But that onrush of joy was sometimes lethal, and most fatal accidents in aviation history have occurred because of it. The greatest danger wasn’t the unreliable engine or fragile fuselage but the pilot himself. Again and again, the young man (or woman) pushed the plane too far and died.
Or he was killed by birds, the original proprietors of the air. Most bird flying occurs between 30 to 300 feet above ground level, the height attained by early aviators. Bird hazards (or “feathered bullets,” as flocks were called) date back to the initial flights of the Wright brothers. Doing circuits over fields at Dayton, Ohio, on September 7, 1905, the brothers encountered flocks of blackbirds that twice struck their aircraft. The first bird-strike fatality in North America was in 1912 when Cal Rodgers, the first man to fly across the United States, lost his life after a gull became jammed in the controls of his aircraft, causing the plane to crash.
Bird strikes weren’t reported then because they rarely brought an aircraft down. For one thing, the aircraft’s airspeed wasn’t high enough to cause severe damage to the wings and fuselage when a bird struck it, and for another, no pilot had yet made it to the heights of the massive annual migrations of large birds such as Canada geese. Strikes that occurred against the forward-facing parts of the aircraft did expose the pilot to flying glass and bird debris, but the propellers on piston-engine aircraft were too strong to be damaged by birds. The rotating blades protected the engines, if only by reducing bird size and thus the effect of impact.
The late Thomas Selfridge had been a member of the Aerial Experimental Association (AEA) formed at Baddeck, Nova Scotia, by Alexander Graham Bell. In addition to Mrs. Bell, who funded the organization, the other members of the AEA were F.W. “Casey” Baldwin and J.A.D. McCurdy, two young engineers from the University of Toronto, and Glenn Hammond Curtiss, a motorcycle builder from Hammondsport, New York. As every Canadian knows (or should know), McCurdy’s flight in the Silver Dart on February, 23, 1909, inaugurated aviation in Canada and the rest of the British Empire. Yet although Canadians might have heard of what happened at Baddeck, very few had actually seen flying machines, and there were many who doubted men could fly at all.
That changed in the summer of 1910. The two great aviation meets at Lakeside, Quebec, and Weston, Ontario, that June and July fielded a profusion of biplanes and monoplanes that sometimes took to the air. There were also dirigibles bumping along, balloons ascending, and even parachute jumps from the latter. Remarkably, although there were several crashes at both meets, the Silver Dart among them, and some injuries (and one near-drowning in Valois Bay, Lake Saint-Louis), there were no fatalities (or none recorded) among the pilots or the onlookers.
The first Canadian to be killed flying an aircraft was the Toronto-born St. Croix Johnstone. When his wealthy father refused to buy him an aircraft in 1910, saying he didn’t want his son to die, Johnstone joined the Moisant travelling aero circus then based at the New Orleans stockyards.[2] Soon, with a few “firsts” behind him such as first flights over cities in the United States, Canada, and Cuba, he achieved fame on the aerial circuit. At the Mineola, New York, fair on August 5, 1911, the young Canadian broke the flight-duration record by remaining in the air for four hours, one minute, and 59 seconds, a difficult feat considering the amount of fuel he had to carry aloft to do so.
Ten days later Johnstone flew his Blériot-type monoplane at the Grant Park air meet held on the Chicago waterfront. Among the onlookers were his parents and young wife, who watched as a mile from shore he executed a perfect corkscrew dive over the water. The aircraft’s wings suddenly crumpled, a local newspaper reported, “like paper and the machine hurtled into the lake, its heavy engine and tangled wires dragging its pilot to his death.”
Reporters attributed the cause of the crash to a “flaw in the airplane’s mechanism.” But in what is probably the earliest accident investigation into the death of a Canadian pilot, other aviators at the meet connected the wings’ collapse to the torque of the dive and/or the strain caused by the Mineola exhibition 10 days earlier. The “shear centre” of a wing wasn’t properly understood until the mid-1920s, and the failure to identify it then meant the industry was unable to ascertain why Blériot-type aircraft, in particular, were prone to shedding their wings in flight.[3]
Before the First World War, the face of aviation in the United States was Orville and Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss, and in Canada, Alexander Graham Bell and J.A.D. McCurdy, all mechanical tinkerers who through trial and error had painstakingly untangled some of the mysteries of powered flight. But more familiar to the public were aerial daredevils such as Archibald Hoxsey, Walter Brookins, Lincoln Beachey, and Cal Rodgers. In the pursuit of cheap thrills, the miracle of flight of which so much had been promised was being strangled at birth. Mass entertainment meant dangerous flying stunts such as inverted loops and spiral dives. Between 1908 and 1913, the New York Times calculated that 308 “aeronauts” had died in air crashes in the United States, with 85 in the first eight months of 1913 alone. The magazine Scientific American deplored the situation in which aircraft that had promised so much were now “providers of sensational amusement,” like racing cars and motorcycles, rather than “practical means of transport.”[4]
The Wrights decried the use of their aircraft for what they termed “fancy flights,” and in refusing to modify their Wright B Flyer for aerobatics, killed several pilots. Nothing could be gained by stunting, the brothers said, except more deaths. But after 1910, with so much money at stake, even they were willing to trade notoriety for a share of the gate receipts and prize money. Like Curtiss, the brothers set up the earliest flying schools. For $500 down to earn their wings (later reduced to $250), students began with ground-school instructions at the Dayton workshop. They studied how a Wright Flyer was built and repaired, graduating to an ingenious “flight simulator” (a Flyer with its control levers powered by an electric motor that regulated the wing warping) before actual flight training at Huffman Prairie Field. All aircraft used for instruction were equipped with dual controls, and the student was allowed five hours of flying before being tested for a licence. The test was carried out in front of observers from the Aero Club of America and was run according to Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) standards.
Without safety measures like helmet and gloves, William Stark gave a flying exhibition with his Curtiss biplane at Minoru Park Racetrack, Richmond, British Columbia, on April 20, 1912. Vancouver Archives.
The odds for the early air man to die violently weren’t in his favour. Planes crashed because no one had put everything together yet. The Wrights, for example, had figured out how the wings on an aircraft worked but were never quite sure where the fuselage fitted in. The little scientific knowledge available then depended on the observation of birds, on intuition, and on limited experience. Aerodynamics was vaguely understood by aircraft engineers and even less by pilots. There had been no experimentation on the structural demand of an aircraft’s wings. Were short, stubby, and strong wings better than long and slender ones or vice versa? Which were more aerodynamic — elliptical or tapered wings? Too many aircraft were falling out of the sky because of thin wings, the planes stalling with no warning to their pilots. Yet no one had figured out that thick wings were safer because they gave the pilot warning and allowed him to reduce pitch. North Americans used pusher engines, but European designers favoured tractors. How did the engine’s position affect the aircraft’s centre of gravity? What was the aspect ratio to be? Were biplanes with their web of bracing wires the future, or were monoplanes such as the birdlike Antoinette with no wires at all the way to go?
Montreal’s Bois Franc Polo Grounds, Toronto’s Trethewey Farm and Long Branch, and Richmond, British Columbia’s Minoru Park Racetrack have long been buried under suburban sprawl. But in the summers of 1910–13, whether in those cities or Saskatoon, Calgary, Fort Erie, or Quebec City, untrained (as all pilots were) birdmen took to the air in numbers for prize money and adulation. Aerial circus promoters attracted the crowds by promising suicidal manoeuvres in flight, luring to their deaths devil-may-care, fatalistic young men possessing little knowledge of aeronautics. And with the public clamouring