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| Portuguese Pioneers of Aviation Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral |
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A Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator (Infante Dom Henrique in Portuguese), had a school there; you can still visit the ruins. He had the latest nautical charts, celestial maps and navigation equipment. It’s where explorers would meet and share knowledge and information before setting sail across the ocean.
Being there made me think about Columbus, Magellan and Vasco da Gama, brave men who took great leaps into the unknown to discover new worlds. Sagres was the Johnson Space Centre of its day.
As all real discovery begins with romantic daydreams, the Portuguese were the first to put their dreams into practice - legend has it that Portuguese aviation history may start to be told with the "deeds of João Torto",
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| João Torto jumps from the tower of the cathedral in São Mateus square |
Unfortunately, when he landed, his helmet slipped over his face and obscured his view. He fell to the ground, fatally wounding himself.
Torto a true Renaissance man, was a person of many trades: He was a nurse, a barber, a certified bleeder and healer, an astrologer and a teacher. - he certainly inspired the next aviation pioneers to come.
Another great pioneer of aeronautics was a Jesuit monk, Bartolomeu de Gusmão, who interrupted his studies at Coimbra University to develop his flying machines. On 5th and 8th August, 1709, the monk demonstrated the principle of lighter-than-air balloon to the King John V of Portugal and his court, and also to the Papal Representative Conti, later to become Pope Inocencius XIII.
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| Bartolomeu de Gusmão and his Passarola |
Gusmão demonstrated indoors and outdoors his “hot air balloon” that in one case reached a height of 4.5 meters, carrying the “Passarola” an oneiric bird-like flying ship.
It is impossible for me not to mention in this blog Santos=Dumont, and his Portuguese maternal side of the family, that he valued so much, using both his Portuguese name "Santos" and also his French "Dumont" separated by a symbol of equal, depicted in his famous signature "Santos=Dumont", in which he equalized the importance of his two ancestries. But Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral were undoubtedly the most important Portuguese aeronauts to this day.
At this meeting, Dumont provided the pair of avid navigators with important navigation information regarding the use of chronometer and other crucial navigation references that made the difference in air safety for the crossing.
On march 30, in 1922, the pair of Portuguese aviators, Sacadura Cabral and Gago Coutinho, set off at the Bom Sucesso Naval Air Station in the Tagus, near the Belém Tower in Lisbon, at 16:30 on March 30, 1922, in the Portuguese Naval Aviation aircraft Lusitânia, It was the first flight across the southern Atlantic.
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| O Lusitânia near the Tower of Belêm |
On April 17 they flew to Praia on Santiago Island, and then to the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago, already in Brazilian waters, where they arrived on the same day, after flying 1,700 kilometres (1,100 mi) over the South Atlantic. They had reached that point by relying solely on the Pattern Bubble Sextant with its artificial horizon and the route corrector, both invented by Coutinho exclusively to this travel.
However, when ditching on the rough seas near the archipelago, the Lusitânia lost one of its floats and sank. The two aviators were saved by the cruiser NRP República, which had been sent by the Portuguese Navy to support the aerial crossing. The aviators were then carried to the Brazilian Fernando de Noronha islands.
Immediately after that incident, the Portuguese government sent another Fairey III seaplane to complete the journey. The new plane, baptized Pátria (homeland in Portuguese), arrived at Fernando Noronha on May 6. After being refitted, the Pátria departed on May 11 with Coutinho and Cabral on board, departed towards the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago to resume the journey at the point where had been interrupted, but an engine problem forced them to once again make an emergency ditching in the middle of the ocean, where they drifted for nine hours until being saved by the nearby British cargo ship Paris City, which carried them back to Fernando Noronha.
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| Fairey III arrival in Santa Cruz Island |
A third Fairey III – baptized Santa Cruz by the wife of Epitácio Pessoa, the President of Brazil – was sent out, carried by the cruiser NRP Carvalho Araújo. On June 5, the Santa Cruz was put in the waters of Fernando Noronha and Coutinho and Cabral resumed their journey, flying to Recife, then to Salvador da Bahia.
They’ve finally finished the 5,100-mile voyage at Rio de Janeiro on June 17, after a total of 62 hours flying, (important to say that British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown, made the first non-stop transatlantic flight in June 1919, and arrived in St. John's, Newfoundland, in Candada).
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| Coutinho-Pattern Bubble Sextant |
Normally used to measure the angle between two objects at a distance, the sextant was the basic tool used by marine navigators, but it was not possible to use it when on board an aircraft, considering the water line and sea level as fundamental points of reference.
It was then that Gago Coutinho invented the Artificial Horizon Sextant or the Coutinho-Pattern Bubble Sextant and the Path Corrector.
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| Coutinho-Pattern Bubble Sextant |
The Sextant used an ampoule containing an air bubble as a substitute for the water line, following the tradition of experienced Portuguese navigators, the idea to conceive this special sextant was elegant and simple – let’s suppose that a navigator is approaching to the coast of Lisbon, and at a certain distance, he wants to measure the angle between the top of the tower of Belem in comparison with the line of the horizon (water line), win order to stipulate the angle and trigonometrically obtain the distance to the tower:
1 - At first it starts from scratch on the movable arm and the micrometric barrel, then looking through the telescope, it fits the water line in the small mirror;
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| How does the Coutinho's Sextant work? |
2 - Once well framed, the navigator tightens the clip and loosens the movable arm, turning the micrometric drum until the top of the tower aligns with the water line - at this point he reads the scale of graduate arc.
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| Artificial Horizon Sextant, invented by Gago Coutinho |
In the case of the Coutinho-Pattern Bubble Sextant, invented by Gago Coutinho, an artificial horizon (9) was added, a device with an air bubble inside a water vial, which was reflected by an auxiliary mirror, thus replacing the window of the water level. This device made it possible to define a horizontal plane without the need for the visible sea horizon for those naturally positioned at sea level.
In collaboration with Sacadura Cabral, he designed and built another instrument which they called the “Plaqué de abatimento” or “route corrector”, which made it possible to graphically calculate the angle between the longitudinal angle of the aircraft and the route to be followed, taking the intensity and direction of the wind into account.
In order to verify the effectiveness of their methods and instruments, Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral made several aerial voyages, one of which was the journey between Lisbon and Funchal in 1921, in approximately seven and a half hours. On this journey, Gago Coutinho performed 15 calculations of straight altitude lines and several observations of the strength and direction of the wind. According to his annotations, the navigation processes used “were sufficient to determine with precision any point away from the earth, as small as it might be, a resource which became essential in a projected aerial journey from Lisbon to Brazil”.
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| Seaplane Fairey F III-D nº 17 "Santa Cruz" (Museum of the Navy of Lisbon) |
The Coutinho and Cabral's saga, the South Atlantic aerial crossing, and the invention of such innovative instruments as well, inspired numerous subsequent transatlantic pilots, such as the American Charles Lindbergh, the Brazilian João Ribeiro de Barros and the Portuguese Sarmento de Beires, all of whom crossed the Atlantic in 1927.
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| Letter from Gago Coutinho to Santos = Dumont |
In an incredible document, kept in the museum of Cabangu there is a beautiful posthumous letter from Gago Coutinho addressed to Santos=Dumont, expressing admiration for the idol, describing the joy when reading about the great man's adventures in the articles of "Vie au grand-air", and affectionately referring to and Santos=Dumont as the father of aviation. Find below the full text.
"Personally, I admired Santos=Dumont before I met him in person. His aerial adventures were reported to me by the French weekly "Vie au grand-air”, when I was working in the African backlands as a geographer, half a century ago.
I noticed that he had begun his studies at first, through the spherical balloon. Then he went to the airship, only military, with electric motor. When he made the turn around the Eiffel Tower; from there he passed to the "fire engine" dirigible, which represented the danger of a "fire at the foot of the tow" event, as it was to be seen later.
And so he was taken to the airplane, already without hydrogen, almost as his vision of the "flying machine" of the future. Finally – after 52 years - Santos, had obtained material result, proving that "Man can fly", and much better than the rivals, the birds. It seems that some people were surprised that he had not made his demonstrations in his homeland, Brazil, as I many times heard 36 years ago, in Rio, causing him dislike ad indifference. But still there were not the resources for his experiences there with light engines, gasoline, in addition to qualified personnel for the construction of balloons, etc.
But there was still a lack of interest worldwide, as proved by his definitive experience in 1906 in St. Cloud. Here (in Europe) his experiences provoked a public interest in the presence of those interested in the problem, such as Blérriot and others, who saw materially the future that S. Dumont had publicly revealed. And so, his experience soon provoked other Air pilots, who after a few months already knew how to fly, with resources derived from those revealed by the "Father of Aviation", our S. Dumont. So, if others had flown better than their two heliometers - flight that I would like to see repeated every year by this time the concrete fact is that it was their experiences of 1906 the capital step that brought about such a development, as that of Company "Panair do Brasil" demonstrates with its giant airplanes, that ships 70 passengers, every week!
That's not all. In 1922, S. Dumont offered me, as his fellow experimenter, those two instruments, with which he sought to demonstrate practically the power of Airplane guidance in the Air - similar to that which - centuries later - the "Portuguese Pilots" revealed to the World, at sea. His Chronometer here, and his sextant, which also served to his studies of navigation, I have already offered to the Museum of São Paulo, studies which preceded ours.
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| Arrangement of the letter originally written in three pages |
That's what I noticed, only 25 years after his public flight, definitive. "
Lisbon, 1958 - Oct. 17 Gago Coutinho
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