Birdmen

by Lawrence Goldstone

  He took off without difficulty but at about one hundred feet the ailerons evidently malfunctioned when Frisbie attempted a turn and the biplane started downward. Frisbie fought for control but one wing clipped the top of a barn and the airplane crashed with Frisbie pinned underneath. He died an hour later. Frisbie’s wife and young daughter were in the crowd, sitting among those whose taunts had sent the aviator to his death. Although Curtiss would never have permitted the airplane to take off again without being thoroughly checked, in newspapers across the nation Frisbie was reported to have been a member of the Curtiss team. Although he didn’t know Frisbie, Curtiss felt sufficiently responsible for this first fatality in one of his airplanes to organize a benefit for his widow that raised five thousand dollars.

  The second fatality was not nearly so long in coming.

  Lincoln Beachey’s exploits caught the fascination of the public like none who had preceded him. Even Hamilton, whose flamboyance was legendary, had never generated the same clamor to pay to see him fly. Hoxsey and Johnstone had come the closest, but their exploits tended to be restricted to height and distance. Beachey did stunts. He controlled an airplane as none had before. And the airplane he controlled was, as every article about him pointed out, a Curtiss. The name Curtiss therefore became synonymous with the most daring exhibition flying, a reputation the erstwhile speed demon on land and in the air enthusiastically embraced. Whereas owning a Wright airplane connoted solid, conservative flying, owning a Curtiss meant flying in the machine Beachey flew.

  October 2, 1911, was typical. Beachey drew 20,000 people to see him fly in Dubuque, Iowa, a city whose entire population was only 57,000. It was Dubuque’s first exhibition and Beachey gave them quite a show.

  When his plane left the ground at 4 o’clock the rain was pelting down. Through it Beachey traveled to the south end of the park, then turned and followed back above the race course. On the turn, he made one of his famous dips so successfully that for a moment the machine appeared to be literally turning upside down. On righting, it glided along above the track 50 feet in the air to the north end of the park, there mounted to about 150 feet and then with a sudden turn, came swooping down toward the crowd. As they scattered in a panic it glided off again 50 feet above their heads. The descent a few minutes later was made near the starting place.

  Beachey wasn’t done.

  The second flight, a race with five motorcycles, proved the thrilling event of the meet. The plane sped around the course five times at the rate of 54 miles an hour, and came in at the finish 200 yards in the lead of the motorcycle riders. On crossing above the goal, instead of descending as the crowd had expected, Beachey took advantage of the rain and the low-hanging clouds to make an ascent above them. The plane mounted up into the air in big corkscrew spirals through the rain and straight into a cloud, out of it into another, and out again and into still another. The third disappearance lasted a full minute. Then suddenly as it had gone, the machine came volplaning toward the ground at a sharp angle. Within 60 feet of the earth it began to drop slowly, and as it touched the earth sped along a short distance to the place in which it was to be stored for the night.2

  What the public did not see was that away from the spotlight, Beachey worked relentlessly to perfect his craft. In 1911, for example, a tailspin meant almost certain death, since no aviator had found a means to recover once the aircraft began spiraling toward the ground.

  Convinced he could solve the problem, Beachey flew his Curtiss biplane to five thousand feet and then intentionally threw it into a tailspin. Trying different techniques as he spun downward, he eventually kicked the rudder hard against the spin, and the plane leveled out. (He likely would have been killed in a flexible-winged Wright.) He repeated the maneuver another eleven times to be certain it was no quirk. Then, rather than take credit for the service he had performed for other flyers, Beachey simply incorporated the move into his already stunning repertoire and called it, as he did in Dubuque, “the Corkscrew Twist.”3

  But the public Beachey was all that mattered and other exhibition flyers felt that they had little choice but to try to match his audacity. If an aviator attempted to complete a booking without a death-defying trick, both the crowds and the promoters would feel cheated and the aviator risked not being paid. And of course these aviators were proud, competitive men and the acclaim Beachey received rankled them. So “doing a Beachey” became shorthand among the exhibitionists for attempting a trick that was excessively risky and no trick was riskier than the Dip of Death. It had become Beachey’s trademark maneuver.

  Obviously, the steeper the angle to the ground, the more exciting and the more dangerous the stunt. One of the only flyers who could even approach Beachey’s near vertical was Eugene Ely. His wife, Mabel, hated the Dip, but it had become almost an obligatory part of his exhibition repertoire.

  On October 19, 1911, Ely was flying at a racetrack at the Georgia State Fair in Macon. Eight thousand people had paid to see the man famed for landing an airplane on the deck of a warship. On his second flight of the day, Ely took his airplane to three thousand feet and, as he was completing a circle of the field, “made a dip, seemingly to startle the thousands beneath him.”

  As reported in the San Francisco Call, “The machine shot down with tremendous velocity and the crowd applauded, thinking the aviator would rise as he had many times before. But Ely seem[ed] to lose his grip on the lever and the machine continued its downward plunge.” Showing remarkable presence of mind, Ely actually jumped from the airplane just before it struck the ground but the force of the fall was too much. When officials of the fair reached him, Ely was still conscious. “I lost control,” he is reported to have said. “I know I am going to die.” And he did, moments later.*1

  As had become almost customary, spectators rushed to the crash to fight for souvenirs “as police fought in vain to keep them back. In a few minutes the field was cleared of every bit of wreckage. Ely’s collar, tie, gloves, and cap similarly disappeared.”4 Spectators combed through the wreckage late into the night, looking for souvenirs.

  Mabel Ely, also her husband’s business partner, was not with Ely but en route to meet him after attending to business matters in New York. It was the first time since he had begun flying that she was absent. Mabel’s mother was quoted as insisting, “This never would have happened if Mabel had been with him,” because she never let him do anything that wasn’t safe. Mabel had a different explanation for the accident. She wrote a letter to Beachey after her husband’s death. “God punish you, Lincoln Beachey. Gene would be with me now if he had not seen you fly.”*2

  In the wake of Ely’s crash came the predictable spate of lamentation. The death of “one of the very greatest of American aviators,” the editor of Aircraft magazine wrote, “brings up the question of whether exhibition flying is a benefit or a detriment to the progress of aerial flight.” After a discussion of all the reasons flying should be conducted with the utmost care and without risk, he concluded that “carelessness upon the part of the expert and non-experience upon the part of the novice are two bad factors which have caused so many fatal accidents” and both “should be guarded against to the utmost limit.”

  This editorial and many like it missed the point entirely. In exhibitions, in private, and especially in battle, the limits of aircraft performance were going to be tested and retested. By the time of Ely’s death, few doubted that aviation would have decisive military applications. In the same issue of the Call, another item reported “The Chinese Army Equipped with Airships.”

  Even without military interest, there was no way an invention with the dramatic allure of the airplane would not continue to spur death-defying acts. So with each fatality—and Ely’s was the hundred-and-first since Tom Selfridge had died at Fort Myer—the public clamor for extreme flying increased.

  In November 1911, the Wrights, as Orville had predicted, gave up. Although exhibition flyers such as Phil Parmalee would continue to be identified as “Wright a
viators,” Wilbur and Orville officially disbanded their team and turned their energies almost exclusively toward the courtroom.

  Curtiss also had a loose arrangement with aviators flying his aircraft, although for publicity purposes he promoted the affiliation, especially with Beachey. At the same time, he tried to disavow the more disagreeable aspects of exhibition flying. He penned an article for The New York Times on December 31, 1911, in which he emphatically and unconvincingly disputed the notion that spectators came to meets to see spectacular crashes.

  But the possibility of those spectacular crashes continued to be the big draw. For the next eighteen months, Beachey performed impossible maneuvers and tempted fate across America and in the process became perhaps the most famous man in the United States. In a nation of 76 million, before radio and television, where only the tiniest percentage of Americans had ever seen or heard Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, or Wilson, by the time Beachey’s career ended as many as 20 million people had witnessed his matchless artistry. Spectators often exceeded 100,000 and twice in Chicago topped a half million; Beachey regularly earned more in a day than most Americans made in a year. His skill was so unerring, so exceptional, that he was dubbed “the Man Who Owns the Sky.”

  But Beachey had no illusions about the source of his popularity. When asked to describe his appeal, he replied, “People come to see me die.”

  Or to see pretenders die. In January 1912, before he had ever flown as a professional, a Yale graduate named Rutherford Page was being billed as “the second Lincoln Beachey.” Page had recently completed six weeks at Curtiss’s aviation school in San Diego, trained by Curtiss himself, where he had flown brilliantly. He was granted his aviation license three days before the opening of the third Los Angeles Air Meet, which was where Page decided to begin his exhibition career.5

  Before adoring crowds that cheered his every move, it seemed as if Page might well live up to the hoopla. He promised that he would push Beachey to the limit and then best him in a short handicap race; when Beachey performed a series of stunts, Page swore he would “beat Beachey or break my fool neck,” and then duplicated the “dips and sharp turns” in a flight “even more daring” than Beachey’s. When he landed, Curtiss warned him that Beachey’s maneuvers were dangerous and took years to learn. Page laughed and told Curtiss he was “all to the good.”6

  Beachey was not about to lose the spotlight to a rookie. His flying was “simply marvelous. He executed right handed and left handed spirals that were not dreamed of a year ago. With his 75 H.P. Curtiss motor and trim little machine, he left the ground and very quickly mounted high in the air. Having gained the altitude desired, he came down in small spirals that were certainly not more than three hundred feet in diameter and probably less. During these spirals he at times took his hands off the controlling wheel and even stood up.”

  Page decided that the best place to supplant the champion was the five-mile “free for all” race on January 22, in which Beachey was entered. Page took his Curtiss biplane up in a stiff wind, flew out over a ravine, and then attempted to “turn on a pivot” back to the starting point at a treacherous spot whose constant crosscurrents prompted aviators to call it “Death Curve.”

  While four thousand spectators looked on, Page’s aircraft suddenly turned nose down and plunged to the ground. Upon impact, the engine broke loose and landed on the young aviator, crushing his skull. Page died instantly. So that spectators would be prevented from rushing the fallen airplane to fight for souvenirs, the wreckage was burned on the spot.

  As was customary, the remainder of the day’s events were canceled, but the next day the crowds were back. Beachey, in his Curtiss, and Phil Parmalee in a Wright dominated the events, winning for speed and endurance. On January 28, Beachey made a stunning announcement. A “new girl aviator, Miss Florence Walker of Seattle,” whom Beachey had trained, would fly at the meet and do as well as any man. In the early afternoon, Miss Walker, short and solidly built, dressed in a long skirt and opera cape, appeared as promised and took her seat in Beachey’s Curtiss biplane. Then, “with broken silk garters flying and a 35 mile gale playing havoc with the draperies,” the woman “performed today what probably were the greatest aviation feats ever seen on Dominguez Field.” She “ascended to a great height, tilted the machine almost perpendicular, and dived back to the windswept course. The only mishap was when the wind blew off a silk garter.” Then Miss Walker sent her craft round Death Curve “at 60 miles an hour, and not more than 25 feet from the ground.”7 When the plane landed, Florence Walker removed hat and wig to reveal the familiar form of Lincoln Beachey. The thousands of onlookers, oblivious that Rutherford Page had lost his life at the very spot that Beachey had pulled his stunt, cheered wildly.

  Aeronautics declared the meet “a howling success from a show standpoint, a fair success financially, and disappointing from a sporting point of view. It was a veritable circus in the air.” Aircraft magazine agreed, characterizing the meet as “a great success.” Rutherford Page was not mentioned.

  Ten weeks later, Cal Rodgers was in Long Beach, California, where the town was planning to erect a monument to commemorate his cross-country flight. From late March until early April, Rodgers performed exhibitions, often taking passengers aloft to soar over the Pacific Ocean. Rodgers had become known for his reckless flying, ignoring friends who urged him to be more cautious. “The air is nothing to me now,” he said to reporters. “I’ve conquered it. I have never been afraid when I go up.”

  On April 3, before a crowd estimated at seven thousand, Rodgers took off in his Wright B, “circling through the air over the city, performing thrilling manoeuvres,” then engaged in a series of “Texas Tommy” figures, wild aerial gyrations that had gotten their name from a raffish dance begun at a “Negro cabaret” in San Francisco in 1910. At one point, “Seeing a flock of seagulls disporting themselves among a great swarm of sardines just over the breakers, Rodgers turned and dived down into them, scattering the birds in all directions.” The crowd cheered. “Highly elated with the outcome of his dive,” Rodgers had gained altitude and headed out to sea when suddenly he went into a steep descent. Initially, he relaxed his hands on the levers, as if he had gone into the dive intentionally, but he was then seen desperately trying to pull them back. The airplane did not respond and Rodgers “crashed into the surf and was crushed beneath the engine.”8 He perished within moments. When there was no attempt to keep spectators away from the site, some swarmed over the wreckage fighting for souvenirs even before Rodgers had died. When he examined the remains of the airplane, Rodgers’s mechanic, Frank Shafer, found “the body of a seagull tightly wedged between the tail and the rudder of his aeroplane.”9 The gull had rendered the rudder immovable and snapped the control wire when Rodgers tried to pull out of the dive.

  In the wake of Rodgers’s death, Walter Brookins assembled a group of aviators at the Hotel Manhattan in New York to found the “Safe and Sane” flyers’ club. All members pledged not to attempt extreme stunts, particularly the Dip of Death. Brookins “pointed out that of the early airmen … the Wrights, Curtiss, Grahame-White, and Paulhan are still alive and happy, a group that took up aviation immediately after the pioneers who gained their fame has now become nearly extinct.” Those who died, according to Brookins “were almost always the trick riders and daredevils of the sport.” Although Brookins tried to recruit Tom Baldwin, Curtiss, and flyers known for conservatism, such as Frank Coffyn, his effort went nowhere. The money was in tricks and most flyers were more than willing to risk their lives rather than their livelihoods.

  Despite Orville’s grousing about his association with the traitorous Brookins, the Wrights were content to allow Phil Parmalee to continue to fly under their aegis. He had been joined on the circuit by his friend and another Wright-trained flyer, J. Clifford Turpin. Just weeks after Brookins’s aborted organizing effort, Parmalee and Turpin were flying at an exhibition in Seattle. On May 30, the very day Wilbur Wright died, Turpin, in a Wright B, was
coming in to land, “careening down the airfield … at 50 mph,” when an “unknown man rushed across the track and would have been beheaded by the machine but for the quick action of the aviator.”10 Turpin turned away from the landing strip toward the packed grandstand but could not gain enough altitude to clear the crowd. He cut his engines, trying to bring down the airplane short of the spectators, but crashed into the lower tier of boxes, killing two spectators, one of them a ten-year-old boy, and injuring fifteen more. According to the Chicago Day Book, a “heavily jeweled woman’s hand was found in the wreckage.”11

  Clifford Turpin just before crashing into the crowd in Seattle.

  Although everyone assured him that the accident was unavoidable, Turpin was distraught. Still, he and Parmalee refused to cancel the tour. They moved on to Yakima, where two days later in high wind, Parmalee took his seat at the controls. With Turpin’s accident so fresh, the promoters asked him to postpone the flight until the wind abated. Parmalee, known for safe and prudent flying, is reported to have “laughed at the persistent and fatal misfortune that had dogged aviators for the week and climbed to his seat.” At about four hundred feet, he passed the rim of Moxie Canyon, seemed to have been hit by a side gust of wind, and went into a vertical dive from which he could not pull out. His body was found by local farmers and pulled from under the wreckage.