The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  The two DH-4s were flying one above the other before a large Kelly Field audience. A refueling hose that connected the two aircraft was plainly visible. All went smoothly until the propeller of the top aircraft struck the top wing of the bottom ship, flown by Lt. P. T. Wagner, who lost control, flipped over and crashed. Wagner was killed, the first in-flight refueling casualty in history. The crewman flying in the rear cockpit survived by breaking out the side of the wood and fabric aircraft. The second DH-4, the top ship, also crashed but with no injuries.

  A half-dozen eyewitnesses testified at the Air Service hearing. The official report that survives at first appears to contain an error. According to Lt. Ellis D. Willis, an eyewitness on the ground, the two ships were refueling at an altitude “not to exceed 50 feet.” Fifty feet? Refueling with two primitive biplanes at fifty feet? Surely a typo, except that other eyewitnesses at the hearing gave similar altitude estimates. One claimed the bottom ship was “lower than the roofs of the hangar.”

  If the low altitudes as reported by witnesses were correct, it meant that Wagner would have had no spare altitude to escape the spinning propeller of the top ship when he saw it edging toward him. Official photographs of the aircraft connected in flight were part of the investigation and confirmed the low altitude testimony.

  Another eyewitness, who was not invited to testify, claimed the hose from the top ship became entangled in the wings of the ship being refueled, contributing to or perhaps causing the crash. It was not considered a factor and the possibility was never brought up at the hearing, but a photograph of the lower ship taken after the crash shows the refueling hose trailing from the wreckage.

  The demonstration meant to thrill and win the hearts of the Kelly Field spectators that day was clearly more entertainment than useful experiment. It’s not known whether Lt. Wagner and the others volunteered to fly or were ordered. In either case, Wagner in his DH-4 dutifully attempted to thread the needle between the top aircraft and the nearby ground as the crewman in the rear cockpit grabbed for the hose.

  The crash and loss of life at Kelly Field halted aerial refueling efforts for a few years. Anti-aviation congressional leaders and military brass saw the crash as more evidence, if any was needed, that pouring money into the Air Service was a luxury America could ill-afford.

  Let the record show that while Russian émigré Alexander P. de Seversky may have obtained the first United States patent for inflight refueling, the first person to actually accomplish the feat was an American wing walker and parachutist named Wesley May in 1921. May’s effort was widely criticized as a stunt because, in fact, it was a stunt. May worked with barnstormer Earl Dougherty, who had announced publicly that he intended to stay in the air for twenty-four hours, beginning the next day at Long Beach Airport.

  Wesley May with a five-gallon of gasoline strapped to his back, becomes first aerial refueler, climbing from one aircraft to another.

  As Dougherty flew over the field in his Curtiss Jenny, Frank Hawks, a soon-to-be-famous race pilot, flew next to him in a Lincoln Standard J-1, another surplus wartime biplane trainer. May, with a five-gallon can of gasoline strapped to his back, stood on the top wing of the Standard. Dougherty positioned his left wing over May, who boarded the Jenny via the lower wing and made his way through the maze of wires and struts to the gas tank, into which he emptied the gas can.

  The Jenny landed a while later, many hours short of the promised twenty-four.

  14

  A MYSTERY

  SOMEONE had to be the first pilot to fly into the side of a building in a movie. In 1923, there was no shortage of those willing to try, but the credit belongs to Beverly Homer DeLay, a giant among aerial stuntmen in the silent film age, which is to say, a giant among giants.

  DeLay, like so many other stunt pilots, had proven his mettle and sharpened his reflexes on the racetrack before he stepped into an airplane. When he made the switch, he soon showed everyone how he had earned the track nickname “Daredevil DeLay.” He was the first to transfer from an airplane to a train and back to the airplane, as well as the first to transfer from a horse to an airplane.

  Coming from a theatrical family with a one-hundred-year stage history, DeLay was a natural for the silent movies. He performed stunts and starred in westerns, comedies, and dramas with two dozen film companies. He also found time to run a movie stunt pilot training school in Venice, California. DeLay did all this despite being crippled, possibly from polio as a boy. He walked with a bad limp and sometimes had to be helped into and out of airplanes.

  When DeLay arrived in Hollywood, crashing into buildings was still faked with model aircraft. He showed that real airplanes, though not necessarily reusable afterward, were capable of the job and that he was living proof the stunt was survivable. An appreciative Jack Warner, a studio mogul not known for flattering the help, described DeLay as a “real flyer,” although Warner’s definition of a “real flyer” was probably any pilot who made him money.

  DeLay was more than a Hollywood stuntman and actor. He was also an aviation innovator. His DeLay Airfield in southern California was one of the first lighted airports in the United States. He started the first airborne police unit in Venice, California. Even though he made his name taking chances, DeLay began passenger service out of Venice Airfield with an eye to safety. He desired that “the passenger service will be advanced to a degree of perfection and safety never before attained.”

  Ever the promoter, DeLay threw out the first pitch of the season for the Venice Highflyers, a semi-professional baseball team. He tossed it from an airplane. At a time when few pilots dared to fly after dark, DeLay performed loops at night in a wood and fabric aircraft illuminated with fireworks, his famous “Fire Ride.” Searchlights from twenty navy destroyers off the California coast created a brightly-lit horizon background for him. (DeLay Airfield became a hangout for many of the Hollywood stunt pilots of the day. They were a playful bunch, so much so that a special city ordinance was passed prohibiting low-level flights over churches on Sunday mornings.)

  Despite the fact that DeLay performed death-defying stunts in dozens of full-length silent movies and shorts, he was not killed in the making of a movie. In 1923, DeLay was performing at a Fourth of July airshow at Ocean Park in California before a crowd of thousands when the wings on his aircraft failed during a dive. DeLay and a passenger, Ruel Short, were killed.

  The airplane was the Wasp, which featured an octagonal fuselage and two sets of wings, one for racing and stunt-flying and another for cross-country flights. At the Ocean Park show, the cross-country wings, not the stunt wings, were installed.

  A friend, Moye Stephens, offered insight afterward. He said that DeLay had ignored a warning given to him by the aircraft’s builder. “Fiske (builder of the Wasp) told DeLay not to stunt the airplane with the cross-country wings,” said Stephens. “But he went up with Short and stunted it, and the wings came off.” (The Wasp was also known by some as “Jail Bait,” a cruel Hollywood inside joke referring to Mann Act charges that had been filed against Charlie Chaplin.)

  There was another, more villainous explanation besides performing aerobatics with the wrong wings. Investigation of the wreckage showed that bolts holding the wings to the fuselage were too small for the job, which indicated possible tampering. DeLay may have been murdered. The improper bolts could also have been the result of negligence.

  Silent movie stunt pilot and aviation innovator B. H. DeLay. The aircraft may be the Wasp, in which he was killed.

  The newspapers chose to play up the sinister version of events and pointed to sabotage as the reason for the fatal crash. DeLay was involved at the time in a contentious lawsuit involving airport ownership. He had been shot at just days before the crash, a fact that added credence and reader appeal to the murder theory.

  The possible aerial homicide was never solved. The death of the man who had contributed so much to the movie industry became a murder mystery equal to any film plot. B. H. DeLay was thirty-one yea
rs old.

  By 1923, the American public could be forgiven for believing that flying was the domain of zanies who flew perfectly good airplanes into perfectly good buildings, jumped from horses, automobiles, and locomotives to airplanes and back, did loops at night in tinder-box aircraft illuminated by fireworks, spurned military regulations, transferred gasoline from one aircraft to another in the air for no good reason, got shot at, and alas, walked upon wings. It may not have been apparent at the time, but the future of aviation in America was in very good hands.

  15

  QUEEN BESS

  TWO obstacles stood between Bessie Coleman and her dream of learning to fly in the early 1920s: She was a woman and she was African American.

  One of thirteen children to sharecropper parents in Waxahachie, Texas, Coleman participated in the Great Migration by moving to Chicago in 1916 at the age of twenty-three. She worked as a manicurist in a barber shop, where she heard pilots returning from World War One tell flying stories. The stories made Coleman not only want to fly, but determined to fly.

  A few women in the United States had managed to ignore or fight the prevailing discrimination against them and become pilots, but no flight instructor in the U.S. would teach Coleman to fly, more because of her race than gender. If she were to learn to fly, she would have to go to France, a country free of repressive Jim Crow–type laws. Coleman obtained backing from the owner of the Chicago Defender, an influential and successful African-American newspaper. She learned some French and sailed in 1920. The well-respected French Caudron Brother’s School of Aviation accepted her for flight training.

  After becoming the first African American to earn a pilot’s license from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, Coleman returned to the U.S., eager to join one of the many flying circuses. Once again, when she could find no one in the U.S. willing to teach her stunt flying, she returned to France and learned from French and German war aces. She performed in airshows in Europe, where the media first took notice.

  The quiet and dainty Coleman, dressed in a military type uniform of her own design, returned to America in 1922. Coleman barnstormed, performed with air circuses, parachuted, wing walked, and entered air races. At an airshow September 3, 1922, on Long Island, her public performance was the first by an African-American woman in America. It was also the first by a Native American woman—Coleman’s father was half Cherokee, although some sources claim Choctaw.

  It didn’t take long for the African-American press to adopt Bessie Coleman, whom they named “Queen Bess, the Daredevil Aviatrix.” Here was a woman who grew up poor, learned French and traveled the ocean twice to learn to fly, was taught to loop-the-loop by World War One combat pilots and once buzzed the defeated Kaiser’s palace in Germany. From a media standpoint, it gets no better than that.

  “Queen Bess” continued to tour airshows for the next three years and developed a reputation as a skilled aerobatic pilot. Later, she was in great demand on the lecture circuit. Coleman was an early black activist, fully committed to her race and gender. She went so far as billing herself the “Black Joan of Arc.” She once turned down a role in a film produced by an African-American movie company because her character perpetuated black stereotypes.

  In September 1925, Coleman returned to Waxahachie, Texas, in triumph. Despite the enthusiastic welcome given her, which included a story and large picture of her and her Curtiss Jenny on Page One of the Waxahachie Daily Light, everything else remained much as it was when she had left the town ten years before.

  Admission to her airshow was to be through two gates, one for whites and one for African Americans. Coleman complained and the town compromised. All would enter through the same gate but would sit in segregated stands. Coleman reluctantly agreed before she climbed into her Jenny and thrilled the homecoming crowd to a full aerobatic display.

  Coleman hoped to establish a flying school for African-American aviators but did not live to see it. In Jacksonville, Florida, on April 30, 1926, she and William D. Wills, a pilot and mechanic, took off in the Jenny. Coleman did not fasten her seat belt because she needed to be free to look over the side of the fuselage to scout a good place for the parachute jump she would do in the next day’s airshow, sponsored by the Jacksonville Negro Welfare League.

  Bessie Coleman, the first black woman pilot in America, standing on the tire of her Curtiss Jenny.

  As Wills flew and Coleman looked over the side, the airplane entered a steep dive and turned sharply. Coleman was thrown from the airplane to her death. The Jenny never recovered and Wills was also killed in the crash. Investigation of the wreckage determined that a wrench left on the floor of the aircraft had jammed the controls. Queen Bess was thirty-four years old.

  Coleman loved flying and pursued it with as much enthusiasm as any man. Despite roadblocks, she contributed more to the struggle for gender and racial equality than she may have realized. In Black Wings, a 1934 book dedicated to Coleman, the African-American author Lt. William J. Powell wrote, “… we have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream.”

  A decade after Coleman’s death, a Baptist minister said of her, “This girl was one hundred years ahead of the race she loved so well….”

  Bessie Coleman’s star did not burn long, nor as brightly as it might have in different circumstances, but its glow has never dimmed.

  16

  THE WRONG PLACE

  SPECTATORS in all sports edge as close as possible to the action, sometimes too close. Audiences in the front row of the Roman Coliseum occasionally shared their benches with frenzied, starving lions; occupants of expensive ringside accommodations have been targets of flying blood splatters rocket-launched by vicious uppercuts; baseball fans, hoping to catch a souvenir ball, have had to fight off splintered Louisville Sluggers; automobile race fans accept that sometimes their heroes wind up in their laps rather than at the finish line; the list goes on.

  Airshows in the United States had been relatively immune from spectator fatalities until April 27, 1930, when an aircraft slammed into a crowd standing in the wrong place. Despite being warned of the danger, about one hundred attendees at the American Legion Air Circus in Fayetteville, Tennessee, had gathered on a railroad embankment below the end of the runway to watch aircraft fly over their heads on approach to landing.

  An unhurried Waco biplane powered by a World War One-era OX-5 90-horsepower engine lined up with the runway. The pilot, twenty-three-year-old Milton P. Covert, was giving sightseeing rides to two passengers. He was part of the Dixie Flyers Aerial Circus. Covert deviated from his glide path and dipped below the level of the runway. He failed to pull up in time and crashed into the crowd. Nine persons were killed and twenty others injured. Covert and his two passengers were unhurt.

  According to an Associated Press wire story, eyewitnesses were of two opinions. Some believed the young pilot intentionally swooped down to thrill or frighten the spectators on the embankment and simply mistimed his pull-up. Others blamed the accident on what was variously described as a “downward current” or “air pocket” that caused the aircraft to drop below its approach path and made the collision into the embankment unavoidable.

  An angry mob, who may or may not have known that the victims had been warned to stay off the embankment, swarmed around Covert. Open talk of violent retribution caused Sheriff M. W. Rhea to arrest the young pilot for his own protection. Covert was later secretly moved to a jail in another county for safekeeping.

  Covert and Al Gombert, manager of the Dixie Flyers, were charged with second degree murder, based on eyewitnesses who said they heard Gombert tell Covert to “blow them off” the railroad embankment and that Covert had replied, “I’ll scatter them.” A grand jury failed to indict the two men six months later.

  If Covert had stood trial, his case would have been helped by Sheriff Rhea, who ascribed to the “air pocket” theory. The prosecution, on the other hand, might have called witness
es who saw Covert flying at a low altitude a long way from the end of the runway. He was low enough that he clipped a wire, which was still attached to the wrecked aircraft.

  The jury would have heard John E. Underwood’s unvarnished opinion of Covert’s flying. He told the AP that he had watched Covert perform the week before at a show in Columbia, Tennessee. “That crazy nut did a snap roll not fifty feet off the ground,” said Underwood, whose flying credentials were not stated. “You never heard an airplane cry like that one did.”

  Over the years two categories of airshow pilots have evolved: Those who fly “stunts” and those who fly “precision aerobatics.” Not to forgive Covert’s recklessness, if that’s what it was, but most airshow pilots in 1930 flew stunts. Frightening spectators by flying directly at them and pulling up at the last moment was sometimes included in the price of a ticket.

  Was Milton Covert just doing his job by buzzing the crowd or did rough air drop him into harm’s way? All that is certain is that Fayetteville in 1930 foreshadowed similar airshow tragedies many years in the future, tragedies that would be caused by aircraft far faster, larger, and heavier than Covert’s 90-horsepower biplane. The difference is that the spectators at Campo de Marte, Dayton, Flagler, Farnborough, Paris, Ramstein, New Delhi, Sknyliv, Reno, and Shoreham would have no forewarning of where not to stand.

  17

  PAGE ONE

  THERE are the horrors of the predictable and the horrors of the unpredictable. Death can result from both, but the latter more fully ignites the imagination. On the same day in April 1930 that the Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun subscribers read about Milton Covert and the Fayetteville, Tennessee, spectator deaths, a short, incomplete but haunting wire-service account told of a freak airshow accident thousands of miles away in Dusseldorf, Germany. Omitted details and unanswered questions made the story all the more vivid.