The Camel (and many other WWI fighters) had a rotary engine. In a rotary engine, the propeller is fixed to the crankcase and the cylinders rotate around the crankshaft. This made quite a bit of torque, which could be a problem in a short-coupled aircraft.
As for starting, a lone person could start it himself or herself; but usually the pilot stayed in the cockpit to work the switch while a ground crewman spun the prop.
Ah, my mistake, then. I didn’t recognize the number, and assumed that that was because it was a very new plane, not because it was an old one.
Hey, we’re not giving the WW1 pilot any study time; why would we give the 1984 pilot that help?
OK, would they know how to work the switch? Would they know how to work the “blip switch,” to control the power?
How many people could jump into a 1918 Model-T and drive it?
There’s an instructional video. 
The study time of the F-111 pilot would have been built in long before they ever set foot in a fighter jet. They would be familiar with the history of aviation, and would have certainly flown prop planes not too dissimilar from a WWI fighter. It is not that unlikely that they would have flown bi-planes or other WWI era or replica planes.
An F-111 would be entirely novel and alien to a WWI fighter.
It depends entirely on the experience of the 1984 pilot.
On the one hand they may have minimal piston engine time and no tail-dragger time. On the other hand they may be an avid vintage aircraft enthusiast who’s read all about Sopwith Camels and has already flown a myriad of vintage aircraft.
Worst case, if they can get it started, they will quickly lose control on the take-off roll as they get startled by the torque and gyroscopic effects causing the plane to veer off the runway. Working in their favour is that the runway is probably a square paddock and they might have a bit of clear ground to play with before they either ground loop or get airborne. This is something that can catch experienced pilots out, more commonly on landing.
The big difference between going from a modern to vintage aircraft and vice versa is that the 1916 pilot doesn’t even know an F-111 is technically possible. The 1984 pilot knows all about the history of flight.
You’re a pretty smart old buzzard!
I would certainly like to see modern jet pilots take a crack at starting up a WWI-era plane with no prior study or training. I bet many would eventually pull it off but it would fun to watch them as they try to figure it out. I don’t think a WWI pilot has much of a chance of starting up a jet fighter.
This made me wonder if an engineer ca. 1918 familiar with slide rules could operate a modern scientific calculator. Push-buttons certainly existed by then and anyone familiar with an adding machine could probably figure out how the calculator was meant to be operated. Use of on-screen menus might be a hurdle, though.
Conversely, I don’t think many new engineers today could figure out how to make a slide rule perform a calculation. Given enough time they might recognize the logarithmic nature of the scales and from there recognize how they could be used for mathematical operations. Most of my slide rule manuals state that several weeks are required to “master” the slide rule so I don’t think that instrument was ever easy to just “pick up.”
Can lassos attach to lightning bolts? Can citrine confer magical powers? Will your wind-up watch stop at the moment of your death and restart at the moment of your resurrection?
While this question is interesting in its own right, our world and the world in which the movie occurs operate according to fundamentally different rules. One of the movie’s genre rules is “Expertise in a broad field is transferable to anything remotely related to that field,” and that’s clearly not how it works in the real world.
[Post spoilered by moderator]
Moderator Note
This question is not about the movie, but really about the differences in aircraft from the time periods in question. Pointing out that movies operate by different rules is both obvious and irrelevant to the basic question. This is essentially thread shitting; let’s refrain.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
My opinion is that not only would a WWI pilot fail, but so would a WWII pilot, or for that matter a contemporary pilot who had never flown high performance jets. I’m tempted to say thst even a modern jet pilot could not fly it without some serious dual instruction first. An F-111 is a tricky bird to fly, it has wickedly complex manual systems that require a lot of training, and actually required two people to fly it safely.
A big factor would be the speed at which things happen. You aren’t going to cruise around the airport area VFR in this thing, and people used to flying slow VFR will find themselves miles padt the airport before they figure out how to lower the gear.
If you’ve never flown a jet, thing like not understanding spool-up time can get you killed.
As for a modern pilot flying a WWI plane - sure. Prop starting is still done and easy to learn (chock the wheels, mags on, mixture rich, throttle in 1/2, and start flipping), and WWI fighters were light and responsive. The biggest thing would probably be landing if you have never flown a rsildragger. Remember, those WWI pilots often only had a handful (4-10 hrs) of training hours before they were sent off to fly solo. More of fhem were killed in training than by dogfighting. Most were not good pilots, unless they survived long enough to develop real experience.
One of the handling foibles of the Camel is that it had a rotary (not radial) engine, in which the crankshaft is fixed and the cylindees spin around it with the prop. This amount of mass spinning at 1200 rpm apparently caused some serious gyroscopic precession effects that had to be dealt with by the pilot.
But a modern pilot learning to fly a Camel is orders of magnitude easier than a WWI pilot trying tomfly an F-111.
Including a helicopter, according to the scriptwriters of Biggles.
Who obviously never understood that fixed-wing and rotary-wing flight are entirely different skills.
It’s also a giant spoiler for a movie currently in release, when OP was very careful to avoid such spoilers.
Good point. Since I have not seen the movie in question myself I am not sure which specific points are spoilers (although I can guess). Given this, I have spoilered the entire post.
My apologies for the spoiler. I thought the OP had been answered and discussion was both exploring other related questions and veering into the OP implications for the movie (posts 13-15, including a mod), so figured that continuing that discussion would be in line with GQ protocol. But the spoiler aspect of my post is definitely real, and I shouldna done that.
Nope. Absolutely not.
I have flown a 1942 airplane. I’m pretty sure I could fly one from WWI, although at first it might be interesting in all sorts of annoying ways. There’s not a chance in hell I could fly an F111.
A WWI era airplane did not have an electrical system, radio, or navigational systems beyond a map and maybe a compass. As @bryanmaguire notes, it’s possible they wouldn’t even know how to get an F111 started. In WWI seat belts were optional and often absent - in open cockpit airplanes. Radar didn’t exist. I’ve flown ultralights that had more electrical equipment and sophistication than WWI airplanes.
An F111 is late 60’s/early 70’s technology. They weren’t nearly as automated as a more modern airplane. Meanwhile, a WWI airplane likely had NO buttons to push whatsoever. No flaps, spoilers, afterburners, the gear was down and welded…
As I said, I know I couldn’t just get into an F111 and go and I’ve a lot more knowledge about the sort of systems an F111 has than some dude form 1917.
Not as long as 12 months, no, but longer than just a few minutes.
It’s not just what buttons to push - the WWI guy is used to airplanes that fly at, to us, what would be annoying slow speeds in a car on a freeway. When you move from that to faster speeds you have to adjust your thinking, you have to anticipate more, and you can get lost a hell of a lot faster.
At least put the poor man in a simulator for awhile so he doesn’t accidentally kill himself or bystanders.
Potentially fatal if you have the trim way off. That’s a bit of an extreme, but stuff happens. And the WWI guy would have no concept of swept wings and how to fly one, which would be different than the sort of biplane he’d most likely be used.
I’ll just note that some of those dials might be later additions.
^ This.
Huh. I used to take my husband flying with all the time, never had a problem…
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
Dammit, that alone would kick me out of the movie. Stupid comic books
A no-prize is a Marvel thing.
Chuck Yeager supposedly took 2 hours of dual instruction in an ultralight trainer aircraft before soloing an ultralight himself. And if Chuck felt that was necessary… well, it’s probably a good idea for anyone.
A Sopwith Camel had different enough flight characteristics that the muscle memory of an F111 pilot would cause trouble at the worst possible times.
If the Sopwith Camel needs to be handpropped the 1984 pilot may or may not know how to go about it. Sure, that topic was probably covered early in flight school, in theory, but do it wrong and you’ll die fast. Or maybe just lose an arm.
Trust me - a 1960’s, or even a 1940’s, prop plane is a LOT different than a WW1 era airplane. I don’t care how much you study the “history of aviation”, studying to actually fly an airplane is much different than aviation history.
The 1942 Stearman biplane I flew was different enough from a typical 1960’s trainer that an untutored pilot could get into trouble just pulling out of the parking slot. Ground handling characteristics are VERY different, just to start. No, even in the 1960’s, pilots in training were NOT usually flying biplanes or WWI or replica WWI airplanes. For one thing the airplanes from the 1930’s/40’s onward were a LOT safer, more forgiving, and easier to handle both on the ground and in the air. And by 1960 trainers were even easier to fly, handle, and were safer yet. That’s one reason the training accident rate went way, way down. In WWI they had problems with people getting killed on take-off, much less any other portion of the flight.
They might ground loop it just on the way to the taxiway.
Don’t know about these days but when I was in flight school in the late 1990’s we had to learn to use an E6B… which is basically a WWII era circular slide rule. Do they still require that these days? A 1980’s era pilot probably could figure out the basics on a slide rule with E6B familiarity, although “mastering” it might take longer.
Maybe he or she has never seen one before, but any “engineer” who cannot figure out the scales and how to perform calculations is not one you really want designing your high-performance jet fighter. This is not directly comparable to the weeks of simulator time necessary to master tricky-to-fly aircraft with complex controls.
ETA not sure what are the most popular of scientific calculators (HP-15C and ilk) but they did not really go in for too many on-screen menus
Modern “scientific calculators” don’t do on-screen menus, but graphing calculators like the TI-80somethings, which are probably more common nowadays, use them all over the place. Though the scientific calculator (with trig functions, logs and exponentials, etc., but no graphing) is the more directly analogous tool to a slide rule.
A solid understanding of the properties of logarithms should make it obvious how to use a slide rule… but the best way to get that solid understanding is by using a slide rule extensively. That’s one of the reasons why I think that their use should still be taught in schools, even though electronic calculators are superior tools.
Yeah, just as a solid understanding of arithmetic should make it obvious how to use an abacus.
Still going to take a bit before someone is proficient with it.
But, as far as that goes, I would say that I personally learned to understand logarithms more intuitively after having played with and learned to use a slide rule.
Yes, but probably more similar than a Sopwith Camel to an F-111.
My point was more that someone who ends up flying an F-111 is probably going to be fairly interested in aviation, and have more than a simple passing familiarity with older planes.
As you point out, even as not a fighter pilot, you have experience with older model planes.
I didn’t say that they would be training in them, I was saying that, due to their interest in aviation, they have a reasonable chance of having flown them, just for their own interest.
My overall point is that an F-111 pilot, while certainly not sure to be able to fly a WWI bi-plane, would be infinitely more likely to be able to than the reverse.
If you had a movie where a fighter pilot went back in time and had to fly WWI planes, it would not require much suspension of disbelief on my part to assume, or to even be given, a backstory that included experience with such a plane. The reverse, as portrayed in the movie discussed in this thread, requires more suspension of disbelief than the time travel required to get him there.
I couldn’t use a slide rule to save my life, but I design aircraft quite fine, thank you. I live in the now, not the past.
Anyone designing a modern plane with a slide rule, and not modern computational analysis, is not going to design an optimized plane. It’s going to be too heavy, for starters.