page_title: Sydney Vincent Sippe
section_title: Aviation pioneer
hierarchical_section_title: Sydney Vincent Sippe / Aviation pioneer
caption_attribution_description: English: Steel tubing monoplane invented by Sippe brothers et al. 1909-10
context_page_description: Major Sydney Vincent Sippe DSO OBE FRAeS was a British pioneer aviator. He designed, built, and tested early aeroplanes, being the first pilot to take off from the sea in Britain. He flew many missions in World War I, including some of the first ever bombing raids. He won honours from several countries, particularly for his part in the 1914 bombing of a German Zeppelin factory.
context_section_description: After leaving school, in February 1906 Sippe became an engineering apprentice with British Westinghouse in Manchester.
  Between late 1909 and early 1910, just a year after Wilbur Wright first demonstrated powered flight in Europe, Sippe (aged 20), his brother Arthur, and their friend James Jensen (or Jenson) designed and built a monoplane from steel tubing.  Its attempted maiden flight on 24 April 1910 at Addington, Croydon, failed due to insufficient power:
  Sydney Sippe was thrown forward with some violence and his nose came into collision with one of the steel tubes. The nose came off worst, and a piece of flesh was removed from the inside of his thigh. That, with sundry bruises, was all. A well-meaning friend rushed up with a flask of whisky, which he thrust into the pilot's mouth, and so Sydney Sippe arrived home to his mother with a broken nose, a bleeding thigh—and slightly intoxicated.
  He learned to fly at the Avro school at Brooklands, gaining his licence in January 1912 "in a way which showed that he had thoroughly mastered the art". He immediately became a test and demonstration pilot. Three weeks after his flying test he survived a crash near Finchampstead caused by a frozen carburettor; the aircraft was wrecked, but Sippe escaped unhurt.
  In the spring of 1912 he test-flew the Avro hydro-aeroplane at Barrow-in-Furness, making the first ever flight from the sea in Britain on 2 April.
  He shortly afterwards tested a monoplane for Hanriot in France. Engine failure forced him to land in a cornfield; the plane ended up upside down, but was undamaged, and he flew it again in the first Aerial Derby. This was a race round London, competing against various European pilots including Thomas Sopwith. Engine trouble forced Sippe out of the race.
  Later that year he supervised the construction of aircraft in Milan for the Bristol Aeroplane Company, and took part in an Italian long-distance flying competition. On his return to the UK he took up flight testing and instruction at Salisbury.
caption: The Sippes' monoplane
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