One hundred years ago, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made a non-stop transatlantic flight for the first time, taking off on June 14, 1919 from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and landing near Clifden, Ireland, the following day. These pilots won money and fame at a time when flight was a dangerous undertaking: they froze in an open cockpit and their biplane had no directional instruments for steering through fog. Today, passengers look bored while standing in line at airports waiting for flights that will cross similar distances in a third of the time. Most of us have never known about the excitement generated by early aviation because our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were encouraged to forget the time before airplanes became safe transportation.
In the fall of 1901, Wilbur and Orville Wright traveled from Dayton, Ohio, to the dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to try out their first glider. Lying prone between wood and cloth wings, one brother at a time took off for a very short glide. Years of experiments brought greater control. By December 1903, the Wright Flyer I, a biplane powered by a lightweight motor and two propellers, marked the official start of aviation. The Wrights kept their invention quiet while they applied for patents, so quiet that one skeptical newspaper editor queried, “Fliers, or liars?” By 1905, Orville was able to keep the Wright Flyer III in the air for thirty-eight minutes. In 1908 Wilbur demonstrated the excellence of the Wright Model A in Europe where aviators Henri Farman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and Louis Blériot were making strides. With his Golden Flyer of 1909, Glenn Curtiss of Hammondsport, New York, became a major American contender in the race to manufacture successful airplanes, and his fierce competition with the Wrights has often been recounted.
Less familiar is the story of the young exhibition pilots who demonstrated the earliest aircraft at a time when very few Americans had ever seen a plane and the designers were still debating how many sets of wings one should carry. The first of many international air meets in the United States was held at Dominguez Hills field south of Los Angeles in January 1910. “WE FLY!” exulted the local paper. During a ten-day run, the gate totaled two hundred fifty thousand. Heavier-than-air flying machines dominated the meet. The women and men who flew in 1910 risked their lives for exhilaration as much as remuneration, viewing landscape from surprising angles: looking down on places from above, looking out or up at wind and weather. The aircraft generated awe, or what historian Joseph Corn has called the “winged gospel,” the belief in “mechanical flight as portending a wondrous era of peace and harmony.” At the same time, pilots began to do “Death Dives” for rowdy audiences, and promoters smiled at headlines like “Monster Crowds Thrilled by Air Devils.”
The 1910 Census listed pilots as carnival entertainers, and in the exhibition years, they often performed for tens of thousands at racetracks and state fairs. One promoter boasted of his “flock” of bird men and bird women. Drawn from cities like Rochester and San Francisco, as well as from small towns like Greenville, Texas; Mountain Home, Alabama; Arcadia, Michigan; Oxford, North Carolina; and Orofino, Idaho, stunt fliers were the sons and daughters of bankers and manufacturers as well as farmers, miners, saloon keepers, salesmen, and carpenters. Until the mid-1920s, when Bessie Coleman appeared, all were white. Some had made or raced bicycles, motorcycles, or automobiles. A few had experience in the air steering hot air balloons or dirigibles. Grade-school dropouts met college graduates in flight school, and on the exhibition circuit, they all had to master new skills. Around 1910, accounts of the exhibition fliers’ achievements began to appear in newspapers and magazines where their events often made the front page, accompanied by photographs. Interviews and profiles of pilots created aerial celebrities. Trade journals such as Aero and Hydro reported air meets in detail, but there were society page accounts as well. Wealthy individuals purchased some of the first planes, just as they had bought some of the first automobiles a decade earlier. Town and Country covered aviation.
Rich or poor, male or female, early pilots who performed at carnival altitudes needed exceptional stamina. Accidents were common. Pilots had no control tower, little advanced weather information, and few established landing places. Early aircraft were open to the weather, with cloth wings, wooden struts, bracing wires, and front or rear elevators or rudders. Powered by a small motor and a propeller, an early airplane’s landing gear might be rigged with bicycle wheels. The best flyers were skilled in both intuition and calculation. Basic equipment usually included a fuel gauge and an altimeter. Some pilots carried a personal compass. For a long-distance flight, a pilot who was “contact flying” spotted landmarks on the ground and checked them against a paper map strapped on a knee board. Exhibition pilots usually traveled from one venue to another by train or ship, sending disassembled aircraft as freight because it was safer than flying.
When the United States entered World War I, private aviation slowed in favor of military activity. Air combat in Europe was deadly, but the United States was late in entering the war, so relatively few American pilots saw combat. Extensive flight training and rapid airplane production resulted in postwar surpluses of both pilots and machines, especially the Curtiss JN-4D, the Jenny, a biplane with two cockpits designed as a trainer. After the war, cheap military surplus airplanes allowed dozens of pilots to make a living giving rides in pastures outside small towns. The earliest barnstormers in the United States were traveling actors who performed in barns and open fields, and the young pilots took up this name. Soon the barnstormers created small groups called flying circuses to increase attendance. Antics grew wilder. Parachute jumps, night stunts with fireworks, and finally, wing walking and transfers from plane to plane were added. A wing walker did acrobatics on the wings, tail, or landing gear of a two-cockpit plane while a partner handled the controls. Barnstorming pilots also began to earn money in outdoor advertising, dropping leaflets, forming smoke letters, trailing banners. Some drew customers to land sales by performing stunts in the sky above the tracts.
By the late twenties, the postwar Jennies were aging machines and the barnstormers made flying seem very dangerous. Entrepreneurs who aimed to exploit the commercial potential of moving passengers, mail, and freight by air called for more rules on safety. When John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew the Atlantic nonstop, Newfoundland to Ireland, in 1919, they demonstrated both the civilian and military potential of flight. After Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon flew the Pacific nonstop in 1931, global connections were understood. U.S. Department of Commerce regulations went into effect near the end of the 1920s, and within a short time, most of the barnstormers were out of business, as aviation become safe transportation.
Dolores Hayden is a landscape historian and poet. Exuberance, her collection of poems based on characters from the early years of aviation, is just out from Red Hen Press.
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