The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  Willy Hundertmark, billed as an “aerial acrobat,” the European equivalent of the American wing walker, grabbed at the bottom rung of a rope ladder hanging off the wing of another aircraft during an air-to-air transfer. Instead of cleanly grasping the rung, his wrist became snared in a twist of the rope. Hundertmark’s weight instantly tightened the snare so that he could do nothing but hang helplessly.

  Hundertmark struggled for almost an hour to disentangle his wrist or grab the next rung with his free hand and relax the tension on the arm. He was unable to do either. As his strength ebbed, his desperation and agony built to an unendurable level. He did not even have the bittersweet option of simply letting go to end the suffering, as did the silent movie stuntman Earl Burgess ten years before.

  The pilot slowed the aircraft and circled the field above a crowd of spectators. Below, police stretched a large canvas to catch Hundertmark if he got free of the rope ladder and fell. It never happened and it was soon apparent that Hundertmark was hopelessly entangled and exhausted. The pilot had no choice but to land at the slowest speed possible. The aircraft dragged Hundertmark along the field. He died later that day from injuries.

  But why hadn’t the pilot of the other aircraft put a wing under Hundertmark to allow him to loosen his snared wrist? And why hadn’t the daredevil carried a knife to cut himself free, offering at least a chance with the net below? The story contained no answers.

  Poor Willy Hundertmark’s ordeal burdens the mind a century later, much like one mentally shares space on the rack with a victim in a medieval dungeon. It’s impossible to think of Willy hanging by the wrist from that rope ladder for the better part of an hour without vicariously living the terror and experiencing the pain. It raised the question once again: do airshows live on, not despite the danger, but because of it?

  18

  TO SEE WHAT THEY WILL DO

  IVAN Gates, owner of the famous Gates Flying Circus, encouraged spectators to participate in the show. Rosalie Gordon, a young Houston, Texas, showgirl and actress, took advantage of the opportunity for self-promotion and signed up for a parachute jump at a Gates show in Houston, Texas, at Ellington Field in February 1924.

  Thousands watched as Rosalie and stuntman Milton Girton, there to assist Rosalie with the jump, squeezed into the front cockpit of a Curtiss Jenny. The pilot in the rear cockpit was the noted Clyde “Upside Down” Pangborn, billed as a man who could fly several miles inverted.

  At about 2,000 feet, Girton helped Rosalie out of the cockpit and into the parachute harness, a complicated device in 1924. Without hesitation, the plucky Rosalie jumped off the leading edge of the lower wing. She was attached to a “pull-out” parachute in a container affixed to the landing gear. The parachute required a minimum amount of weight to extract the canopy. Unfortunately, the petite Rosalie did not weigh enough and only the shroud lines left the container. She fell only the length of the lines and swung back and forth, a human pendulum, her cries for help muffled by any number of competing sounds.

  The spectators far below did not know whether to cheer in delight or scream in horror. The Gates show was known for innovative and risky stunts, but could this really have been planned?

  Girton scurried down to the landing gear spreader bar. He could not pull the canopy from the container because the shroud lines had become snared in the wheel axles. Rosalie tried but could not climb the lines, which were becoming oil-soaked from the engine. Girton lacked the strength to pull Rosalie to safety. He climbed back to the cockpit to inform Pangborn.

  Tommy Thompson, in another Gates Flying Circus Jenny, had watched the stunt go bad. He edged next to Pangborn’s ship with “Fearless Freddie” Lund on his upper wing ready to transfer airplanes and lend assistance to the damsel in distress. Lund nimbly stepped across a foot or two of eternal abyss to Pangborn’s wing and made his way to the landing gear to help Girton. But the two men together were not strong enough to reel in Rosalie.

  Lund climbed to the cockpit to ask for help from Pangborn, a much bigger and stronger man. After explaining the situation over the engine noise, Lund traded places with Pangborn, who scrambled down to the landing gear. He and Girton were able to pull Rosalie, a few inches at a time, to within a couple feet of the landing gear, at which point Pangborn gallantly offered his foot. Rosalie grabbed hold and soon reached the relative safety of the landing gear spreader bar.

  Pangborn returned to the cockpit and landed the aircraft, with Lund in the front cockpit and Girton and Rosalie sitting on the landing gear. The rescue drew attention and free nationwide publicity for showgirl Rosalie and the Gates Flying Circus. Local officials awarded Lund and the others gold medals for bravery.

  “Fearless Freddie” Lund returned to the United States after World War One suffering from tuberculosis. Doctors told Lund he would die, but he attained remission—a near miracle in 1919—and joined the Gates Flying Circus as a stunt pilot and wing walker.

  After a long career with Gates, Lund left in 1928 to become chief pilot and test pilot for the Waco Aircraft Company in Ohio. Lund was a natural test pilot, possessed of nerve and inquisitiveness. He was fond of saying, “I like to take ships up and see what they will do.” Lund soon got his chance when one of the factory engineers asked him to perform an outside loop in a Waco Taperwing biplane to “see if the aircraft could take it.”

  Without hesitation, the fearless Lund took the aircraft up a couple thousand feet and pushed the nose down. He held it down until the aircraft went under the bottom and up the back to complete the outside loop, the first ever performed in a commercial aircraft. He enjoyed the outside loop maneuver so much he incorporated it in his airshow act. Lund might have executed an outside loop in 1930 when he won the World Aerobatic Championship.

  Aerobatic routine of Fearless Freddie Lund.

  Lund was something of an inventor. Among his contributions to the modern airshow was a smoke system that allowed spectators to follow the path of an aerobatic maneuver. He is credited as the first to fit an aircraft engine with smoke-generating equipment. Lund most likely used titanium powder to create the smoke. Titanium powder was a dangerous substance that worked only when it worked. Sometimes it exploded in the exhaust manifold. Modern airshow pilots use a much safer biodegradable and non-toxic mineral oil.

  Lund seemed to sometimes confuse fearlessness with good sense, such as the day his seat belt broke at the bottom of an outside loop during an airshow in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1931. G-forces hurled Lund outward; he hung onto the upper wing with his hands while his feet clung to the edge of the cockpit. Lund was wearing a parachute but only briefly considered using it. Luckily, the aircraft transitioned into a power-on high-speed dive and Lund was able to settle into the seat and regain control, although not until very close to the ground. Examination of the seat belt found a frayed steel cable that had snapped.

  In his written account of the harrowing experience for Popular Aviation magazine, Lund admitted that bailing out of his red, white, and blue Waco Taperwing seemed imperative as he hung upside down halfway out of the cockpit. How Lund defended his decision to stay with the ship says at least as much about the economic realities of 1930s America as it does about Freddie Lund.

  Lund wrote, “I knew I was in an awful predicament. I said to myself, ‘old man, if you don’t get back into that seat and do it in a hurry, it’s the curtain for you… ’ … Then there was that $9,000 ship. It hadn’t done me wrong. I know that. It had been my fault. I had been careless in not inspecting it more thoroughly before going up. I hated to lose the old hack. And $9,000 wasn’t to be picked up in the road every day, either.”

  Lund had bet his life against the cost of the airplane and won. He would die in the same airplane a few months later, in October 1931, in an air race at Halley Field in Lexington, Kentucky. After taking off “racehorse” fashion with five other aircraft, Lund was behind the first four ships and above and ahead of the last ship, a Monocoupe piloted by C. B. Burmood.

  Burmood, who would no
t have been able to see above him in the high-wing Monocoupe, pulled up under Lund’s Waco. The Monocoupe’s propeller severed the tail section from Lund’s aircraft, which crashed, killing the thirty-four-year-old Lund. Burmood was able to land safely.

  By the time of Lund’s death, the grand free-for-all phase of aviation history known as barnstorming had ended. Most of the flying circuses were defunct, partly due to new federal regulations but mostly due to the deepening Depression. A good many men and women, equally as fearless as Freddie Lund, had also died.

  As if to provide an exclamation point to mark the vanishing of an era he helped create, the great promoter Ivan Gates, his Gates Flying Circus and big paydays only a memory, committed suicide in 1933. He had brought aviation to 2,500 towns and cities and carried 1.5 million passengers.

  Although the party was over, some guests refused to go home. The airshow did not die. It might have, except for the auspicious blossoming of air racing in the late 1920s. Air racing was a major spectacle sport in America, second only to baseball. And what better way to hold the attention of the air racing crowd between heats and main events than with loops, wing walkers, sky divers in bat wings, and, of course, a dive of death or two?

  A new generation of pilots, who preferred the term “aerobatics” to “stunt flying,” became intertwined with their air racing cousins. Among the aerobatic pilots who would help millions get their minds off the worsening economic circumstances in the 1930s was Lund’s widow, Bettie, who became a celebrity flying her own red, white, and blue Waco Taperwing.

  19

  “SPEED”

  CHARLES “Speed” Holman filled all the aviation squares of his era: barnstormer, wing walker, parachutist, air circus performer, night airmail pilot, record-setting long distance and pylon racer, the first pilot and chief pilot for the newly-formed Northwest Airlines and, lest it be forgotten, a pioneer of aerial advertising, dropping tiny parachutes holding sample bags of Gold Medal flour over airshow spectators early in his career. The only gap in Holman’s resume was flying in World War One, which he tried to do, only to be rejected for a hearing deficiency.

  A towering figure six feet, five inches tall, with a measured disposition delicately balanced against a fiery temper, Holman’s piloting, like his personality, had two faces. He was a daredevil without equal, unafraid and inspired. No maneuver gave him pause, no race was too dangerous nor any bridge too low to fly under. Holman’s hair-shaving buzz jobs went beyond playful: they were feared. His wild side produced some curious records, such as 1,433 consecutive inside loops in five hours, a number that tripled the existing record and stood until 1986!

  Flying passengers at Northwest Airlines was a different story. “Speed” Holman became Charles Holman, courteous and prudent. He never took chances with other people on board.

  In 1930, at the National Air Races in Chicago, Holman was offered a chance to fly in the Thompson Trophy Race, a pylon race for aircraft with unlimited horsepower. There was a catch: the race was about to start and the experimental Laird Solution biplane had not yet been test-flown. That presented no problem for the man who had honestly earned the nickname “Speed.” Holman put the maiden flight on the Solution, landed, asked for a few rigging adjustments, and entered the race, which he won at over 200 mph. As if the Holman legend requires embellishment, exhaust gases leaking into the Solution cockpit caused him to black out several times during the race. (The Laird Solution was a bit short on wing area but long on power, perhaps the reason Holman later said, “given enough power, you could make a barn door fly.” Most likely, only if Holman was flying it.)

  Racing helped pay the bills, but Holman’s passion was airshow flying. His preferred mount was a black and gold Laird Speedwing, a biplane with exquisite lines and performance dazzling even by modern standards. The Speedwing was designed and built, against all odds, as America and the world sunk into economic depression.

  Not that Holman needed a specialized aircraft to provide thrills. Anything would do. He was one of a rare few airshow pilots to “wring out” a two-ton Ford Trimotor, including flying it inverted and executing consecutive loops. Holman’s antics in the sluggish behemoth might have kept Henry Ford, builder of the beast, awake at night.

  On Saturday, May 16, 1931, a crowd of twenty thousand spectators gathered for a weekend airshow to dedicate the new Omaha Airport. The promoters had pulled all the stops with a stunning list of celebrities and featured acts. On hand were Jimmy Doolittle, well-known for his record flights, air racing wins, and as the first person to receive a doctorate in aeronautical engineering in the U.S.; “Tex” Rankin, famous aerobatic pilot who a year later would perform 131 outside loops, a record that still stands; Frank Hawks, who held most city-to-city speed records in the U.S. and Europe; Al Williams, the noted navy aerobatic pilot who pioneered dive bombing and won the 1923 Pulitzer Trophy Race; and Johnny Livingston, who won eighty air races and once flew with the Baby Ruth Aerobatic Team in aircraft tied together with ropes. Not all the celebrities performed that weekend, but they were on hand, a sneak preview into the future aviation hall of fame. If flying ever enjoyed an Augustan Age, the faculty was all there on that Sunday afternoon in Omaha.

  Anyone other than Holman might have been intimidated by the presence of such superstars and the large audience. But Holman and his Speedwing were ready for them. He loved to fly for crowds, the bigger the better. The celebrity pressure would have done nothing but motivate him.

  It was unseasonably warm as Holman took off to the roar of the crowd. He began by gaining altitude. Then, throttle wide open, he dove near the spectators at top speed, which would have been about 200 mph, very impressive for the time. At the bottom of the dive, he did a sharp pull up to finish the “dip of death.” It was a simple stunt as old as aviation but spectators never seemed to tire of it. Holman was just getting started.

  After a series of loops, slow rolls and snap rolls, Holman flew by the stands with his wings perpendicular to the ground, in what would later become known as “knife-edge flight.” He stunted his Laird for the next quarter-hour, recovering from each maneuver ever lower. For his finale, Holman began by descending in a high-speed dive. At a few hundred feet from the ground, he entered inverted flight and sped past the grandstands, following up with an outside square loop. He repeated the maneuver but when he next passed by the grandstands inverted, about twenty feet off the ground, the Laird began drifting toward the crowd.

  Unbelievably, Holman appeared to be hanging out of the inverted Speedwing. It appeared that he was struggling to stay inside the airplane by locking his knees against the edge of the cockpit. An instant later, the Laird struck the ground. Holman was thrown free, but had been killed in the impact. All who saw the accident agreed that Holman had somehow steered his aircraft away from his audience when all hope was lost. He was thirty-two years old.

  No one could remember Holman flying more daringly than he had that day. During his performance, in fact, the government aviation inspector on hand walked back and forth and shook his head. He said later that if Holman had not been killed, he would have violated him.

  Famous-broadcaster-to-be Edward R. Murrow, a young reporter working on the Omaha World Herald, witnessed the crash. His prose suggested more of a future at a microphone than a typewriter:

  Down comes the plane, down, down… About three hundred feet in the air the black plane spins, flops over on its back. The motor roars on, the wires scream… The spectators, agonized, wish Holman would abandon this insanity. No man should taunt death like that, to give the crowd a thrill.

  Airshow and government aviation officials examined the wreckage and agreed that Holman’s seat belt had failed while he was inverted, similar to the event that had almost killed Freddie Lund that same year. Corrosion was later discovered on the fitting that held the belt to the airframe. Holman was not wearing the shoulder harness that had been made for him.

  As the crowd sat stunned and a fire truck raced to the scene, “Tex” Rankin, who was
next on the bill, took to the air and began his routine. Not stopping the show after an accident was standard at the time, a practice that lasted for many more years. Some reports contend that the band continued to play as Holman’s body was loaded into an ambulance.

  The pilot they called “Speed” had retired the nickname. It would never fit anyone else quite as well.

  “Tailspin” Tommy was a comic strip pilot of the 1930s whose high-flying adventures were limited only by his creator’s imagination. Some claimed that Tommy’s daring ink and paper deeds in the air were inspired by Charles “Speed” Holman. Tommy didn’t even come close.

  20

  IN-FLIGHT ADVERTISING

  IN 1935, a giant Tupolev ANT-20 toured the vast Soviet Union, broadcasting radio messages from the sky through powerful speakers and projecting images on clouds or from lighted billboards under its 206-foot wing. It boasted the largest wingspan of any aircraft until the Hughes H-4 “Spruce Goose,” with a wingspan of 320 feet 11 inches, was built ten years later.

  The massive Maxim Gorky flies over Moscow Square flanked by two biplanes.

  The aircraft, named after the Russian writer and communist hero Maxim Gorky, was attached to an “agitational squadron.” Its mission was to spread propaganda throughout the country. The fifty-nine-ton ship was a crowning achievement of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The Maxim Gorky was not only a propaganda tool but also the symbol of Russian aviation dominance. That is, until it tumbled out of the sky during a demonstration flight meant to instill confidence in the masses.

  On May 18, 1935, the Maxim Gorky performed a public flyover of the Moscow Aerodrome. It was flanked by two tiny Polikarpov I-5 biplane training aircraft intended to emphasize its enormity. The formation flight went smoothly until one of the I-5 pilots, Nikolai Blagin of the Soviet Air Force, attempted to spice up the show. He performed several loops around the Maxim Gorky. At the bottom of the last loop, Blagin misjudged his position and flew into the top of the giant’s left wing. The little trainer stuck like a lawn dart.