Tuesday Torque: Rotary Engine Challenges

Great War pilots faced great challenges, learning to fly, fight in the air, and handle planes with peculiarities that are difficult for pilots with long experience.  Whenever technology happens there is a learning curve, and people die while troubles are sorted out and overcome. It happened with steam trains as they sped up in the Nineteenth Century before reliable braking, communication, and signal systems were developed.  We have seen it recently with Boeing airliners with changes to the engines and software systems in the planes.  Rotary engine peculiarities were responsible for many crashes and pilot deaths.  Some say that the handling characteristics of the Camel killed as many pilots as the Germans.  Here are a couple videos that give a pretty good look at the problems pilots had to overcome.