Would You Pay $1.5 Million For The Only One Out There?

"After the turn of the century, in the clear blue skies over Germany, came a roar and a thunder like you've never heard, or the screaming cry of a big war bird"  - The Royal Guardsmen

If you're old enough to remember that song, and I am, you remember Snoopy mounting his faithful Sopwith Camel to take on the Red Baron over the western front. Indeed, a real Sopwith Camel was the real Red Baron's nemesis, although few debates in aviation history are testier than those between the Ball-got-him and the Australian-infantry-got-him camps.

Of course, Snoopy didn't have a real Sopwith Camel... except for a very few museums, nobody does... or do they? It turns out that yes, Virginia, there is a real Sopwith Camel in private hands, and it's for sale, and it's not made of pure unobtainium -- it's just really expensive.

The Sopwith is for sale on eBay with an opening bid of $750,000 -- Jim has already warned Rob that his Christmas bonus ain't gonna cut it -- but I digress. If you can't live with the suspense of an auction, the owner has thoughtfully provided a "buy it now" button for $1,500,000 -- which is what he himself paid for the machine, he says.

What's so special about this wood-and-fabric machine that makes it cost as much as an Eclipse? Well, scarcity, for one. Twentieth century fighter planes were, to the nations that built them and the aerial armies that employed them, as disposable as the tin helmets of the infantry (or the heads under those helmets). And they weren't built for durability, either. 5,597 Sopwith F.1 Camels were thrown together by a veritable squadron of British light industrial firms. (For example, Boulton Paul, which was previously best known for making the Scott Antarctic expedition's tents, got its start in aviation by building Camels and other aircraft under license).

They were prone to crashes. The machine was fiendishly unstable, a double-edged sword that made it difficult to fly but highly maneuverable, especially in right turns assisted by the torque of its rotary engine -- and it was flown by pilots with little training. RFC, RNAS and RAF records recount the loss of 413 pilots to the enemy, and 385 due to accidents.

After the end of the Great War, those Camels that were not expended as firewood or sold to scrap dealers were often passed on to other nations, including Belgium, which had suffered badly in the war, and the new nations of 1918, such as Greece, Poland and Latvia. Camels fought on both sides in the Russian Civil War and in the Russo-Polish war, and the sketchy records of those campaigns indicate that the plane's character didn't change -- combat effectiveness teamed with non-combat crashes.

"The trouble is stunting too near the ground," the introspective Canadian ace Roy Brown wrote home. "The number that are killed that way is awful but that is one thing I never do under any circumstances, as I have seen too much of that."

The Camel is associated with aces, especially Canadians, such as Billy Barker  and Donald McLaren (who flew Camels from the same batch as this survivor; that's Barker in front of the crashed Camel) and Roy Brown (who did, or didn't, shoot down von Richthofen. I'm inclined to give Brown credit, for even if the ground fire got the Baron, he ran into the ground fire in his attempts to solve his Roy Brown problem). But above all, the Camel is, along with the Fokker Triplane, the most evocative aircraft of the Great War.

Is there anyone who does not remember this cliched movie scene?

"How man hours do you have, kid?"

"Eight, sir."

"In Camels?"

"Uh, one, sir."

"One hour in Camels, he says! Great Scott, what are they doing? They're sending me lambs to the slaughter!"

But there is an essential truth in it, that long before today's insurance companies would consider a pilot seasoned enough to take the 172 around the pattern while a nervous instructor paced at the base of the tower, young boys of 1918 were horsing Camels off uneven grass strips to joust with the kaleidoscope colors of Richthofen's Flying Circus.

It was hard on many things, including the Camels.

The Camels were hard right back, shooting down the staggering figure of 1,294 enemy aircraft.

After the war, the Camel was quickly obsolete, and thousands of them were broken up and burnt as firewood, their engines and other metal parts tossed aside to be consumed in the scrap drives of the next war.

There are only four other original F.1 Camels left, one each in Brussels, Krakow, Chicago, and at the RAF Museum in Hendon, and none of which will ever fly again. (There are also three F.2 Naval Camels, similarly situated in Little Rock, London (IWM) and at the Canadian National Air Museum). That gives a total of eight original Camels anywhere, full stop.

So an original Camel is a special thing. There are a number of replica Camels flying, but there are no originals in airworthy status -- this machine was carefully restored by British Aerospace in 1989, on behalf of a previous owner.

The owner's people also take great pains to point out B6291's history, which has been meticulously researched. They have determined that it is:

• The only well-documented original flyable Camel to survive
• The only surviving complete Camel with documented history placing it in an operational squadron on the Western Front during WWI
• The only surviving Camel to have its original Data Plate
• The only survivor built by Sopwith Aviation

This last point is worth treating in a bit of depth, because the widespread industrial mobilization of the 1914-18 war made total war possible, but its output was not popular with pilots of the period.

Pilots tried hard to avoid flying airframes built by licensees or behind engines that were not built in the original plant of the designing firm. This was true in every service; an American who drew a SPAD built by Breguet or Nieuport would be long in the face, especially if its engine was license-built, too.

A Sopwith-built Sopwith would have been quite the sought-after ticket for the fighter pilot of 1918.

Now, this aircraft has been rebuilt a couple of times, not just with the BAE 1989 major reconstruction (in, as it happens, the same factory where it was built in 1917), but also during the Great War, after two crashes that injured the pilots. Somewhere during that process, the engine listed on the data plate, a 9-cylinder Clerget, was replaced by a Le Rhone. So the plane is not entirely as it was delivered by the Sopwith factory.

It's just the most original Sopwith Camel in the world. And the only one to have flown in recent decades.

So... if you want a truly unique piece of aviation history, buzz on over to eBay. But don't expect the owner to take your '71 El Camino in trade. Even if it does have a new alternator.

FMI: www.1917SopwithCamel.com