by Pete Fusco
A BLINDING SMILE
WING rider Kitty Middleton’s career lasted only three performances over two months. She first performed in August 1951, and was killed a month later on Labor Day in a crash at the Minnesota State Fair. Kitty was seventeen years old.
Promoter and stuntman George Waltz hired Kitty, the youngest of thirteen children, to take his place as a wing rider. Unlike wing walkers, who are free to roam about the aircraft, a wing rider is strapped to a mast atop the wing during an aerobatic routine. As for Kitty’s youth, it is proof, if anyone still needs convincing, that a person is born with what it takes to walk—or ride—on a wing.
Waltz, a former Hollywood stunt pilot, acquired a red and cream Stear-man biplane upgraded with the more powerful 450-horsepower Pratt and Whitney R-985 engine. He changed Middleton’s first name from “Pansy” to “Kitty” and used her maiden name of Middleton. (Kitty was married in January of the year she was killed.) Waltz christened the Stearman the Kitty M. and hired Carl Ferris, a twenty-seven-year-old ex-military pilot. The team of Ferris and Middleton was “The Skylarks.”
With Ferris at the stick, young Kitty was an instant sensation. The seventeen-year-old who had grown up poor in a large family loved the adoration of the crowds. She had every right to anticipate a future full of smiles and prospects, including Hollywood, where Waltz told her he still had contacts. All of it is broadcast in Kitty’s face and eyes in a surviving publicity photo in which Kitty, dressed in a cheerleader-style outfit, stood on the bottom wing of the Kitty M. and shared a laugh with her pilot, Ferris.
The crash that killed Kitty and Ferris occurred during the act’s finale at the Minnesota State Fair. It began with a dive to gain airspeed. As thirty-two thousand people watched, the Stearman, with Kitty standing on top of the upper wing, arms outstretched, never recovered from the dive. The aircraft crashed and burned a short distance from the fairgrounds. Ferris died instantly. Kitty was thrown from the wing and was pronounced dead later that day at a local hospital. It was only her third airshow. Her pay had been $25 for each performance, plus expenses.
Seventeen-year-old Kitty Middleton laughs with pilot Carl Ferris before a performance. Her career lasted only two months. Courtesy of Minnesota State Fair Archives.
Civil Aeronautics Board investigators placed the blame for the crash on Ferris, whom they determined was flying lower than authorized.
Even six decades later, it’s impossible to read of young Kitty’s death without grieving for her. Songwriter and singer Tim Brown was so taken with the event that, in 2008, he celebrated Kitty in a ballad, which he graciously allowed to be used in this book. Brown’s lyrics tell of Kitty joining and flourishing as part of the airshow:
After the barnstorming show one day, Kitty Middleton flew away …
With arms outstretched up to the sky, just like an angel, she could fly, she could fly …
Outside loop and a barrel roll, the world too small to contain her soul …
How the girl on the wing, in a perfect style, never dropped her arms or her blinding smile …
A surviving amateur 8mm color film captured Ferris performing loops, rolls, and Cuban eights with Kitty atop the wing. The film, available for viewing on the internet—as is Tim Brown’s ballad—is of an earlier performance that day; it mercifully does not include the fatal accident.
The Minnesota State Fair had a long-standing association with airshows. According to the 1990 book Blue Ribbon: A Social and Pictorial History of the Minnesota State Fair by Karal Ann Marling, the first flight in Minnesota took place at the fairgrounds on June 20, 1910. In 1912, an exhibition company brought two biplanes and a Nieuport monoplane to the fair and performed stunts. Even at that early stage in aviation, crowds had grown jaded. Marling writes, “… level flight had ceased to be of much interest to Minnesota fairgoers.”
In 1914, master showman Lincoln Beachey, the “King of the Loopers,” brought his “Little Looper” to the fair. He did loops and other daring maneuvers to satisfy the crowd’s thirst for novelty. In 1915 DeLloyd Thompson flew upside down. That same year Art Smith made a night flight and, according to Marling, “setting off the Grandstand fireworks as he went.” How he did it is not explained.
In the years following World War One, many well-known performers would appear at the Minnesota State Fair. Ormer Locklear, the “King of the Wing Walkers,” performed in 1919. He was followed by wing walker and pilot Ruth Law in 1920 and 1921. The Minnesota State Fair was where wing walker Lillian Amelia Boyer became the first woman to successfully transfer from an automobile to an airplane in 1922.
Marling writes that Captain F. F. Frakes in 1935 added “a new wrinkle to thrill flying by deliberately crashing his plane into a flimsy ‘house’ erected in front of the Grandstand.” It may have been a “new wrinkle” at the fair but nowhere else, as silent movie and air circus pilots had flown into buildings as a matter of routine throughout the 1920s. Lincoln Beachey had been the first to do it around 1914.
There had been opponents of the Minnesota State Fair airshow almost from the beginning. In 1923, the fair received protest petitions against attractions which “depend for their popularity on the hazard of human life.” These included the auto races on the track in front of the grandstands. The petitions were ignored. Another document specifically called for an end to stunt flying at the fair, claiming it was “a detriment to ‘public confidence’ in the safety of commercial aviation.”
The thrill opponents finally got their way after the 1951 Stearman accident, all the more controversial and compelling a case because of Kitty Middleton’s youth. “Aerial thrill shows” at the Minnesota State Fair were terminated. Auto racing persevered until 2002, when it, too, ended. Eight persons, including Kitty and Ferris, had been killed performing on the racetrack or in the air.
Though the pilots, wing walkers, wing riders, and race car drivers that lost their lives at the Minnesota State Fair are long gone, their spirits may have been less inclined to leave. Stories abound of ghosts that haunt the fairgrounds. They are said to walk along the top of the grandstands at night. If one of those restless spirits is that of Kitty Middleton, a young woman with dreams forever unfulfilled, who could blame her?
28
FLAGLER
LT. Norman L. Jones missed the pilot briefing for the Flagler, Colorado, Fall Festival airshow on September 15, 1951. Had he attended the briefing he would have known that the Civil Aeronautics Administration waiver stipulated no aerobatics lower than 500 feet over and no closer than 500 feet horizontally from spectators.
Jones announced his late arrival by turning on his smoke system and swooping low near the crowd; he pulled up slightly and entered a slow roll in his Timm N2T-1, a mostly wood and somewhat underpowered World War Two training aircraft. The ship lost speed halfway through the roll, the nose dropped, and the aircraft descended and turned toward the audience.
The left wing struck the ground, cartwheeling the aircraft into an estimated two thousand people, many of whom were in parked cars watching the show. The crash killed Jones and nineteen people in his path, ten of them children. Fifty others were injured. A reporter from the Denver Post wrote that the aircraft “cut through the crowd like a scythe.”
Jones, twenty-nine, was a member of a flying club at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, about a hundred miles from Flagler. He was a last-minute replacement for another act that was not available. (Another version of the story has it that Jones was not a participant at all, but merely a spectator who attempted to show off.)
Lowry AFB officials were quick to distance the air force from the disaster, saying that Jones was acting on his own and not performing on behalf of the military. Jones was an air force bomber pilot and flew the Timm for the first time the day before the show; he logged about thirty minutes in it. He told another member of the Lowry flying club that he intended to practice aerobatics on the way over to Flagler. A subsequent Civil Aeronautics Board accident investigation report blamed pilot error for the crash.
T
he Flagler crash begs the question: Did Lt. Jones really need a pilot briefing, whether or not he was part of the show? Would he not have known to keep a safe distance from the spectators and perform his aerobatics at a safe altitude? The simple truth is that Arrogance is the hunter! Ego is the hunter! Stupidity is the hunter! Some pilots stalk themselves all the way to their own graves.
The day in Flagler began with optimism and a parade. It ended with Jones, in a moment of indiscretion, rewriting the future of the town.
Lt. Jones was also partly responsible for rewriting the future of airshows, at least temporarily. Six days after the Flagler accident, the head of the Civil Aeronautics Administration (predecessor of the Federal Aviation Administration) was under intense public and political pressure to regulate airshows. He announced new waiver rules that did not entirely ban airshows, but came close.
The new rules required all pilots to be under “direct radio control” (contact) when performing. The rules outlawed delayed parachute jumping, mock dog-fighting, intentional aircraft crashes, and “crazy” flying—although no definition of “crazy” was provided then or since. The CAA would not consider granting a waiver “solely for the sake of thrills.” It summarily cancelled all future low-altitude waivers in the U.S., whether they had already been granted or not. The only exceptions were for those shows that could prove they would “contribute directly to the advancement of, and public confidence in, aviation.”
Thus did the government almost end airshows forever in America to guarantee the safety of pilots and the boredom of the masses.
Bill Sweet, a larger-than-life airshow promoter, popularly known and rightly remembered as “Mister Airshow,” made his living providing “thrills” to the public. His National Air Shows had played to millions of spectators. Sweet, who found his season suddenly cancelled, took it upon himself to do battle with the forces of bureaucracy. Using his own money, Sweet traveled to Washington, D.C., and lobbied, cajoled, begged, and did anything else necessary to get the bureaucrats and politicians to hear his appeal. Airshow pilot Duane Cole, who also had his Cole Brothers’ Airshow waivers cancelled, joined the fight.
Against all odds, Sweet, Cole, and a couple other airshow promoters got the senseless overkill lifted. Airshow waivers, even for those that merely provided “thrills,” were reinstated. All airshow pilots and wing walkers—and all spectators who love watching smoke chase an airplane through a square loop—owe a great deal to Sweet, Cole, and the others.
The CAA’s 1951 arbitrary restrictions on airshows was nothing new. The first recorded case of government meddling came in 1923 at the state level. The California State Aviation Board took action after the death of parachutist Wesley May, the same wing walker that had carried a five-gallon can of gasoline on his back from one aircraft to another in 1921. May was with the Gates Flying Circus when he was killed April 2, 1922, at a San Francisco airshow in a freak parachute accident. May landed in a tree in a cemetery. He fell out of the tree and broke his neck on a tombstone. He died later that day.
A San Francisco newspaper helped spread the word of the state aviation board’s new anti-airshow ruling: “Immediate arrest of aviators attempting ‘stunt flying’ or ‘wing walking’ has been ordered by the State Aviation Board.” As far as is known, nothing became of the ruling and no one was ever arrested.
A few years later, the Air Commerce Act became law on May 20, 1926. For the first time, pilots and aircraft would be government regulated. Pilot licenses were no longer optional. The Act was not only the beginning of the end for the free-for-all barnstorming era but also threatened the future of airshows. It forbade such flying circus mainstays as the transferring of wing walkers from one aircraft to another. Civilian aircraft were required to remain at least three hundred feet apart. Aircraft could no longer carry fireworks on board, a rule that killed the questionable but popular practice of attaching flares to aircraft for evening performances. The military did its part by refusing to sell spare parts for Curtiss Jennies to civilians. Further, it destroyed all Jennies still in service in the late 1920s.
Somehow airshows survived.
Twelve years later, the Air Commerce Act of 1938 passed new rules designed specifically to rein in, if not end, airshows. Wing walking was forbidden below fifteen hundred feet, an altitude that airshow pilots and wing walkers of the day considered the floor of the ionosphere, or at the very least the altitude at which the sun would melt the wax from their wings. All performers, no matter their role, were required to wear parachutes and all shows had to be supervised by federal aviation officials.
When World War Two began a few years later, the federal government’s attention turned from hassling airshow performers to defeating the Axis. No one seemed to care any longer how far a wing walker might fall if he or she slipped.
29
ENTER THE JETS
BREAKING the sound barrier was once an airshow act, especially in England, where spectators could not get enough sonic booms or, “bangs,” as they were called. British jet fighters of the late 1940s and early 1950s, while not quite capable of the feat in level flight, accomplished it by beginning from a high altitude, pointing the nose almost straight down, pushing the throttle to the stops, leveling off low, and flying past the grandstands at speeds either approaching or breaking the sound barrier. Sonic boom or not, the jets made plenty of noise. It was a show highlight and crowd pleaser.
Except on September 6, 1952, at the annual Farnborough Airshow in England, when the prototype de Havilland DH-110 Sea Vixen, a twin-engine, two-seat jet fighter flown by British test pilot John Derry, thirty-one, and his watch pilot, Tony Richards, twenty-four, disintegrated in flight. Besides the two pilots, falling debris killed thirty people and injured sixty-three.
De Havilland DH-110 Sea Vixen similar to one that crashed at Farnborough in 1952.
Derry and Richards had arrived at Farnborough in style only minutes before. The Sea Vixen descended in a high-speed dive and treated the crowd to three sonic booms. Derry flew past the several hundred thousand spectators at over 700 mph. He banked to the left and circled back toward his audience. As Derry started a climb to get into position for his next maneuver, the Sea Vixen, traveling quite fast, came apart.
Some eyewitnesses described the structural failure as occurring in “slow motion,” followed by pieces of the aircraft floating to the ground. Not all the pieces fell so benignly, however. The two Rolls-Royce jet engines, each weighing a ton, became cannon shells aimed at the crowd.
The rattled airshow announcer could only shout, “Look out!” One engine missed the spectators. The other broke into two pieces and went into an area known as Observation Hill, resulting in the great loss of life and the many injuries. The cockpit section of the aircraft slammed down in front of the grandstands. The rest of the aircraft fell on the opposite side of the field.
Four years before, in 1948, Derry had pushed his de Havilland DH-108 Swallow, a swept-wing, tailless jet aircraft not quite capable of supersonic speed, to the limit to see if he could perforate the feared “sonic wall” of air required to reach the speed of sound. Derry began a dive at forty thousand feet and actually reached Mach 1.1, slightly exceeding his goal. He became the first British pilot to break the speed of sound, although admittedly it took a long power-on dive to get there. (American Chuck Yeager, flying the rocket-powered Bell X-1, was the first to break the sound barrier in level flight about a year earlier, in October 1947.)
John Derry was also the originator of the “Derry Turn,” a simple but clever maneuver meant to confuse and elude enemy fighters. The pilot with the enemy hard on his tail rolls the aircraft 90 degrees, say, to the left, as if intending to turn in that direction. The pilot then rolls the aircraft 180 degrees more to the left, at which point he is again banked at 90 degrees but now positioned to turn right.
An investigation of the Farnborough crash found faulty design of the end sections of the main spar, resulting in the outer sections of the wings shearing off during Derry�
��s high speed turn and climb. The findings resulted in design changes and ultimately a better aircraft for future Sea Vixen pilots. Even with the improvements, 54 of the 145 Sea Vixens built were lost in accidents. The two prototypes were also lost. A “coroner’s jury” placed “no blame to John Derry.”
The hard lessons learned from the propeller age had not necessarily transferred to the jet age. Much had to be relearned in the development of jet-powered fighters in the 1940s and 1950s. Knowledge was gained on the backs of very brave test pilots, who worldwide were lost at the rate of one a week. But much was learned from those accidents, such as that of John Derry and Tony Richards.
The Farnborough tragedy resulted in stricter safety regulations at British airshows. In the future, jets would be prohibited from flying closer than 750 feet from spectators when straight and level and 1,500 feet when performing maneuvers. Minimum altitude for all flight at airshows was 500 feet. Speed was not restricted.
The Farnborough show that year was not cancelled following the Sea Vixen crash. Famed World War Two British ace and test pilot Neville Duke flew the new Hawker Hunter jet fighter—and broke the sound barrier in a dive.
The Hunter was one of a number of newly-developed aircraft to appear at Farnborough in 1952. British pilots were eager to demonstrate them and prove, among other things, that Britain had recovered from World War Two. The aircraft were some of the most advanced—and beautiful—in the world. They were not all jet fighters. The four-engine Vickers Viscount turboprop airliner climbed convincingly before the grandstands with only one of its four boisterous Rolls-Royce Dart engines operating, the other three feathered; a twenty-five ton Canberra medium bomber performed low-level aerobatics; the exquisite but star-crossed de Havilland Comet jet airliner leaped off the runway—with a little help from rocket assist; the turboprop Bristol Britannia, possessing the most elegant styling of any propeller-driven airliner ever built but obsolete soon after it first flew, whistled past the grandstands; out of the distant past flew the brand-new Saunders-Roe Princess, a glorious 100-ton flying boat that should never have gotten past the draftsman’s pencil. The British government spent £10 million on the Princess, only to discover that flying boats had no place in post-war aviation. The Princess was, however, a big hit with the Farnborough audience, proving that nostalgia always sells.
