As the president of the Indianapolis Speedway suggested, spectators were also drawn by less exalted motives. The excitement of simply watching a man fly quickly gave way to a hunger for speed and aerial thrills. The sense of competition helped to keep the crowds coming. Everyone knew that the Wrights and Curtiss were locked in a courtroom struggle. To many, the flying field seemed the most appropriate place to settle the dispute.
Soon, star performers on each team were vying for the crowd. Arch Hoxsey and Ralph Johnstone took one another on at meet after meet, each struggling to top the other’s performance. It was all part of the show—as was the danger.
The first major accident involving a member of the Wright team occurred at Asbury Park, New Jersey, on August 10. Fifty thousand people came to see Walter Brookins make the first flight of a ten-day meet. Three times Brookins aborted his takeoff run when press photographers crowded in front of the oncoming machine.
Finally in the air, Brookins circled the field for twenty minutes, then cut his engine and came in for a landing, only to see the photographers standing precisely where he intended to touch down. He nosed his aircraft straight into the ground to avoid crashing into them. “Well, all they had to do was raise the flap of the hospital tent and drag me in,” he recalled. “I had a broken nose, a broken ankle and several teeth knocked out. And the ship was a complete wreck.”20
A few days later it was Ralph Johnstone’s turn. Orville originally planned for all of the team to fly a single Model A. When Brookins destroyed that machine in the crash, Orv ordered Taylor and the mechanics to assemble one of the new Model B aircraft on the spot. Unaccustomed to the long landing roll resulting from the use of wheels, Johnstone miscalculated and smashed into a line of parked automobiles. “We all laughed at him,” recalled Frank Coffyn.21
Brookins was back in the air in time to win the distance and endurance prizes at the Squantum Meadows Meet, near Boston, on September 3–13. At the same time, Hoxsey suffered his first serious accident flying at the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee. Losing control during a low-level pass in front of the grandstand, his machine dropped precipitously to the ground, injuring a number of spectators.
Both brothers were concerned about the risks their pilots were taking. Three days after the accident in Milwaukee, Hoxsey and Johnstone, who were preparing for yet another exhibition in Detroit, received a letter from Wilbur:
I am very much in earnest when I say that I want no stunts and spectacular frills put on the nights there. If each of you can make a plain flight of ten to fifteen minutes each day keeping always within the inner fence wall away from the grandstand and never more than three hundred feet high it will be just what we want. Under no circumstances make more than one flight each day apiece. Anything beyond plain flying will be chalked up as a fault and not as a credit.22
Hoxsey and Johnstone had not won fame as the “Stardust Twins” for their caution and knew that the crowds did not come to watch them fly in sedate circles. The Dive of Death, a nose-down plunge from 1,000 feet with a pullout at the last possible minute, was what packed them in.
The stunts continued, along with the accidents. Johnstone crashed at Kinloch Park, St. Louis, early in October. He lost control of his aircraft in a turn and landed so hard that his motor broke loose from its mount and came smashing forward, missing the pilot by inches. Undaunted, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt made a short flight with Arch Hoxsey the next day.23
On October 22–30, the entire team reported for duty at Belmont Park, New York. The size of the field gathered for the competition at the Long Island racetrack indicated the enormous growth in American aviation over the past year. The Wright and Curtiss teams entered four aviators each. In addition, there were seven independent American competitors: Clifford Burke Harmon with his newly acquired Farman machine; French-trained Earl Ovington, flying a Blériot type constructed by the New York-based Queen Monoplane Company; John Moisant, who had recently flown the Channel in his Blériot; and millionaire Harry Harkness, proud owner of the first American Antoinette.
It was the first international meet held in America. Nine French pilots brought a collection of Farman and Blériot aircraft. England was represented by Claude Grahame-White, James Radley, and William McArdle, also flying Farman and Blériot machines. Grahame-White was the best known of the group. Just the week before he had landed and taken off from West Executive Avenue, between the White House and the War Department Building. Alec Ogilvie, the final English entry, flew a Wright Model R. A friend of the Wrights, he had traveled to Dayton in September to take possession of the machine, a modified Model B with a four-cylinder, 35-horsepower engine.
The aviators were drawn to Belmont by the promise of $72,300 worth of prizes. The meet would be capped by the second running of the James Gordon Bennett speed classic, which Curtiss had won at Reims the year before. In addition, there would be a $10,000 race around the Statue of Liberty and a host of speed, altitude, and duration contests.
This special Model R, “Baby Grand,” designed to capture the Gordon Bennett trophy at Belmont Park in 1910, was destroyed in a crash before the race.
The Wright team came to Belmont Park with a special Model R, determined not to let Curtiss win the Gordon Bennett Cup a second time. Dubbed the Baby Grand, it had a wingspan of only 21 feet and an eight-cylinder engine that developed 50–60 horsepower. Orville was clocked at 70 mph during test flights on October 25.
The Wright pilots entered a variety of contests. Ralph Johnstone caused a flurry of excitement when he set a new world altitude record of over 9,200 feet on October 25. Brookins took an early lead flying the Baby Grand in an endurance contest that day. He was forced to land after only twelve laps of the course, but the smart money was betting that he would win the Gordon Bennett competition—the only one that really mattered to the Wrights.
Their hopes were dashed during a trial flight before Brookins’s first official speed run on October 29. The tiny airplane smashed to earth when the engine stopped cold in a turn. Brookins was rushed to a nearby hospital with minor injuries. Grahame-White, whom the Wrights sued for infringement, won the 1910 Gordon Bennett. Victory in the Statue of Liberty race went to John Moisant.24
The Wrights did not leave Belmont with empty pockets. Ralph Johnstone set another altitude record on the last day of the meet. It raised their total prize earnings to $15,000, plus an additional $20,000 for sanctioning the meet.25 But it was clear that they had lost their technological edge. After Belmont, the inventors of the airplane resigned themselves to a position back in the middle of the pack.
Hoxsey flew at Baltimore on November 2, then, accompanied by Johnstone and Walter Brookins, now recovered, he moved on to a Denver air meet that opened on November 16. Johnstone took off first on the afternoon of November 17, climbing aloft and winging over into a spiraling dive. He did not pull out.
Hoxsey, also in the air, watched in horror as the crowd broke through the police cordon and streamed toward the tangle of wreckage. By the time he landed and made his way to the scene, Johnstone’s body, smashed beyond recognition, had been stripped of gloves and other items of clothing. He was the first American pilot to die in a crash.26
Orville was on board ship at the time of Johnstone’s death. He and Katharine had watched Phil Parmalee take off from Simms Station on November 7 with two bolts of dress silk strapped into the passenger seat of a Model B. An hour and six minutes later he landed at a field outside Columbus, sixty-five miles away, and turned the material, the world’s first air-freight shipment, over to an agent of the Morehouse-Martens Department Store.27
Orville sailed from New York aboard the Kronprinzessin Cecile on November 15. He learned of both the Denver accident and Chanute’s death when he landed at Bremen on November 23. This was a business trip with no flying involved. His friend Count de Lambert met him at the dock with the latest news from France, none of it good. Weiller’s syndicate, founded only two years before, was virtually out of business. The Astra company, wh
ich had constructed most of the French machines for CGNA under contract, was taking over. The legal complications of the changeover might take years to untangle. In the meantime, profits plummeted.28
The situation in Germany was no more promising. Flugmaschine Wright Gesellschaft had an impressive factory, with a main building large enough to accommodate the construction of five machines at once. The materials and workmanship Orv thought “first class.” The flying field, and the German pilots operating the license-built Wright machines, were also impressive.29
The business side of the operation was another matter. Orville regarded Herr Klose, the manager of the operation, as “incompetent to handle the business.” He took no interest in the infringement suits pending in the German Patent Office, and paid scant attention to the company books.30
Royalty payments to the Wrights were handled in the most cavalier fashion. Pilots came into the factory and constructed their own Wright machines, which were exempt from royalty. The company was also selling machines on the installment plan, with the royalty to the Wrights coming from the final check—if there was a final check. Nor were royalties paid on company-owned training machines.
Orville spent a few days discussing the design of a new machine for the German military. It was a pointless exercise. The procurement officers demanded that the craft feature “the latest inventions of the Wright brothers in control,” so long as all of the steering was done with the feet.31
Wilbur kept his brother abreast of the latest news from home. Johnny Moisant, the young aviator who had done so well at Belmont, was touring the country with a “flying circus.” The operation netted only $600 for a three-day appearance in Chattanooga, and $200 for a single day in Memphis. Knabenshue, on the other hand, booked Brookins, Hoxsey, and Parmalee into San Francisco for $22,500. Parmalee would fly the rebuilt Baby Grand at the event.32
Wilbur did not succeed in cheering his brother. “I have about made up my mind to let the European business go,” Orville wrote. “I don’t propose to be bothered with it all my life and I see no prospect of its ever amounting to anything unless we send a representative here to stay to watch our interests.”33
Orville returned to Dayton on December 29 thoroughly discouraged. He had been gone less than a month and a half. Two days later Johnny Moisant was killed while flying near New Orleans. That same afternoon, Hoxsey and Brookins took off from Dominguez Field, Los Angeles. Hoxsey climbed to 7,000 feet in search of yet another altitude record, gave up, and nosed over into a spiraling dive. Like his friend Johnstone, he did not recover.
Only a week earlier, Frank Russell had announced that the Wright Company would pay a monthly annuity to Johnstone’s widow. Now he told reporters that they would pick up Hoxsey’s funeral expenses and contribute to the support of his mother.
Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxsey were the first members of the Wright Fliers to die in aircraft accidents. Others would follow. Six of the nine men who served on the team (Johnstone, Hoxsey, Parmalee, Welsh, Gill, and Bonney) died in crashes. All but Bonney—who died in a machine of his own design in 1928—were killed in Wright aircraft before the year 1912 was half over.
The situation was as bad for other Wright pilots. Almost one quarter of the thirty-five men killed in aircraft crashes by the end of 1910 died in Wright or Wright-type machines constructed by licensed builders. Eugène Lefebvre, the first man after Selfridge to die in an airplane, was a Wright pilot. So was C. S. Rolls, who purchased one of the first machines from Short Brothers.34
Some aviators began to regard the Wright machines as fatally flawed. That was not the case. The Dayton-built Wright aircraft were the sturdiest machines in the air. If they were less stable than some other types, they repaid the pilot by giving him absolute control. These were airplanes that would do precisely what the pilot asked of them.
The same could not be said of many of the license-built machines. The aircraft in which C. S. Rolls died, for example, had been hastily modified. The collapse of that modified structure caused the crash. The same was true of the German- and Italian-built machines in which European aviators died.
The only safety problem with the Wright machines could have been remedied with a few pennies worth of belting. No aircraft of the period had seat belts. Brookins believed that Johnstone fell out of his seat during the dive. Wilbur accepted that judgment, and suggested that the same thing might have happened to Hoxsey.
The Wrights remained in the exhibition business for eleven months after Hoxsey’s crash, but profits were falling and the brothers were rapidly losing interest in “the montebank game.” They dissolved the team in November 1911.
That did not mean there would be less activity at Huffman Prairie. Orville made hundreds of flights from the old field between 1911 and 1915, testing nine of the thirteen distinct aircraft types developed by the Wright Company. Huffman remained a world center of aeronautical achievement.
It was also a teaching center. Late in his life Orville compiled a list of 115 individuals who had learned to fly there. It included the pioneers of U.S. military aviation. Lieutenants Frank Lahm and Charles DeForest Chandler, who began their instruction at College Park, completed their training in Dayton. The first naval aviators, Lieutenants Kenneth Whiting and John Rodgers, soloed at the Prairie. One junior officer, Lieutenant Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, rose to the rank of five-star general, commanded the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, and served as the first Chief of Staff of the newly created U.S. Air Force.35
Calbraith Perry Rodgers, the first man to complete a coast-to-coast flight across America, soloed at Huffman Prairie. So did Canadian Roy Brown, who would one day be credited with the death of Captain Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s ace in World War I. Eddie Stinson, the founder of Stinson Aircraft, was also on the list.
The average student pilot of the period received nothing more than encouragement before being turned loose to conquer the air on his own. Those whom Orville Wright taught to fly were more fortunate. The world’s first pilot had given a great deal of thought to the business of flight instruction.
The experiences of “Hap” Arnold and Thomas DeWitt Milling, who arrived in Dayton for flight training in April 1911, were typical. “Our primary training took place in the factory,” Arnold recalled, “for in addition to learning to fly we found we would have to master the construction and maintenance features of the Wright machine….” With orientation out of the way, Cliff Turpin and Al Welsh introduced the novice aviators to the business of flying.36
As Arnold noted: “No two types of controls were the same in those days, and from the student’s point of view the Wright system was the most difficult.” Since 1900, the controls had grown ever more cumbersome. By 1910 the pilot negotiating a turn had to move one lever to the front or rear to initiate a bank, while bending his wrist to the right or left to operate the rudder. Nor could he neglect the elevator, operated with the other hand.
Contrast this to the Curtiss system in which a control wheel was pushed forward or pulled back to control the elevator, and turned to the right or left as a steering wheel to operate the rudder. A shoulder yoke controlled the ailerons. Every movement—pushing and pulling, turning the wheel and leaning—was natural and instinctive.
A new pilot had to think about flying a Wright machine, and that was a dangerous thing. To provide his students with some practice before risking life and limb, Orville developed the world’s first flight simulator—an old airplane balanced on sawhorses set up in the rear of the factory.
“It was probably taken out of commission due to its age and need of general overhauling,” recalled Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, who learned to fly at Huffman Prairie in 1912. “The motor was taken out, but the propellers were still in place. It was mounted on a kind of wooden trestle which permitted it to tip over from side to side, and would not remain in a horizontal position if left to itself.”37 “Hap” Arnold described how it worked:
The lateral controls were connected with small clutches at the
wingtips, and grabbed a moving belt running over a pulley. A forward motion, and the clutch would snatch the belt, and down would go the left wing. A backward pull and the reverse would happen. The jolts and teetering were so violent that the student was kept busy just moving the lever back and forth to keep on an even keel. That was primary training, and it lasted for a few days.38
“It was an improvised affair,” Bergdoll noted, “but did its work well for years.” One of his fellow students, Fred Southard, of Youngstown, Ohio, “used to sit in this trainer for days and days at a time and practiced so long that he could read a newspaper and keep the wings balanced without any thought of the same.” Southard was unable to transfer his expertise to the air, however. Every time he went up with instructor Al Welsh, he would push or pull the warping lever in the wrong direction. Welsh gave him up as a hopeless case, and Orville refused to let him take possession of the machine he had already purchased. Southard decided to take matters into his own hands.39
Arriving at the field early on the morning of May 21, 1912, he smashed the lock on the hangar where his airplane was stored and took off. “He got no more than fifty feet up,” recalled Bergdoll, “when the plane rolled over on one side and skidded to the ground a total wreck and Southard killed. Evidently he had pulled the warping lever in the wrong direction for the last time.”40
“Hap” Arnold took his first lesson on May 3, and soloed ten days later, a veteran of twenty-eight flights—3 hours, 48 minutes of flying time. Al Welsh, his instructor, told him it was about average.41
Most of the civilian graduates of the Wright school set up as exhibition pilots, traveling the county fair circuit, and vying for the rich distance prizes established by American newspapers. Harry Atwood, Cal Rodgers, and Bob Fowler were among the best of the bunch.
Harry Atwood left Huffman Prairie determined to win the $50,000 Hearst Prize for the first flight from coast-to-coast. There was no time to waste. According to the rules established by the Hearst papers, the prize would lapse unless the flight was completed by October 1, 1911.
The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright Page 50