The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  Johnstone himself had predicted his death in the air and also the spectators’ indifference to it. He knew that spectators were necessary for his chosen occupation but he didn’t expect sympathy from them. He had expressed his sentiments in a plodding article he wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about three weeks before the Denver accident.

  I fly to survive. If I were not obliged there, I would not do it. I am fatalistic … I believe that the hour of each one is fixed in advance, but for those which are attracted by the plays of the sky, it comes very early. I say to you, people who come to see us want emotions. And if we fall, do you believe that they think of us and cry over our fate? At all. They are well too occupied looking at the following and wondering whether it goes rejouer (replay) the scene.

  Hoxsey, who had matched everything his friend Johnstone did, from stunts to altitude attempts, followed him in death a month later on December 31, 1910. Hoxsey was attempting to break his own altitude record on the last day of the International Air Meet at Dominguez Field in Los Angeles, the first major air exhibition held in the U.S. At seven thousand feet, Hoxsey disappeared in the clouds, itself chancy at a time when aircraft had no instrument to display attitude.

  Many spectators followed Hoxsey’s progress with binoculars. He reappeared from the clouds a bit later in a steep descent. All assumed Hoxsey had achieved a new altitude record and expected him to perform a celebratory “dive of death” and pull out when close to the ground. Instead, the Wright Flyer never recovered and crashed, killing Hoxsey and destroying the barograph that had recorded his altitude. He was twenty-six years old. The cause was never determined.

  The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial the next day that called Hoxsey’s record attempt a stunt that had served no purpose: “The (existing) altitude record is high enough for any practical purposes. In fact, it is too high, experts say.”

  Five of nine members of the Wright exhibition team lost their lives in crashes before the Wrights dissolved the team in November 1911. The Wright brothers, sometimes characterized as stingy and mean-spirited, paid monthly annuities to the spouses of the men killed flying for them. All except the first presidential pilot and bachelor Archibald Hoxsey, whose mother received a “comfortable sum.”

  The Stardust Twins had set unofficial—and unintentional—records for backward flight in 1910 at an exhibition at Belmont Park in New York. Fierce winds that day did not stop Johnstone and Hoxsey, who took off in separate Model B’s. Once in the air, the two could make no forward progress against the high winds, which carried them backward. They went along for the ride. Johnstone landed fifty-five miles from Belmont Park, while Hoxsey was able to set down twenty-five miles distant. The amazing flights only added to the growing lore of the Stardust Twins.

  In 1911, the year following Hoxsey’s death, exhibition pilots died at the rate of five per month. The October 14, 1911 edition of the New York Times reported the grim milestone of a hundred persons killed to date worldwide in aircraft accidents. Most of those on the Times list had been exhibition pilots, including the one-hundredth victim, Hans Schmidt, a Swiss flyer killed in a Berne exhibition. In an example of the lurid newspaper style popular in 1911, the Times reported, “(Schmidt’s) machine fell 130 feet, the gasoline exploded and the aviator was incinerated.”

  The Times ran the entire one hundred–person “Death Roll.” Reading the morbid list must have caused those involved with aviation, as well as those who knew nothing about it, to wonder if the new technology asked a price too high in exchange for little more than stoking man’s fascination with novel devices.

  4

  NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN

  EUGENE Burton Ely, destined to become the first pilot to accomplish an aviation feat many thought impossible, began his flying career in 1909 by climbing into an airplane without a lesson or a clue how to fly it.

  At the time, Ely was selling cars in Portland, Oregon. The owner of the dealership, who was not a pilot and also happened to be afraid of flying, became the northwest agent for the Curtiss Aeroplane Company. He bought a Curtiss Pusher as part of the deal.

  Salesman Ely, who earlier in life had been one of the first automobile racers in the United States, assumed that circling a racetrack at high speed in the barely-controllable vehicles of the time more than qualified him to fly a barely-controllable airplane of the time. He took off in the brand-new Curtiss. And promptly crashed. Embarrassed and with little choice but to purchase the wreck, Ely repaired it and taught himself to fly. Despite the inauspicious start, Ely saw a future in aviation. He left the automobile-selling business to seek his fortune as a pilot.

  Ely’s self-taught flying skills caught the eye of Glenn Curtiss, who hired him for his exhibition team. The visionary Curtiss also set the stage for Ely’s contribution to naval aviation. Fifteen years before General Billy Mitchell sank a battleship from the air, Curtiss proved the concept by throwing fake bombs from his Pusher at battleship-shaped targets, scoring fifteen hits of twenty-two throws. He prophesized that “the battles of the future will be fought in the air.” Without air cover, Curtiss warned, “battleships would be blown apart in case of war.” It was all part of Curtiss’s sales pitch to peddle airplanes to the U.S Navy, even though no one was certain at the time what exactly the Navy would do with them.

  In 1910, Curtiss convinced the navy brass to investigate the possibilities of using airplanes at sea. The navy, with a recommendation from Curtiss, offered Ely the opportunity to become the first pilot to take off from a ship.

  On November 14, 1910, within a year of learning to fly, Ely found himself sitting in his Curtiss Pusher on an eighty-three foot long makeshift wood runway perched out over the forecastle of the cruiser USS Birmingham, anchored near Hampton Roads, Virginia. Ely could not swim and wore inflated bicycle tubes crisscrossed on his chest as a life vest in the event of the unthinkable. Thousands of spectators watched as an approaching squall line darkened the sky. Not to go would have convinced the many skeptics on hand that such a flight was not possible except under the most favorable weather conditions, if at all.

  Eugene Ely prepares for first takeoff from a ship.

  Despite the weather, all involved agreed to give it a try, no one more determined than Ely. They had planned for Ely to take off while the ship steamed into the wind to lend lift to the aircraft. But with anchor chain still coming out of the water and the squall line almost overhead, Ely could not wait for the ship to move. He did what everyone who knew him expected, and started a takeoff roll.

  Ely became airborne, but barely. As soon as the little Curtiss cleared the Birmingham, it began an unpromising, dispiriting descent toward failure. While all held their breath, the wheels and propeller tips touched the sea—an involuntary but unambiguous baptism of all future carrier pilots and aircraft—before Ely gained speed and began to climb.

  Having made history, Ely triumphantly flew in the wrong direction out to sea before he recognized his mistake. He turned around and landed on the beach at Norfolk’s Willoughby Spit, as well as on Page One of most newspapers in the world.

  Eugene Ely taking off from the USS Birmingham in his Curtiss Pusher. Aircraft wheels and propeller tips briefly touched the water.

  Three months later, on January 18, 1911, the navy was ready to try landing on a ship. Once again, it called upon Ely, who agreed to work the historic attempt into his busy exhibition schedule. By then, he was much in demand.

  For the shipboard landing, shipyard workers constructed a 120-foot runway of two-inch wooden planks on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay. Three arresting hooks, the first ever employed, were installed on the Curtiss Pusher. If all went as planned, the hooks would catch ropes weighted with sandbags strung across the short runway. If all else failed, the little Curtiss even had a brake, a foot-operated board that pushed down on the nose wheel, technology leftover from covered wagon days and still employed on Soap Box Derby racers. Thousands of spectators watched from shore, as did many dignitaries aboard tw
o cruisers anchored five hundred yards from the Pennsylvania, also at anchor. Much was at stake.

  Ely, again wearing inflated bicycle tubes as a precaution against the untoward, departed from a local racetrack. Ten minutes later he approached the ship. At an altitude of about a hundred feet, Ely cut the Pusher’s motor and landed dead in the middle of the prepared deck on the Pennsylvania. The arresting hooks caught the ropes exactly as planned. Ely did not need the foot brake, the wooden side rails meant to keep him out of the water, nor the canvas barricade at the end of the runway placed there to catch him if all else failed.

  All who witnessed the event erupted in applause. Captain Charles Pond, skipper of the Pennsylvania and an instant supporter of the branch of naval aviation he had just seen born, declared, “The most important landing of a bird since the dove flew back to Noah’s ark!”

  Ely, who had made history twice in four months, accepted his praise and then confidently sat down in his aircraft as a mechanic swung the propeller to start the motor. Ely adjusted his goggles, checked the controls, and departed the ship, even though it was not required of him. He was, after all, an exhibition pilot. And there was a large crowd present.

  Except for notable modern upgrades, everything Ely used to take off and land on the Pennsylvania is still used today.

  The navy was pleased, although Ely’s wary assessment after the landing test might have given the attending brass a sleepless night. “It was easy enough,” said Ely, who then added, “I think the trick could be successfully turned nine times out of ten!”

  Ely flew a Curtiss Model D. It was a contemporary of the Wright Model B but more advanced. A steering wheel arrangement controlled pitch and yaw. A shoulder-mounted yoke controlled roll via ailerons, which Curtiss employed to circumvent Wright wing-warping patents. Wing-warping died out before ragtime music. Ailerons are still used today, although no longer controlled with the shoulders.

  Ely, who by any standard was the first U.S. Navy pilot, desired to join the navy but was not invited because there was no official naval aviation at the time. He continued to fly in exhibitions and was a sensation wherever he performed. His future seemed bright to everyone but him. Ely’s comment to a Des Moines Register reporter inquiring about plans after his triumphant naval experiments echoed the fatalism of exhibition pilots of the day. “I guess I’ll be like all the rest of them,” said Ely, “keep at it until I am killed.”

  It wasn’t long before Ely’s unsettling prediction was realized. Ten months later, on October 19, 1911, he was performing in an exhibition before a large number of spectators in Macon, Georgia. Ely put his Curtiss into a steep dive from which he would normally have pulled up at the last second to thrill the crowd, the ever popular “dip of death.” On that day, he did not recover from the dive. Ely, who apparently had lost control, jumped from the ship before it crashed. He died where he fell.

  The spectators, as they did at the death of Ralph Johnstone the year before, showed no respect or sympathy for what had just occurred before their eyes. They jumped from the stands and tore through the wrecked aircraft searching for mementoes of the famous flyer. Ely’s gloves and helmet were stripped from his body. He was twenty-six years old. His flying career had spanned less than two years.

  Though Ely had not been welcomed into the navy, the US Congress in 1933 posthumously awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross for “extraordinary achievement as a pioneer civilian aviator and for his significant contribution to the development of aviation in the U.S. Navy.”

  Eugene Burton Ely never fully received the recognition he had earned and deserved. Early aviation history, a cloudy and debated chronicle to be sure, generally gives credit to Samuel Pierpont Langley for making the first takeoff from a ship. Langley’s test pilot, Charles Manly, attempted two catapulted launches from a fixed platform on the Potomac River on October 7 and December 8, 1903, in a kite-like powered aircraft Langley had designed. Both tries were unsuccessful: A wing clipped the catapult on the first attempt and the aircraft came apart on the second. Manly was recovered unhurt from both soakings. In fairness to Langley, he had the idea but a suitable aircraft had not yet been built.

  An aircraft carrier, a U.S. Air Force base and even a mountain were named after Langley. Over the years two U.S. Navy ships carried the name “Ely,” but one was named for a fallen naval hero and the other for cities in Nevada and Minnesota. No navy ship or anything else has ever been named after the courageous young flyer who first demonstrated that taking off and landing on a ship was possible—at least nine times out of ten.

  5

  COAST TO COAST

  IN exchange for cash, the early airmen would paint almost anything on their ships. Consider the Vin Fiz, the aircraft that would make the first unpersuasive crossing of the United States.

  In 1911, pilot Calbraith “Cal” Perry Rodgers, who had cut his teeth on the exhibition circuit, sought a $50,000 prize offered by publisher William Randolph Hearst for the first person to fly the U.S. from coast to coast in a maximum of thirty days. Rodgers, the grandnephew of naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry, obtained sponsorship from meatpacker J. Ogden Armour in exchange for promoting Vin Fiz, the company’s new grape-flavored soft drink.

  Rodgers dutifully painted “Vin Fiz” and “The Ideal Grape Drink,” complete with a cluster of grapes, in bright green and purple paint on the bottom of the lower wing of his Wright Model EX, a modified Model R. (Some historians maintain it was a modified Model B.) In either case, Rodgers was one of the first civilians to buy a Wright aircraft, but certainly not the first to turn his aircraft into a billboard.

  Christened the Vin Fiz, the ship, capable of about 50 mph, seldom got higher than a few hundred feet. Thousands of people watched it fly overhead and every newspaper and magazine along the route tracked its progress. Rodgers, chomping on his ever-present cigar, tossed Vin Fiz leaflets out to anyone he saw on the ground. The flight promoted aviation—and Vin Fiz grape-flavored soft drink—more than could ever be measured by an aviation historian or a marketing guru.

  Armour also sponsored a train, the Vin Fiz Special, to carry a support team, an extra aircraft and parts. The train tracks also provided Rodgers a navigational aid on his trip west.

  Rodgers’s enterprising wife Mabel sold twenty-five cent souvenir air mail stamps she had printed for the historic flight, thus raising extra money while incidentally creating the first airmail service in the world. Only a few of the stamps exist today and are valued at tens of thousands of dollars. The U.S. Post Office, incidentally, did not recognize Mabel’s stamps and required that regular postage be affixed to the mail.

  Averaging far less than a hundred miles a day, it soon became apparent that Rodgers would not complete the trip in thirty days. He nonetheless continued on to the Pacific coast. His determination—and boldness—is evident in a statement made along the way. “I will not stop until I have reached the Pacific Ocean or am disabled by accident or killed.” They were not idle words. Rodgers crashed sixteen times. He was injured but luckily survived the types of mishaps that had been fatal to many of his contemporaries.

  Armour made the grueling trip a bit more pleasant by paying Rodgers $5 for each mile flown east of the Mississippi and $4 for each mile west. The mileage rate earned Rodgers $20,000. The meat-packing and grape drink company, enjoying the unprecedented product exposure and publicity, could not have cared less that Rodgers would miss the Hearst deadline.

  Cal Rodgers and one of many Vin Fiz wrecks on his transcontinental flight. Vin Fiz Special train in background.

  The flight of the Vin Fiz took almost two months and required seventy-five stops, sixteen of which were the aforementioned crashes. Rodgers, who had departed from the Sheepshead Bay Racetrack in Brooklyn, New York, on September 17, 1911, reached Pasadena, California, on November 5 to the cheers of twenty thousand spectators. He missed the deadline for the $50,000 prize by a mere nineteen days, but his forty-nine day crossing of the U.S. beat the fifty-one day record set in 1903 on a motor
cycle. One rudder, the engine’s oil drip pan, and a wing strut with a good luck charm bottle of Vin Fiz still attached, were the only parts of the original airplane to complete the flight.

  Rodgers returned to exhibition flying. He was now famous, thanks to the publicity from the transcontinental flight. Five months later, in April 1912, Rodgers participated in an exhibition at Long Beach, California. He was flying a stock Wright Model B, his backup ship to the Vin Fiz. Before an estimated twenty-five thousand spectators, Rodgers flew into a flock of seagulls, the first recorded bird strike in history. The encounter caused the aircraft to hit a pier and crash into the Pacific Ocean, killing Rodgers. He died near the spot where he had run the wheels of the Vin Fiz into the surf to complete his historic aerial crossing of the country. Rodgers was thirty-three years old.

  Very few aircraft of the period survive, but somehow the Vin Fiz, as repaired and rebuilt along the route, beat the odds. Visitors can view it on display at the National Air and Space Museum, inexplicably missing its most important part: the good luck charm bottle of Vin Fiz tied to a strut.

  In the end, the Vin Fiz, like Calbraith Perry Rodgers, lost the prize but won immortality.

  6

  NO FLAPPING ENDS

  VIN Fiz’s advertising campaign did not end with the death of Calbraith Perry Rodgers. The grape-soda company, pleased with the success of aerial advertising, next hired the aviatrix Harriet Quimby, who promoted Vin Fiz in a shockingly purple satin flying suit and helmet. Her striking picture appeared on the label of the soft drink.

  Quimby was not just an attractive woman in an ad pretending to be a pilot. She was the first woman to earn a pilot license in the United States. In 1912, while Amelia Earhart was still in high school, Quimby became the first woman to fly the English Channel. She learned to use a compass just before departing. The crossing might have earned her more publicity and fame were it not for the fact that every working journalist in the world was consumed with the sinking of the Titanic the day before. In aviation, as in life, timing is everything.