Reach for the Skies Read online

  Glenn Curtiss in flight: some say he did more for aviation than the Wrights.

  The Wrights took a dim view of that, and when Curtiss began building planes with steering flaps called ailerons, they cried foul. The Wrights claimed that in the 1906 patent for their wingwarping system they had described alternative systems for roll control, including ailerons.

  This, while true enough, hardly spoke to the matter. The world wanted to fly, while the Wrights were interested only in defending their patents. They turned down invitations to races and prizes and competitions and lost themselves in endless legal wrangles, leading one federal official to accuse them of single-handedly causing “the United States to fall from first place to last of all the great nations of the air.” The Wrights had the law on their side, but they may as well have joined King Canute and told the tide not to roll in. The Aerial Experiment Association, meanwhile, built plane after plane after plane, and Curtiss went on to become the most successful of all first-generation American aircraft makers.

  The first great sea crossing by plane was achieved on July 25, 1909, when, 124 years after Blanchard and his sponsor John Jeffries narrowly avoided a dunking, Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel and won a £1,000 Daily Mail prize.

  Understandably worried: Louis Blériot takes off in his self-made monoplane.

  Blériot was an aircraft maker. He designed some real death traps in his time, but he was also the first person to make a working monoplane. “It is not beautiful,” one reporter remarked, “being dirty and weather-beaten, but it looks very businesslike.” It certainly was, dashing over the water at 250 feet, at just over 40 miles per hour. Not until 1927, and Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, would a single flight have such an impact. National borders—even ones marked by physical boundaries—lost some of their meaning that day.

  Blériot won the Daily Mail prize by the narrowest of margins: 12 days earlier, his compatriot Hubert Latham had launched his own attempts, all three of which ended in a crash. With his cigarette holder, checkered cap, and fashionable clothing, Latham epitomized the European daredevil aviator and was hugely popular. Born in Paris to a family of wealthy Anglophiles (he had British citizenship, though he never lived there), Latham used his phenomenal fortune to finance glamorous adventures. He may not have flown across the Channel, but he ballooned across it with his cousin Jacques Faure. He raced cars and motorboats and led safaris to Africa. And that, sad to say, is in the end how he died, at age 29: gored to death by a buffalo during a hunting expedition.

  Blériot’s triumph, and Latham’s celebrity, reflect France’s obsession with manned flight. In 1910, France had more than three times as many licensed pilots as America, and most of its pilots were inventors and designers. Blériot alone produced 45 experimental machines, including airbuses capable of carrying eight passengers. By 1913 his aircraft construction business had 33 domestic competitors.

  Belgian airwoman Hélène Dutrieu won prizes, records, and a nickname: Girl Hawk.

  France’s golden year was 1913. France flew higher, farther, and faster than any other nation. By the end of the year the top speed of an airplane was 125 miles per hour, set by the Frenchman Marcel Prévost, while his compatriot Edmond Perreyon set a new altitude record of 19,281 feet. In 1913, the athlete Roland Garros flew across the Mediterranean in a French monoplane, and Hélène Dutrieu—a world-champion cyclist and racing driver—was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for her services to aviation. Adolphe Pégoud became the world’s first aerial acrobat, attracting thousands of spectators to displays of loops, rolls, and other stunts.

  Look at the figures, though, and you’ll notice something important: by 1913, the Germans had already spent more than the French on aviation. At the outbreak of the First World War, Germany took to the skies.

  With 80 confirmed victories in the air, Manfred von Richthofen—the German fighter pilot known to posterity as the Red Baron—was the most successful German flying ace of the war. A wealthy aristocrat, he came to flying comparatively late. As a youth, he had been much more interested in horses and hunting, and liked nothing better than to ride out with brothers Lothar and Bolko to hunt wild boar, elk, birds, and deer.

  When the war began, he served as a cavalry reconnaissance officer. “I was entirely ignorant about the activities of our flying men,” he recalled later, “and I got tremendously excited whenever I saw an aviator. Of course I had not the slightest idea whether it was a German airman or an enemy.” Machine guns and barbed wire made traditional cavalry operations impossible. Richthofen’s men were drafted into the infantry, while their commanding officer looked around for some other kind of “dashing” action. Within a few weeks, reconnaissance operations were being conducted from the air, so Richthofen signed up.

  In the first few months of the war, aircraft were unarmed, although it didn’t take long for enterprising aviators to begin fitting weapons to them. The breakthrough came in 1915, when the Dutchman Anthony Fokker invented a synchronization system that allowed machine-gun bullets to pass through the propeller disk. For a time, Germany’s Fokker Eindecker fighters gave the Germans an edge. But British pusher biplanes (whose propellers were mounted to the rear fuselage) and the French Nieuport 11 were effective opponents, and there were more of them, so, all in all, the sides were evenly matched. Victory in the air depended less on the equipment and more on the character and caliber of the pilots. This wasn’t war as it was being fought on the ground. This was more like jousting.

  It took Richthofen a while to adapt to the grime and discomfort of flying. “The draft from the propeller was a beastly nuisance. I found it quite impossible to make myself understood by the pilot. Everything was carried away by the wind. If I took up a piece of paper it disappeared. My safety helmet slid off. My muffler dropped off. My jacket was not sufficiently buttoned. In short, I felt very uncomfortable.”

  The planes used in the war were fast, topping out at around 100 miles per hour. And when they caught fire (which was often) they went up like matchwood—which is, largely, what they were. Some were quite easy to fly. The British ace Cecil Lewis was told by his instructor to keep his plane above 5,000 feet and then throw her around as much as he liked: “Whether you’re on your back or on your ear, she’ll always fall out of it.”

  Lewis had joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1915, after lying about his age. He was already so tall (six feet, three inches) that the planes could scarcely hold him. When he began his training, the average life expectancy of a British pilot on the Western Front was three weeks. He loved flying for its own sake and wrote a magnificent memoir, Sagittarius Rising, about his experiences. From the air, a rainbow was not an arc but a perfect circle. You could dive and turn to watch the shadow of your plane on the clouds. Below, yellow mustard gas crept “panther-like over the scarred earth, curling down into dugouts, coiling and uncoiling at the wind’s whim.”

  After the First World War ended, Lewis was hired by the Vickers company to teach the Chinese how to fly, married the daughter of a Russian general, and co-founded the BBC.

  Richthofen was not so lucky. Acknowledged by the enemy as the most dangerous man in the air, Richthofen evolved rules for combat that turned his squadron, Jasta 11, into living legends. To help them identify each other in the melee of battle, Jasta 11 painted their aircraft bright red; they became known as “the Flying Circus.”

  On July 6, 1917, Richthofen received a serious head wound. While he was recuperating, a writer from the German propaganda unit turned up to ghostwrite his autobiography. The Red Battle Flyer is a thrilling read, but the arrogant tone can be hard to take: it thoroughly embarrassed Richthofen.

  The Red Baron returned to combat in October 1917, but his head wound had left him a changed man. He suffered nausea and headaches and mood swings, and these may well have contributed to his death: he was shot down while pursuing a young Canadian pilot over Morlancourt Ridge, near the Somme River.

  Manfred von Richthofen with his father, and
sporting a near-fatal head wound.

  Within a few years of the Wright brothers’ first exhibition flights, the public was hankering for more. They had witnessed numerous takeoffs and landings. They wanted to see what these strange craft could actually do.

  Exhibition pilots would scout out suitable open areas for their shows, then fly over neighboring towns dropping advertising leaflets. America’s early “barnstormers” earned a fortune. An aerobatic display could net you $1,000 in a day—more than twice the average American’s annual earnings. The trick was to live long enough to spend it. “When it was blowing hard, nobody wanted to fly if they could help it,” remembered one barnstormer, Beckwith Havens. “But the crowd would demand that you go up. The program said you were going to fly at two-thirty. Well, maybe the wind was blowing pretty hard. You were always watching the wind, you know—watching smoke, watching flags, laundry on the line, and everything. I still do it.”

  By 1911, more than a 100 people had died in airplane accidents. That people were prepared to accept such risks seems extraordinary today, but it’s worth remembering that back then there were plenty of other things that could kill you. Charles “Daredevil” Hamilton survived a staggering 63 plane crashes and died at the tender age of 28—of tuberculosis.

  After the First World War, ordinary men and women got their hands on thousands of surplus and decommissioned planes. In the United States, a $500 course of instruction often came with a free biplane, and secondhand engines could be had for as little as $75. Amateur pilots with a taste for adventure flew from town to town selling five-dollar rides at county fairs. Aerial mapping, skywriting, and crop dusting kept body and soul together out of season. (Continental Dusters began crop-dusting in 1924; they subsequently became part of Delta Air Lines.) As one pilot put it, the most dangerous thing about this kind of life was “the risk of starving to death.”

  Bessie Coleman was the first African American airwoman.

  Barnstorming was a tough life, and it forged a tough breed of pilot—though few were tougher than Bessie Coleman. Born in 1892, Coleman escaped rural poverty and moved to Chicago, where she became a beautician. Inspired by stories of female French aviators like Thérèse Peltier and Elise Raymonde Deroche (the first woman to earn a pilot’s license), she moved to France to learn to fly. She returned to the United States a different woman: Bessie Coleman was now “Queen Bess, the Daredevil Aviatrix.” She gave exhibition flights—sometimes with the Jamaica-born aviator and parachutist Hubert Fauntleroy Julian (“the Black Eagle of Harlem”)—and lectured on aviation. She died in a plane crash in 1926.

  Florence Barnes came from the other side of the tracks. Born into privilege on July 22, 1901, Florence already had an aviation pedigree: her grandfather Thaddeus Lowe had pioneered American aviation by setting up the Union Army Balloon Corps during the American Civil War. A tomboy, and difficult to control, Florence was married off, at 18, to the Reverend C. Rankin Barnes of South Pasadena. She stuck with this dismal arrangement for nine years before she snapped. Abandoning her husband and daughter, she disguised herself as a man and stowed away on a freighter bound for Mexico. She got work on a banana boat and acquired the nickname Pancho.

  Hell-raiser: Florence “Pancho” Barnes flew stunts for Howard Hughes.

  Four months later, Pancho came home. If her family was relieved to see her, their relief was short-lived. A few weeks later, while driving her cousin to flying lessons, she got it into her head to learn to fly. After six hours of lessons she was flying solo.

  Pancho took to “buzzing” her ex-husband’s congregation each Sunday morning. When that lost its interest, she set up a barnstorming show and competed in air races, breaking Amelia Earhart’s world women’s speed record with a fly-by of just over 196 miles per hour. She went to Hollywood and got work as a stuntwoman, and can be seen, going very fast indeed, in Howard Hughes’s Oscar-winning air adventure Hell’s Angels.

  She blew all her money just in time for the Great Depression, and with the last of her cash she bought a chunk of California’s Mojave Desert, near March Field. There she built the business she retired into: the Happy Bottom Riding Club—a dude ranch and restaurant that catered to airmen at the nearby Muroc Army Air Field. We’ll meet some of those airmen in later chapters: the test pilot Chuck Yeager and the astronaut Buzz Aldrin were among their ranks.

  Not every barnstormer was a pilot; in 1908, at a state fair in Raleigh, North Carolina, carnival crowds cheered Charles Broadwick as he descended from a balloon on a homemade parachute. Broadwick was one of the first parachutists to pack his chute into a wearable container—an innovation that would make skydiving possible.

  In the audience that day was a 15-year-old single mother called Georgia Ann Thompson. Married at 12, a mother at thirteen and abandoned by her husband, Georgia—a cotton-mill worker—had by then very little to lose. Even her mother agreed, and gave her blessing as Georgia hooked up with Charles Broadwick’s World Famous Aeronauts.

  At just over four feet tall, Georgia was billed as “The Doll Girl” and quickly became the sweetheart of crowds all across the country. Charles Broadwick adopted her as his daughter. As “Tiny” Broadwick, Georgia jumped from a swing attached to a balloon, jumped from biplanes, and was the first person ever to deliberately free-fall before pulling her cord. She quit while she was ahead, in 1922, after 1,100 jumps, but she stuck with the aviation business. When she died, on August 25, 1978, members of the U.S. Army’s elite parachute team, the Golden Knights, served as her pallbearers.

  Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick made her first parachute jump at the age of 15.

  Parachutists developed a number of daredevil stunts to wow the crowds at county fairs. One lethal escapade involved wearing two parachutes. After the first chute opened, it was cut off, allowing the jumper to free-fall. The second chute would burst open just before the jumper hit the ground. The crowds loved it.

  Art Starnes made his first parachute jump in the mid-twenties, at the age of 18, with a barnstorming troupe at an airfield outside Charleston, West Virginia. As parachutes go, Art’s was, to say the least, basic: “Instead of having a harness there was a large rope loop with a piece of garden hose covering it.” Starnes’s show name, Aerial Maniac, was not calculated to inspire confidence. In truth he was a meticulous pilot, famous—among aviators—for his relentless preparations and rehearsals. It was Starnes who first developed the techniques of free-falling.

  Regular parachutists viewed the prospect of free-fall with terror. Free-falling meant uncontrolled tumbling and spinning and certain death. Military pilots were taught to pull the ripcord the moment they left their planes. In war, though, this left them exposed to enemy fire. No one yet knew what position they should adopt to stay stable as they fell in the air. Starnes thugged out the answer by trial and error, enduring any number of rolls, tumbles, and flat spins before he hit upon the ideal skydiving posture: spread-eagled; chest out; knees bent. By the early 1930s, Starnes was jumping out of planes and falling for three and a half miles before pulling his cord.

  Another great, iconic stunt of the era was to climb out of your cockpit and walk along the wing of your plane. We owe this piece of craziness to Ormer Locklear, a carpenter and mechanic in Fort Worth, Texas, who joined the U.S. Army Air Service in October 1917, just a few days short of his twenty-sixth birthday.

  As part of a pilot’s test, Locklear needed to read and correctly interpret a signal flashed to him from the ground; but the plane’s engine housing and wing kept blocking his view. Fed up, Locklear left the plane in the hands of his instructor and climbed along the wing to read the message. On landing, his instructor bawled him out—and passed him.

  Locklear’s wing-walking saved his neck on other occasions, too: he’d wander out to fix a loose radiator cap or reattach a spark-plug wire. He got his honorable discharge from the Army Air Service in May 1919 and immediately became a barnstormer, quickly establishing himself as King of the Wing Walkers.

  Ormer Locklear, “King of th
e Wing Walkers,” pioneered countless aerial stunts.

  Locklear pioneered virtually all the stunts that other wingwalkers would copy. He did handstands, he hung from a trapeze by his teeth, and he was the first person to switch from one plane to another in midair, and from a car to a plane by grabbing a rope ladder.

  He claimed there was method in all this madness: “I don’t do these things because I want to run the risk of being killed,” he once protested. “I do it to demonstrate what can be done. Somebody has got to show the way someday we will all be flying and the more things that are attempted and accomplished, the quicker we will get there.”

  “Somebody has got to show the way someday we will all be flying and the more things that are attempted and accomplished, the quicker we will get there.”

  Ormer Locklear

  On New Year’s Day 1914, the world’s first scheduled commercial flight took off from the water near St. Petersburg, Florida, and headed northeast over Tampa Bay. Twenty-three minutes and 21 miles later, the single-engined flying boat landed St. Petersburg’s mayor, Abe Pheil, in the town of Tampa.

  The Airboat Line was the brainchild of Tony Jannus. Born in 1889 in Washington, D.C., and nicknamed “the Birdman,” Jannus began life as a barnstormer. Popular, brave, and charming, he dated movie stars, tested machine guns and parachutes, and, with his brother Roger, started his own firm, Jannus Brothers Aviation, coordinating pilots, airplane designers, and builders. Two years after starting the firm, delivering bombers to the czar of Russia, Tony Jannus’s Curtiss K flying boat developed engine trouble and ditched into the Black Sea. Jannus was lost at sea. He was 27.