by Pete Fusco
Harriet Quimby was a newspaper reporter as well as a drama critic and contributor to Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly from 1903 until her death on July 1, 1912. Quimby wrote an estimated 250 articles for Leslie’s on subjects ranging from the evolution of the cake-walk, a popular dance, to the floating gardens of Mexico. She covered such serious topics as the white (sex) slave business that thrived in New York at the time. Quimby openly criticized police, women’s organizations, and churches for their inability or unwillingness to shut down the trade. In addition to her work for Leslie’s, she wrote a number of silent movie screenplays, some directed by the famed D. W. Griffith.
Quimby’s interest in flying began in 1910, when she reported on the International Air Meet at Dominguez Field in Los Angeles, the same meet where Stardust Twin Archibald Hoxsey was killed. Quimby later covered an air meet in Belmont, New York. It was there she decided writing about airplanes was not enough, remarking to friends that flying seemed, “quite easy. I believe I can do it myself. And I will!”
The enterprising Quimby convinced her editor at Leslie’s that if the magazine would pay for flying lessons, she would write about the experience for the readers. The magazine agreed, but Quimby first had to overcome an entrenched gender discrimination that made it difficult for women to learn to fly in 1911. She searched until she found someone willing to give her flying lessons.
As per the agreement, Quimby wrote several articles about flying for Leslie’s, including a two-part series, “How a Woman Learns to Fly.” Quim-by explained to readers the mechanical complexities and workings of aircraft while sharing her flying lessons. From Leslie’s, “The aviator’s first lesson is to learn to steer his airship in a perfectly straight line for a distance of a mile or over. This looks very easy, until you discover that an aeroplane possesses the perversity common to all inanimate objects. It always wants to go the other way, instead of the straight way that you seek to direct.” The lesson still applies to all aircraft.
Quimby also advised women on how to dress properly for the new sport. Again, from Leslie’s, “… first of all she must, of course, abandon skirts and don a Knickerbocker uniform.… There must be no flapping ends to catch in the multitudinous wires surrounding the driver’s seat.”
Quimby wasn’t content to just become a pilot. She desired to set records and find her place in the exhibition spotlight. Her writing, her outspokenness and boldness, along with her beauty, brought her much attention. She became known as the “Bird Girl” and may have been the first pilot ever to receive fan mail. Her good looks and poise caused one writer to describe her as the “Dresden China Aviatrix.” Today, that would be considered a sexist insult, but in 1911 Quimby’s used the comparison to dainty china as a hammer to smash through male barriers.
A month after earning her pilot’s license, Quimby competed against men in a cross-country race. She won and took home $600 in prize money. In September 1911, before a crowd of fifteen thousand, she became the first woman to fly at night, earning $1,500. She continued to write for Leslie’s and encouraged women to take up flying because it was “easier than walking or automobiling… and there is no reason to be afraid as long as one is careful.” She also wrote articles on the safety of flight, including the prudence of what would become known as checklists.
Quimby’s aircraft of choice was a French-built two-seat Bleriot XI-2. The Bleriot was a monoplane with an 80-horsepower engine mounted on the front of a more or less streamlined, if spindly, fuselage. The tail consisted of a rudder and stabilizer. The Bleriot’s configuration would set the standard for all future aircraft. It also boasted the world’s first crosswind landing gear, a contrivance that kept the wheels straight while the airframe weathervaned into the wind. Quimby and her Bleriot were clearly both ahead of their time.
In the fall of 1912, Quimby was a featured performer at the Third Annual Hartford-Boston Aviation Meet in Squantum, Massachusetts. She and a passenger, meet organizer William Willard, climbed into her all-white Bleriot, in which pilot and passenger sat alarmingly high. Quimby was in the front cockpit while Willard sat in the rear cockpit. Several eyewitnesses said they saw Quimby and her passenger fasten their seat restraints.
Harriet Quimby in her Bleriot. Note how high the pilot seat is mounted in the fuselage.
After a short flight, Quimby returned to the field to land. As she approached, the Bleriot pitched up, almost vertically, as if in a whip-stall. The nose then pitched down sharply, also in keeping with the stall theory. When it pitched down, the unimaginable occurred. Negative G forces first catapulted Willard and then Quimby from the aircraft. An estimated five thousand spectators watched both fall a thousand feet to their deaths in shallow water in Dorchester Bay. The Bleriot glided down to a splash landing but was not destroyed. Quimby was thirty-seven years old.
The mystery is not whether Quimby and her passenger fastened their seat restraints, but whether they had unfastened them for some reason. Quimby was an early disciple of seat restraints; she had written articles on the subject. Some observers claimed they saw Willard, a man of no little girth, stand up in the rear cockpit and lean over to say something to Quimby, who they thought may have unfastened her restraint to lean back and instruct Willard to sit down. Their combined weight behind the Bleriot’s center of gravity may have caused a stall and the resultant violent pitch change that ejected them from the aircraft.
It seems indefensible today, but seat restraints were not a universally accepted aircraft safety requirement in 1912, a fact that becomes even more baffling when one considers how many of the aviation pioneers were killed after being thrown from their aircraft in crashes, or even while airborne! Seat belts had been invented in the last part of the nineteenth century, but neither the automobile nor the aircraft industry rushed to embrace the concept. An aircraft belt and shoulder harness, the “Twombly Safety Harness,” which featured a quick-release mechanism, was quite advanced and available in 1912 but never caught on with pilots.
Quimby’s passing left her friend, Blanche Scott, the only remaining woman pilot in the United States. Scott is considered the first American woman pilot and was the first woman to perform in public on October 24, 1910 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. From the distance of a century, Scott’s comments to the New York Times on Quimby’s death the following day seem cold and unsympathetic. In any case, her words capture the mindset common among exhibition aviators of the time: A surrender to inevitability.
“All aviators get it, sooner or later,” said Scott. “If they stay in the game, it is only a question of time before something goes wrong and they are killed. We all realize that. All aviators are fatalists; they realize that what is to be will be.”
Scott, known as the “Tomboy of the Air,” was an exhibition pilot admired for her daring until 1916, when she retired from flying. She gave as reasons the public’s excessive fascination with crashes as well as the aviation industry’s lack of opportunities for women. Scott died in 1970 at the age of eighty-five.
Every pilot killed in an airplane leaves a warning, a gift really, to those wise enough to open the package and heed the message inside. Harriet Quim-by’s message is flying’s First Commandant and warrants repetition forever: “There is no reason to be afraid of flying,” she once wrote, “… as long as one is careful.”
7
POETRY
IN June, 1911, Lincoln Beachey was the first pilot to fly over Niagara Falls, a challenge that paid a $1,000 prize. He could have landed his Curtiss D Pusher and collected the money, but Beachey was far too much of a showman, especially with 150,000 spectators on hand.
After circling two or three times, Beachey dove his Curtiss D Pusher biplane into the mists at the bottom of the Falls and skimmed the river. For a finale, he flew under “Honeymoon Bridge,” which was only 20 feet above the rapids in 1911. Applause, it was reported, drowned out Niagara Falls.
In his short career, Beachey more than earned the titles of “America’s First Stunt Pilot,” “The Man Who Owns the Sky
,” and, no doubt his favorite, “King of the Loopers.” The one title he never aspired to was as a champion of woman aviators. His comments about Harriet Quimby after she was thrown from her Bleriot in 1912 says much about Beachey, and even more about the age in which he lived. Rather than give Quimby the benefit of the doubt, he publicly speculated that, since Quimby was a woman, she lacked hardiness and suggested that the wind in her face may have caused her to faint, lose control, and be thrown from the aircraft. Not to excuse Beachey’s callousness, but the comment probably reflected that of his fellow airmen, then and for a long time afterward.
If Beachey earned no points for political correctness, his flying impressed even the toughest critics. No less an authority on aviation than Orville Wright once said, “An aeroplane in the hands of Lincoln Beachey is poetry…. He is the most wonderful flyer of all.”
It should be noted that Orville and Wilbur were more inclined to sue other aviators than praise them. Orville’s compliment is even more remarkable considering Beachey flew with the exhibition team of Glenn Curtiss, a favorite Wright litigation target. The Wright brothers believed they owned the rights to flying itself and fought to collect royalties on every aircraft built. By obstructing the progress of other designers with unending lawsuits, the Wrights nearly smothered the infant to whom they had given birth. The United States government, recognizing the “patent wars” held back aircraft development in the U.S., eventually intervened and required manufacturers to cross-license patents.
By the time World War One began in 1914, British and European powers were already designing fast and efficient aircraft to carry the slaughter to each other. No aircraft built in the U.S. during World War One was considered fit for combat. Indeed, the few Wright aircraft built during the war can best be described as quaint.
Operating in the U.S., far from the trenches in France, Beachey was an aviation rock star, easily the brashest and most colorful of all the early exhibition pilots. He had thrilled crowds as early as 1908, not in an airplane but in a primitive dirigible. After he transitioned to aircraft about 1910, his crowd appeal was staggering. Beachey drew an estimated fifteen million spectators in the few years he performed.
Beachey was an airshow innovator like none other. He built the “Little Looper,” the first aircraft designed strictly for stunt flying; in it he executed arguably the first loop and, later, up to eighty loops at a time. Beachey added his own twist to the ever-popular “dip of death.” He would climb to five thousand feet and dive straight down with his hands outstretched while he controlled the aircraft with his knees. He introduced many innovations to exhibition flying, such as racing a speeding train, complete with a touch-and-go off the top of the locomotive. Beachey helped develop spin recovery and, last but not the least of his original aviation stunts, he was the first pilot to fly into a building. Intentionally, that is.
Beachey solved the problem of carrying enough fuel for altitude attempts by filling the fuel tank of his Curtiss Pusher and climbing until the tank ran dry. He then glided down, his engine stopped. It allowed him to set an altitude record of 11,578 feet. When he got the idea to fly exhibitions at night, he illuminated his ship with acetylene burners, seemingly unconcerned with the terrifying possibilities or arson charges.
Beachey may even have invented the “clown act,” wherein he dressed as a helpless woman who suddenly found herself alone and out of control in an aircraft that had somehow left the ground. As the crowd screamed, the pilot would pretend to be out of control and only make it down safely by some miracle. Clown acts remain an airshow staple.
Since auto racing was at least as popular as flying, Beachey teamed up with well-known driver Barney Oldfield and competed against Oldfield’s Fiat Cyclone with his Curtiss Pusher at racetracks across the country. A witness at one of the races wrote that Beachey would kick up dirt with his wingtip during turns. When performing, Beachey insisted on fences and kept his maneuvers low to the ground because he knew people would not pay to see an act they could see for free outside the gates. Low-level aerobatics may well be Beachey’s lasting contribution to the airshow.
A poster showing Lincoln Beachey looping his Little Looper over the Exposition Building in San Franscisco.
Beachey was a complicated individual. He wrote an article in 1913 in which he denounced stunt flying because he believed most people—the same people that had made him wealthy—attended flying exhibitions hoping to witness crashes and death. He retired from the airshow business for three months once because of a sense of guilt over the death of twenty-eight—twenty-eight!—exhibition pilot contemporaries, some of whom he felt had died trying to duplicate his stunts.
When he returned to flying, Beachey became obsessed with being the first pilot to fly an aircraft upside down. He built a new ship to meet the challenge, the Beachey-Eaton Monoplane. Powered by an 80-horsepower engine, the ship was capable of nearly 100 mph. He planned to demonstrate inverted flight at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco Bay in March 1915.
As a quarter-million spectators watched, Beachey climbed his new monoplane to about 2,000 feet and entered inverted flight at the top of a loop. The aircraft began to descend; Beachey pulled back on the stick trying to complete the loop and return to upright flight. Had he enjoyed a bit more altitude, it might have worked—but when Beachey realized he was too low, he pulled back harder on the stick to tighten the loop. The wing spars could not handle the additional stress and snapped. The aircraft, its wings folded, plunged into the bay. Beachey was not killed in the crash, but drowned. The master showman was twenty-eight years old.
Three long years later World War One ended and, due to the vastly improved aircraft available, inverted flight became somewhat routine. A few pilots made it their trademark. Clyde Pangborn, a famous barnstormer and record-setting pilot, became known as “Upside Down Pangborn.” But history will remember Beachey as the guy who first tried it, in America at least.
Bravado and bragging rights were a big part of early aviation. Honesty was not. Exactly who did what first is difficult to determine from the records. A French exhibition pilot named Adolphe Pegoud claimed the first inverted flight on September 1, 1913, two years before Beachey. Pegoud also claimed the world’s first loop. Beachey did not argue the point but a Russian did. Imperial Russian Army pilot Pyotr Nesterov insisted he had performed the first loop in history twelve days before Pegoud. Nesterov is recognized by some as the originator of modern aerobatics; again, a title that does not enjoy consensus.
Like many of the pioneer airmen, Beachey had a deep spiritual side. After surviving his first loop, Beachey recognized his debt in a prayer:
The silent reaper of souls and I shook hands that day. Thousands of times we’ve engaged in a race among the clouds. Plunging headlong into breathless flight, diving and circling with awful speed through ethereal space. And many times when the dazzling sunlight has blinded my eyes, and sudden darkness has numbed all my senses, I have imagined Him close at my heels. On such occasions I have defied Him, but, in so doing have experienced flight which I cannot explain. Today, the old fellow and I are pals.
If airshow performers have a patron saint, it’s Lincoln Beachey.
Perhaps the most under-appreciated and least-remembered Beachey contribution to aviation and the United States was the day in 1914 he brazenly made mock bombing attacks on the White House and the Capitol Building. It was an unsolicited demonstration meant to show Washington how defenseless it would be when, someday soon, bombs would fall from aircraft. The warning went mostly unnoticed.
In the summer of 1914, of course, bombs had already begun to fall in Europe as world powers settled scores, some old, some new, some imagined, some real, in the only conclusive way man has ever settled scores. The Great War, as it would euphemistically be tagged later, employed the airplane in a manner that war-mongers had dreamed of since the day in 1903 when they first heard that the Wrights had tamed gravity. What military man, upon seeing that grainy photogra
ph of the first Wright Flyer catapulted 120 feet into the future, did not rub his hands, lick his chops, and ponder where they might someday hang the bombs and place the guns?
By the time the great Lincoln Beachey died in 1915, the powered-kite stage of aircraft development had long passed. The dynamics and demands of global conflict boosted technological advances beyond anything the aviation pioneers had ever imagined. Aircraft designers and factories—in Europe, if not in America—could either keep up with the frenzied pace of world war or get out of the way.
For their part, pilots would develop new maneuvers not meant to amaze and thrill spectators and fatten the gate but to avoid being shot out of the sky. Until further notice, airplanes would be used to kill people, not entertain them.
PART TWO:
THE FREE-FOR-ALL
PLANET Earth emerged from World War One with an excess supply of aircraft and pilots. Large, multi-engine bombers, undreamed of four years earlier, were converted to makeshift airliners, though with mixed results. Small countries hoping to improve their odds in border skirmishes bought surplus fighter, ground attack, and observation aircraft. Likewise, training aircraft, light-years removed from the 1903 Wright Flyer, were suddenly on the market in giddy abundance for a nominal fee.
The Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny,” the loveliest aircraft ever designed using only straight lines, was the most plentiful of the surplus trainers. Hundreds had been built and a good number were released to the civilian market, where the Jenny found a new career in entertainment. Every square inch of a Jenny was a stage. It had an enormous forty-four-foot straight wing festooned with king posts, inter-plane struts, fittings and skids, all held together with a mile of wire. In short, a wing walker’s dream. The two cockpits were deep and roomy, yet the fuselage was narrow enough so that it could be straddled like a horse. The Jenny’s wide landing gear featured a spreader bar that doubled as an airborne bench seat, a convenient place for a tired wing walker to take a break and wave to the crowd. The Jenny did everything at 60 mph, making it easy for spectators to follow in the air.
