produced.

After the World Wars I and II, the plane found its place in popular culture in the "Peanuts" comic strip when Snoopy pretends his doghouse is a Sopwith Camel and imagines himself the World War I flying ace fighting the Red Baron.

Kozura, 48, has top-flight pilot bona fides. He was a U.S. Air Force instructor pilot and a Northwest Airlines pilot and ran a small flight school. He has 10,000 hours of flight time. He is now an inspector with the Federal Aviation Administration and a fully certified airframe and power plant mechanic.

The instrument panel for the Sopwith Camel was assembled from parts collected all over the world. What Tom Kozura can’t find he has made to the precise specifications of a set of 1917 blueprints.

To comprehend the Sopwith reproduction's pedigree, it is helpful to understand Kozura's attention to authenticity.

The plane includes:

An original data plate: Think of it as a birth certificate. The Sopwith on which it was mounted high on the instrument panel was made in Lincoln, England, in the country's eastern midlands. Something happened on the way to the Western Front. The plane, B2337, crashed on Aug. 24, 1917, headed 130 miles south to Felsted and was parted out.

Other parts of the instrument panel are also authentic: the compass, oil gauge, magneto switches, altimeter, airspeed indicator and other parts. What he can't find he has made to the precise specifications of an original 1917 set of blueprints he located, some 700 drawings in all.

The guns: Concentrated fire from British twin Vickers passed between the microsecond arc of the propeller using a top-secret synchronizer. The guns were capable of firing 400 rounds per minute, or about seven rounds per second, each.

The engine: Kozura's nine-cylinder Clerget 9B engine was made in July 1917. No. 3244 was stored at Toussus-Le-Noble Airfield, west of Paris. There it remained crated. After World War I, it was sent to a French training base south of Paris and hidden from Germans during WWII so it would not be melted into "Stuka parts," for the Luftwaffe, Kozura said.

Kozura obtained the 130-hp engine in 2011. "It's almost like a living being, " Kozura says, "as it hisses and breathes in air."

He obtained the Clerget in a trade for a rare 50-hp Gnome Omega engine, built in 1909. It was found in a barn near Stanton, Michigan. The engine had sat on a pile of old tires since the 1950s, Kozura said.

A page from a magazine of the Sopwith Camel’s era is on display in Kozura’s shop in Comstock Park.

The Gnome Omega was as important to aviation "as anesthesia was to medicine" and allowed flying machines of the day to evolve into true aircraft, he says. "It set numerous world records in the day," Kozura says.

The engine trade opened the doors. WWI flight aficionados are a hard fraternity to break into. "Once I got that one running, I was everybody's buddy," Kozura says. "Now I was in the fold and museums would trade parts with me."

The under-construction fuselage is surprisingly small, just 27 inches wide at the cockpit, 14 feet long.

"Pilots were pretty small back then. You didn't have big guys in 1917," Kozura says.

The Sopwith is capable of flying 110 mph at up to 20,000 feet, "shockingly high," Kozura says — at 1,200 rpm, about the idle speed of a modern automobile. Now, a pilot would intermittently assist with oxygen above 12,500 feet and continuously use it at and above 14,000 feet, he adds.

The propeller is 9 feet of English walnut. Thirty gallons of gasoline are behind the pilot, plus seven reserve gallons. The engine vaporizes a $10 quart of castor oil every 15 minutes.

Kozura dismisses the myth that pilots drank brandy to clear inhalants from giving them intestinal problems. He does not address why else they might drink brandy.

The Sopwith is Kozura's fifth hand-made plane. His others are three experimental Piper Super Cubs — one from scratch, two kit-built — and one Steen Skybolt from scratch.

It is also his most ambitious effort, hopefully airworthy in two years for the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War.

"For me, I'm doing it right, and when I'm finished, there will be no excuses," he says.

Tom Kozura has the proof.