History was made in the skies over the estuary

It was to be a day they would remember for the rest of their lives.

What they saw seemed to belong to the world of wild fantasy. In fact, it proved to be history in the making, the first attempt anywhere in Britain to take off and land an aircraft from a ship.

The year 2009 marks the 100th anniversary of the Fleet Air Arm.On May 1, the occasion will be marked by a team of naval flyers in a fly-past over the site of that first trial.

The Fleet Air Arm, in its original guise as the Royal Naval Air Service, had been created three years earlier, on May 7 1909. But the fledgling service made a false start, investing in an airship, the Mayfly, rather than fixed-wing aircraft.

Like many other dirigibles, Mayfly proved a disaster, barely making it out of her hangar in Barrow-in-Furness. Nevertheless, this was Britain’s first official attempt at using flying machines for military purposes, allowing the Fleet Air Arm to claim precedence as the oldest flying service.

It beat the formation of the Royal Flying Corps by three years and the RAF by almost nine years. The first shipboard take-off and landing by a plane took place in America, the following year.

On November 14, 1910, coast guard lieutenant Eugene Ely flew a Curtess plane from the deck of the US Navy cruiser Birmingham, landing it in Norfolk, Virginia.

In January 1911 the same pilot reversed the process, landing aboard the cruiser Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay.

Ely told a local newspaper: “It was easy enough. I think the trick could be successfully repeated nine times out of ten.” Nine months later he was killed while taking part in an aerial demonstration.

This early success galvanised the British Admiralty into activity.

Driving the campaign to develop naval aviation was the young First Lord of the Admiralty, appointed in October 1911, a man who had learned to fly off the Essex coast. His name was Winston Churchill.

Even before Ely’s first take off, a British aircraft company, Short Brothers, had been working on the theory of shipboard flight.

At its base on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, Short, the world’s first dedicated aircraft manufacturer, also produced and tested the first generation of seaplanes.

Working with officers based at nearby Chatham, the Short engineers set about transforming their paper blueprints into action. Their first move was to set up a joint Royal Naval Research Station at Eastchurch, opposite Southend.

A number of naval flyers trained there, using two planes donated by the Royal Aeronautical Society. The ship chosen for the experiment was an all but redundant battleship, HMS Africa.

Built in 1906, she had almost immediately been rendered obsolete by technical advances in naval guns and armour plating.

Africa was laid up in the Nore anchorage, off Sheerness, while the Navy tried to come up with a role for her, short of the scrapyard.

If ever a vessel happened to be in the right place at the right time it was Africa. Naval embarrassment was about to make history as the grandmother of all British aircraft carriers.

The pilot chosen to take off from Africa was lieutenant Charles Samson. He had little to guide him except gut instinct.

He had read newspaper accounts about Ely's historic flights, but by now the US pioneer was dead, hardly a reassuring precedent. HMS Africa cut an odd profile on that historic morning. Chatham dockyard workers had erected a wooden ramp, starting on the turret of the forward guns, and stretching forward over the prow of the ship.

Sitting in the cockpit of a modified Short Brothers S27 Box Kite, Samson revved the engine to full throttle.

The plane hurtled along the ramp and out over the bows of the ship. For a second it seemed to dip. Observers thought it was about to plunge into the sea. Then Samson pulled up and climbed away.

He made three circuits around HMS Africa, while all aboard cheered. Then he climbed to 800ft and headed for Eastchurch airfield.

In May the same year, he scored an even more impressive double achievement.

This time, the experiment took place in Portland Bay, off the Dorset coast. It was here, using the same Short box-kite, Samson became the first man in history to take off and land from a ship in a single flight, and the first to complete these manoeuvres with a moving ship.

The purpose-built ramp was transferred to HMS Hibernia, flagship of the vice-Admiral Home Fleet. Hibernia, a faster and more manoeuvrable battleship than Africa. In July, Samson repeated the manoeuvres in front of tens of thousands of spectators, including King George V, at the 1912 Royal Naval Review.

Naval aviation had arrived.

Yet it was that small gaggle of shipspotters on Southend Pier who became the first members of the public to watch this amazing spectacle.

Pilot went to war in a car

ONE lone individual accounted for an odd quirk of history, the fact it was the Royal Navy that ran both Britain’s first military aircraft service, and the world’s first motorised combat unit.

Naval lieutenant Charles Samson was not only the first Briton to fly a plane from a ship, but also the first man to command an armoured vehicle in battle.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Samson, was commanding Eastchurch Royal Naval Air Station.

It boasted a small squadron of planes, all modified for naval aviation experiments. Samson took his squadron to the Belgian battlefront, but the planes needed major modification to make them fit for combat.

Grounded and impatient, the naval pilot looked around for other ways to harass the enemy.

He made the acquaintance of a Belgian millionaire who owned a limousine. Samson noted with approval the car was fitted with a machine-gun mounting. He added a gun from one of his planes, and metal plating from an airfield boiler, before heading off to the front. Samson’s early forays were highly successful.

His makeshift armoured car devastated units of German cavalry, severely disrupting the enemy’s reconnaissance patrols. He then persuaded his crew of wealthy young pilots to add their personal vehicles to the unit.

Impressed by Samson’s results, Winston Churchill commandeered extra fighting vehicles on his behalf – a fleet of London buses.

He also gave the unit an official designation, the Royal Naval Armoured Car Division. By now, though, the conflict was bogging down into trench warfare and a sea of mud, making armoured cars redundant. Samson’s squadron headed for the Mediterranean to do the work they had trained for on sea and in the air. But they left behind the seeds of a new type of land warfare.