Creator of Early Warplanes : Sir Thomas Sopwith; ‘The Genius of Flight’

Aviation pioneer Sir Thomas Sopwith, the adventure-loving creator of the famed World War I Sopwith Camel and Pup aircraft--planes that turned the course of two world wars--died Friday.

“The genius of flight is dead,” said a headline in the Evening Standard newspaper of London.

His son, Thomas, his only survivor, said he was 101 and died at his 19th-Century manor home near Winchester in southern England.

‘Died of Old Age’

“Really he died of old age, but he’d had a marvelous (life),” said Thomas Sopwith, 56, from his office in Brighton.

Sopwith, last of a generation of British air pioneers, taught himself to fly in 1910 and began designing airplanes at age 26. An accomplished race car driver and yachtsman before he discovered his passion for airplanes, Sopwith set several early flying records.

“We had a lot of crashes in those days but, bless you, it was fun,” he recalled on his 100th birthday last year.

Sir John Lidbury, a former director of Sopwith’s Hawker Siddeley aircraft company, said, “He was a wonderful engineer, with great technical ability and flair. . . . Everything he put his hand to he did thoroughly and well.”

More than 16,000 Sopwith airplanes were built for action in World War I, including 6,000 Camels, which shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied plane. A Camel flown by Roy Brown shot down German Baron Manfred Von Richthofen, the infamous “Red Baron.”

Years later the plane became legendary again when cartoonist Charles Schulz had Snoopy at the controls in the Peanuts comic strip as the beagle fought imagined battles with the Baron.

Wealthy Engineering Family

Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith, born in 1888 into a wealthy engineering family, was 16 when the Wright brothers flew under power for the first time in the United States.

Sopwith, who was knighted in 1953, loved all racing and became involved with motorcycles, motorboats, ballooning and sailing before taking up flying in 1910.

He bought his first airplane for 630 pounds (then about $3,000) and, after two flights as a passenger, he taught himself to fly. His first solo flight ended in a crash, but he was not injured.

Sopwith founded Sopwith Aviation Co. in 1912 and gave up piloting for design two years later. His company created the Snipe, the Pup and the Camel.

Jack Bruce, an aviation historian, said some pilots grew to love the Camel, which he called a “neurotically responsive machine,” but only after they had spent time with it.

Though unforgiving in the hands of novices, the Camel, Bruce said, had superb climb and maneuverability. Its firepower was provided by two forward-facing machine guns.

Sopwith’s second company, founded between the wars, took the name of his test pilot Harry Hawker, who died in 1921.

In 1936, Sopwith gambled by building 1,000 of his Hurricane airplanes without an advance order from the government, but the planes later became the backbone of the Royal Air Force when World War II broke out. They were credited with winning the Battle of Britain.

On his 100th birthday a procession of his planes--from the Camel to the Harrier--flew over his home in tribute.

Blindness prevented him seeing them.