Throughout the whole of 1935 Carlos Haya’s Flight Card registered a great number of flights aimed at carrying out bombing campaigns, aerial photography and attacks using machine gun. After devoting himself to so many and varied aspects of aviation, and perhaps as a prelude to or premonition of the tremendous war that was about to break out and which would cast a shadow over the relations between the Spanish, Haya seems to have focused a considerable amount of attention on a number of weapons such as bombs, fuses, explosives and detonators as well as bombing formations.

A likely result of these unfinished studies was the project named Incendiary shrapnel “H” Bomb with an explosive mass consisting of buckshot and phosphorus. Weighing no more than 10 kilograms, at least in its original version, the aim was to drop it enemy plane formations producing a fragmented explosion which had a great effect on several air targets simultaneously. The invention was completed with the introduction of a fuse mechanism that could be set off by impact, being fitted with a delay system capable of being fixed on land, or be directly time activated. The whole idea, which at the time was undoubtedly crude, turned out to be a splendid precedent for a later use by the German Luftwaffe in the Second World War, when bombing large allied plane formations with light bombs from fighter planes flying at higher altitudes.

The incendiary bomb project as well as the “Haya” Fuse with the designs and the studies for their fabrication and use, were donated to the Air Force, being received at that time by General Kindelán, although the project did not come to fruition, in spite of the ingenious character of the proposed system.

Many other of Haya’s projects remained, no doubt, in his head and in lost documents, divided up into barely glimpsed diagrams and sketches, that were never realised. You will recall, for example, the Schematic Pilot Itineraries, something akin to a modern day Route and Objective File, or a Method of Deviation Correction, or the application of a Fuel Consumption Calculator.

Haya was, without a doubt, an imaginative man. This facility was borne out by the little ideas he thought up to solve a number of problems easily and in an ingenious and even amusing way. In order to drop medicines gently into the Sanctuary, he came up with the idea of clipping a turkey’s wings and tying its legs so that it couldn’t go far; all manifestations of his personal trademark. His highly individual bomb release consisted of a cord running from the cockpit to a cowbell placed next to the soldiers who were dropping the bombs manually from the rear door.

As in many cases, the outbreak of war interrupted many peacetime and creative projects for Carlos Haya, marking a change to a frenetic and exceptional activity in the field of aerial war, as is patent in his list of war aeronautical achievements, until his heroic and glorious death in combat.

In view of all that he achieved in such a short space of time, we can only hazard a guess at what that creative dynamism might have produced if it had survived the war, and dream of the unquestionably valuable products of his mind and his creative spirit.