Farnborough to Salisbury Plain without any control other than the
rudder being touched; and on another occasion it flew a complete
circle with all controls locked automatically assuming the
correct bank for the radius of turn. The peculiar form of wing
used, the camber of which varied from the root to the tip, gave
rise however, to a certain loss in efficiency, and there was also
a difficulty in the pilot assuming adequate control when desired.
Other machines designed to be stable--such as the German Etrich
and the British Weiss gliders and Handley-Page monoplanes--were
based on the analogy of a wing attached to a certain seed found
in Nature (the 'Zanonia' leaf), on the righting effect of
back-sloped wings combined with upturned (or 'negative') tips.
Generally speaking, however, the machines of the 1909-1912 period
relied for what automatic stability they had on the principle of
the dihedral angle, or flat V, both longitudinally and laterally.
Longitudinally this was obtained by setting the tail at a
slightly smaller angle than the main planes.

The question of reducing the resistance by adopting 'stream-line'
forms, along which the air could flow uninterruptedly without the
formation of eddies, was not at first properly realised, though
credit should be given to Edouard Nieuport, who in 1909 produced
a monoplane with a very large body which almost completely
enclosed the pilot and made the machine very fast, for those
days, with low horse-power. On one of these machines C. T.
Weyman won the Gordon-Bennett Cup for America in 1911 and
another put up a fine performance in the same race with only a 30
horse-power engine. The subject, was however, early taken up by
the British Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was
established by the Government in 1909, and designers began to