The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  While the Wright machine was among the easier aircraft of the period to fly, it was not forgiving. The Wrights used wing-warping for lateral control instead of ailerons. Wing-warping produced much more induced drag, which in turn increased stall speed. Nor were the Wright Flyer’s flight controls particularly user-friendly. They were so foreign from what has evolved that a modern pilot would not be able to fly one without considerable instruction and a bit of luck. On the Wright aircraft, the pilot’s left hand operated a lever that controlled the elevator while the right hand controlled a combination of wing-warping and rudder—think shooting pool with a cue in each hand. A forward movement of the right stick resulted in left roll, a backward movement rolled the ship right. This was only if the pilot was in the left seat. If seated on the right side, the left hand worked roll and yaw, while the right hand controlled pitch from a second elevator control. The closest thing to a throttle was a foot-operated spark control.

  To add to the confusion, Orville and Wilbur did not agree on a standardized system; each preferred a slightly different arrangement. A Flyer could be ordered with the Orville or Wilbur method of control. In general, Wright aircraft built in the U.S. had an Orville system of controls; those built in Europe were fitted with the Wilbur method. Prudent pilots checked the owner’s manual before attempting flight.

  The Wright Flyer Rolls flew had a safety record similar to that of other aircraft manufacturers: Poor. Thirty-three aircraft crashes occurred between 1908 and 1910; a quarter of these were in Wright aircraft. In fairness, there were comparatively more Wright aircraft in circulation during those two years. Rolls was among the first exhibition pilots to die in an aircraft and the twelfth pilot worldwide in the seven years since the Wrights’ first flight in 1903. Statistics differ, but it’s generally agreed that 80 percent of all exhibition pilots before the start of World War One were killed in crashes. Eight of ten!

  Most of the pioneer airmen were realistic, even stoic, about the odds. Rolls was no exception. He gave an off-handed but prophetic quote to a newspaper reporter before his last flight. “All good engineering calls for casualties… It was once my ambition to arrive at the Golden Gates on wheels, now wings….”

  It would be convenient to dismiss the death of Rolls and the other early airmen as the predictable end of daredevils flying unstable and flimsy crates. The evidence, however, does not support this. Based on interviews and comments from the era, the early exhibition pilots were not anxious to die in their aircraft. While some flew mainly for the excitement and the money, all the pioneer airmen knew that every flight was a contest that matched their will and nerve against a new science reluctant to give up its secrets. If for no other reason than self-preservation, the pioneers were after those secrets. They approached the task with the same guarded confidence and stoic acceptance that remains unchanged with test pilots of the jet and space age. The pioneers accepted risk as the ante-up to a grand new game. Survival, plus a scrap of knowledge, was the prize.

  There was also the love of flying, born the instant the Wright Flyer left the ground at Kitty Hawk. Certainly the first human able to form a thought had envied the birds, an envy that festered for tens of thousands of years. In a stroke, the Wright brothers had shattered the chains that bound man to Earth, a miracle long-awaited. In Rolls’s own words, “a fresh gift from the Creator, the greatest treasure yet given to man.”

  But the divine gift was not for everyone, at least not in the beginning. The sky was a lovely but treacherous siren that beckoned bold voyagers to risk death on the rocks for a whisper of her beguiling song. Charlie Rolls—and every airshow pilot who would follow—longed to hear the siren’s song, even if it meant taking his chances among the rocks in a newly-discovered ocean rather than watching from the safety of shore.

  One might think there was universal sympathy for Rolls who, after all, had been a national hero and a martyr to the new cause of aviation, but it was not so. It’s difficult to believe now, but there existed at the time a group of “anti-aviationists” with no appreciation of Rolls’s sacrifice. The anti-aviationists publicly proclaimed that Rolls had thrown his life away.

  Statue of Charles Stewart Rolls in Agincourt Square, Wales.

  Wreckage of Charles Rolls’s aircraft after fatal accident.

  2

  VICTIMS OF THEIR OWN COURAGE

  THADDÄUS Robl did not like to disappoint his fans. They returned the favor by growing angry and insisting that he fly during dangerous weather conditions. It cost him his life on June 18, 1910.

  Before “Thaddy” Robl became a famous exhibition pilot in Germany, he had been a world-class champion in a competition known as “paced racing,” a sport as difficult to comprehend today as it was popular at the time. There exists more information about Robl’s paced-racing career than his flying career, but they are inseparable for an understanding of the man and his early death.

  Paced racing at first appears to be an elaborate Google hoax. Surely it never happened, except it did. Robl was one of the best. He was a “stayer,” the main player in the sport. Before motorized vehicles entered the scene at the turn of the century, the stayer rode a bicycle behind a tandem bicycle propelled by as many as five cyclists, the “pacers.” A “coach” sat at the back of the tandem bicycle, acting as a “wall” that created a draft. The stayer remained as close as possible to the back of the tandem bicycle to take advantage of the draft, which afforded him added speed.

  Almost as soon as motorcycles were invented, they replaced the tandem bicycle. Paced racing became motor-paced racing, an effort to make the sport more interesting for the spectators. And more dangerous for the stayer, who was now expected to keep up with a motorcycle instead of a tandem bicycle. The speeding motorcycle provided even more draft and helped the stayer achieve top speeds exceeding 80 mph, while yet still on a bicycle! In the greatest understatement of all time in any sport, a history of paced racing declared that “speeds increased when motors were added.”

  The stayer, trusting his life to the operator of the motorcycle, kept his head down and pedaled as hard as he could, all the while breathing poisonous carbon monoxide fumes, praying the rear tire of the motorcycle or his own front tire did not explode in his face and resisting the temptation to yank the cheerleading coach off the back of the motorcycle. Yes, there was still a coach, who early on had the added chore of operating the motorcycle throttle while a second person steered. Races, some lasting for days, were cross-country or on board tracks known as velodromes. Many early stayers, who wore neither helmets nor gloves, were killed or injured. A photograph from the period shows a bandaged Robl, no explanation given or needed.

  A bandaged Thaddäus Robl in his paced racing days.

  Robl, a native-born German, dominated paced racing during the first part of the twentieth century, winning five European and two world championship titles between 1900 and 1907. When Robl retired from the paced-racing circuit in 1909, he turned to the one enterprise that promised even greater stimulation: Exhibition flying.

  The aeroplane offered everything needed to feed Robl’s unflinching nerve and bold spirit: speed, smelly gasoline engines, crowds, good money, fame, and few rules. Compared to the terrors of the velodrome, flying must have seemed tame to Robl, once described by a journalist as a man of “indomitable pluck.”

  The former stayer caught on quickly to the new flying dodge. By 1910, Robl was an exhibition pilot touring Europe, although according to one source, he may have skipped the inconvenience of first obtaining a “flight license.” The lack of official flying credentials, not unheard of at the time, mattered little to Robl’s fans. They knew him as an unhesitating risk-taker and born showman who always delivered.

  Robl’s unfortunate and all-too-avoidable death is described by Charles C. Turner in his exhaustively-detailed 1912 book, The Romance of Aeronautics, a required read for fans of early aviation. An excerpt from a chapter indelicately titled “The Death Toll of the Air” tells the story:

  “�
�� Robl was killed at Stettin (Germany) while flying an Aviatik biplane in a high wind,” Turner wrote. “This accident was caused by the clamoring of a mob of thoughtless spectators who demanded a flight in spite of the unsafe conditions.”

  The Pomeranian Society for Aviation, which hosted the Stettin event, urged Robl and the other pilots not to fly that day because of an approaching line of storms. The other performers agreed but Robl, a man who in his stayer days once got up after being briefly knocked unconscious, climbed back on his bicycle, got behind the motorcycle, and won the race, was not so easily benched. Nor, apparently, did Robl want to fail his boisterous fans. There’s also the possibility that he may not have wanted to fail himself.

  Details of the fatal crash are sparse. What is known is that Robl, after circling the spectators twice, entered a dive from about 200 feet. He never recovered from the dive. A thunderstorm raged overhead and Robl might have been caught in a downdraft, or what’s known today as a “microburst.” He was observed pulling back hard on the controls but the strong vertical wind and perhaps an accelerated stall may have caused the crash.

  An assessment of Robl’s accident in the November 1910 issue of Pan American Magazine stated, “… accident or miscalculation of machine when close to the ground.” Pedantic it may be, but the analysis from long ago still applies to most aircraft accidents.

  “Victim of His Own Courage,” a cruel combination of compliment and gloat, is how the August 1910, issue of Aeronautics magazine captioned Robl’s brief obituary. It was in keeping with the times: Pilots of the era seemed to neither expect nor did they receive sympathy when they were killed.

  A photograph taken five minutes after the crash shows doctors attending to the fatally-injured Robl. What appears to be a large collapsed tent in the background had been his aircraft, variously described as an Aviatik or a Farman biplane. It matters little. Both the Aviatik and Farman of 1910 vintage were typical of the times, which is to say, almost safe enough on a calm day but vulnerable to extreme weather.

  The thirty-three-year-old Robl was the first German killed in a non-military aircraft accident and the eleventh person overall in the world. Unfortunately, Robl would not be the last victim of a rowdy, demanding crowd.

  In September 1911, about a year after Robl’s death, the New York Herald carried a story about J. J. Frisbie, a forty-two-year-old flyer from Ireland. Frisbie was killed in Norton, Kansas in his Curtiss Pusher, which had been damaged in a crash earlier in the day. Frisbie went up, against his better judgment, only when, according to the Herald reporter, “driven to it by the taunts and jeers of the crowd.” The spectators hooted and shouted “faker” when Frisbie tried to explain the circumstances. Once in the air, he tried to turn the aircraft but it “tipped and he lost control.” The ship glanced off a barn and crashed. Frisbie died an hour later.

  Sometime in the 1980s, Frank Price, a storied Texas airshow pilot, showed a visitor a list of names he had written on his hangar wall. Price said, “These men are all dead. They were all airshow pilots. Do you know who killed them?” When the visitor replied that he didn’t know who was responsible for the deaths of the men on the list, Price said, simply, “The crowd.”

  3

  STARDUST

  IN 1910, Orville and Wilbur Wright needed pilots to demonstrate and sell their new Model B Flyers. They formed an exhibition team but soon faced the same problem that has always stymied aircraft operators: finding pilots who would listen to them. To ensure obedience and conformity in the pilot ranks of the new team, the Wrights handpicked some of the members and trained them to fly, the Wright way.

  It almost worked, except that flying emancipated the untamed spirits dormant within team members Ralph Johnstone and Archibald Hoxsey, two mavericks more inclined to follow their hearts than instructions from their bosses. Worse, as far as the Wrights were concerned, Johnstone and Hoxsey pushed the limits of their Wright Model B’s to compete with each other, even as they did their job demonstrating the aircraft.

  On October 30, 1910, Johnstone doubled the existing world altitude record with a flight to 8,471 feet, validated, as was required, by a barograph taken aloft. A couple months later, on December 26, Hoxsey achieved an altitude of 11,474 feet. At such astounding heights, it didn’t take long for the press to tag the two pilots “the Stardust Twins,” or sometimes, “the Heavenly Twins.” Both nicknames stuck.

  As the “Twins” gained celebrity status through their altitude records, they began doing “stunts” for the cheering, adoring crowds, much to the chagrin of the Wright brothers. A favorite was the “dip of death,” or “dive of death,” a steep descent at high speed, sometimes aimed at the crowd, with a pull-up at the very last moment. A more thrilling variation of the “dip” was Johnstone’s “spiral dip,” in which he entered a spiraling dive with the wings banked beyond 45 degrees. The Wrights had warned the Stardust Twins, and anyone else who would listen, that 45 degrees was the maximum designed angle of bank for the Model B Flyer.

  Stunts were not what the ever-practical Wright brothers had in mind when they invented flying. (Ironically, they are given credit for inventing aerobatics by executing the first 360 degree turn in 1904.) Nonetheless, stunts increased the likelihood of crashes, which all involved conceded were bad for business. The brothers desired only to sell aircraft and encouraged team members to fly safely. But even the publicity-shy Wrights basked in and benefitted from press coverage of the Stardust Twins. The company sold four Model B’s a month in the United States alone.

  The Wrights kept trying to rein in their two willful pilot employees. In September 1910, Wilbur composed a letter to Johnstone and Hoxsey before an upcoming exhibition in Detroit. The Wrights would not be accompanying the Stardust Twins so Wilbur explained what was expected. The letter stands as the prototype “briefing memo,” a version of which would be rewritten thousands of times over the next century by military squadron leaders, airline chief pilots, charter and flight school operators, and, of course, federal aviation officials. Wilbur wrote:

  I am very much in earnest when I say that I want no stunts and spectacular frills put on the flights there (Detroit). If each of you can make a plain flight of ten to fifteen minutes each day keeping always within the inner fence well 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.

  History has no record of the Stardust Twins’ response to Wilbur’s letter or the performance they put on in Detroit, but both can be joyfully imagined. Relations between the famous brothers and exhibition team members had been strained from the start, partly due to strict Wright brothers’ rules prohibiting alcohol, gambling, and cussing. Worst of all, pilots on other teams were paid more. Wright competitor Glenn Curtiss split the gate with his exhibition team while the Wright brothers paid their flyers a flat $20 per week and $50 for each day they flew.

  The Stardust Twins were not only difficult to bridle but were also impulsive, another trait not shared nor endorsed by the disciplined Wrights. Hoxsey, on a whim, offered ex-President Theodore Roosevelt a ride in the Model B on October 11, 1910, in Kinloch, Missouri. Roosevelt, who was on hand only to observe, at first balked but then accepted Hoxsey’s offer. After all, Roosevelt was the Bull Moose, the man who had led the charge up San Juan Hill. Two years later, he finished a longwinded speech with a would-be assassin’s bullet in his chest.

  Hoxsey made several circuits of the field and even threw in a few complimentary “dives of death” for Roosevelt, who put up a brave front while clenching a handy wooden strut. The airplane ride, the first for any American ex- or sitting president, ended well but the Wrights, no doubt contemplating the adverse publicity if Theodore Roosevelt had been killed in one of their Model B’s, threatened to fire Hoxsey on the spot.

  It did not happen. How could one fire Teddy’s newest pal and personal pilot? Besides, Roosevel
t raved for months in his speeches about his ride in the Wright flying machine, by any measure the first Air Force One.

  Archibald Hoxsey, one of the Stardust Twins, gives ex-President Theodore Roosevelt a ride in a Wright Model B.

  On November 17, 1910, the Stardust Twins were in Denver, Colorado. Both were in the air at the same time performing for 15,000 spectators, most of whom no doubt expected Johnstone to perform the “spiral dip,” which had once caused Orville Wright to shout “Cut it out!” after he watched it.

  Despite Orville’s foreboding and warnings, Johnstone gained some altitude and lined up for his descent at the north end of the airfield. At about 800 feet, he banked well past the factory-recommended maximum 45 degrees and began a spiral descent. The crowd cheered as the turn tightened and speed increased. A strut on the left wing broke under the added stress; the wings folded into each other. Centrifugal force wrenched Johnstone from his seat. He grabbed part of the upper wing with both hands and attempted to warp the tip to stop the spiral. It briefly worked; the rate of descent slowed. However, the aircraft turned upside down and crashed to the ground.

  Johnstone, who was thirty years old, never gave up; he held on to wires and struts till the very end. He was the first recorded American pilot killed in an airplane crash. (The first recorded death in an airplane crash was that of a passenger, U.S. Army Lt. Thomas Selfridge, who was killed in a 1908 crash while riding with Orville Wright, who survived with serious injuries.)

  Two bizarre occurrences, apparently common at the time, followed Johnstone’s accident: the band continued to play—ragtime—and the spectators rushed the crash scene for mementoes. The pilot’s clothing, particularly the helmet, was a favorite souvenir. One spectator pulled a splintered and bloody wooden strut from Johnstone’s lifeless body and ran off with it.