The Bishop's Boys (68 page)

Teaching all these men to fly kept Orville busy. He made nearly 250 flights from Huffman Prairie in 1910, over 100 of them during the last three weeks in May. Change was in the air. Orv test-flew the first Model B early in July, and conducted the first experiments with wheeled machines on July 21.
¹⁰

Wilbur flew only once, on May 21. It was the last time that he would ever fly as a pilot in the United States. Four days later, Orville took his brother up as a passenger, the only time they flew together. That was also the day on which Milton made his only flight.
¹¹

The Wright team flew its first exhibition at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on June 13–18. It was especially exciting for Frank Coffyn, who soloed while the meet was in progress. Walter Brookins had his share of excitement, too—he was descending from a record altitude of over 6,000 feet when a valve broke, forcing him to glide in for his first dead stick landing.
¹²

The Wright crew was very green indeed, and most of the flying at Indianapolis consisted of straightforward laps around the track. The promoters were disappointed. “The age is one of speed and competition,”

remarked one speedway official, “and I want to see a flock of airships fighting for first place under the wire.”
¹³

Things grew more exciting as the aviators gained experience. Ralph Johnstone set a new Canadian altitude record at Montreal early in July. Moving on to Atlantic City, Brookins won $5,000 for exceeding his own world altitude mark. Curtiss was there as well, earning $5,000 for a series of flights over the ocean. He was training his own exhibition team at Hammondsport, and intended to take on the Wright Fliers at every opportunity.

The Curtiss crowd was free-form, operating under the loose control
of Jerome Fanciulli, the publicist who managed the exhibition operation. The pilots were well paid, receiving 50 percent of the revenues resulting from an appearance. “We were taught by the Wrights that the Curtiss crowd was just no good at all,” Frank Coffyn recalled. “We turned our noses up at them. But we found out later on, by flying at the same meets, that they were a pretty nice bunch of fellows.”
¹⁴

Pilots in the Wright camp were subject to much stricter supervision. All the standard family rules were in effect. There was no drinking, gambling, or flying on Sundays. The pay was much less—a set fee of $20 per week and $50 for every day a man flew. For the Wright Company, it was an ideal arrangement. The brothers demanded $1,000 for for each day that they flew at a meet. The company received $6,000 per man for a standard one-week meet, plus any prize money earned; the pilot received $320. Small wonder that the year 1910 was a good one for the Wright Company, with profits approaching $100,000. Half of that amount went to the Wright brothers.
¹⁵

The crowds flocked in increasing numbers to see the members of the two teams perform at makeshift flying fields—and their reaction fascinated the pilots. “They thought you were a fake, you see.” That was the way pioneer Curtiss aviator Beckwith (“Becky”) Havens remembered it. “There wasn’t anybody there who believed an airplane would really fly. In fact, they’d give odds. But when you flew, oh my, they would carry you off the field.”
¹⁶

“Flight was generally looked upon as an impossibility,” Orville recalled, “and scarcely anyone believed in it until he had actually seen it with his own eyes.” People reacted in unexpected ways to their first sight of an airplane in the sky. Wilbur noticed an “intensity of enjoyment” and a sense of exhilaration among the spectators. He recalled one man who wandered away from the 1909 trials at Fort Myer muttering, over and over again, “My God! My God!”
¹⁷

A Chicago clergyman attending his first air meet thought that he had never seen “such a look of wonder on the faces of the multitude. From the grey-haired man to the child, everyone seemed to feel that it was a new day in their lives.”
¹⁸
A reporter noticed the same look on the faces of those attending the meet at Dominguez Field: “Thirty-thousand eyes are on those rubber-tired wheels, waiting for the miraculous moment—historical for him who has not witnessed it. Suddenly, something happens to those whirling wheels—they slacken their speed, yet the vehicle advances more rapidly. It is the moment of miracle.”
¹⁹

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:

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, which 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