Later, aboard the Pennsylvania, the navigator, Lieutenant Commander W. H. Standley, approved the log with its matter-of-fact recital of this unique event sandwiched in with the routine without adding any comment of his own. Was he unimpressed? Thirty years later, would his thoughts return to Eugene Ely? In December 1941, Admiral W. H. Standley, U. S. Navy (Retired), was a member of the commission sent by President Franklin Roosevelt to evaluate and report on what Japanese naval aircraft had done at Pearl Harbor.
Captain Pond’s report of the experiment was enthusiastic:
I desire to place myself on record as positively assured of the importance of the aeroplane in future naval warfare, certainly for scouting purposes. For offensive operations, such as bomb throwing, there has as yet, to my knowledge, been no demonstration of value, nor do I think there is likely to be. The extreme accuracy of control, as demonstrated by Ely, while perhaps not always to be expected to the same degree, was certainly not accidental and can be repeated and probably very generally approximated to. There only remains the development of the power and endurance of the machine itself, which, as with all mechanical things, is bound to come. There will be no necessity for a special platform. The flight away may be made either from a monorail or from a stay, and either from forward or aft, but preferably forward, while the return landing may be made on the water alongside, and the aviator and his machine afterwards brought on board.
No responsible naval officer of that day, not even Captain Chambers, envisioned an aircraft carrier. Chambers knew the 1911 “bamboo tails” needed a lot of improving before they could be used for operations at sea with the Fleet.
The Pennsylvania flights were the last Ely made for the Navy. He never wore a uniform, never drew a nickel of Navy pay, and he never liked the sea. But he tried to give aviation to the Navy because he believed it would strengthen his country. That fall he died in a crash while stunt flying at Macon, Georgia, after a career that had lasted less than two years. On the day he would have been 25 years old, he was buried near his Iowa birthplace.
The next steps toward aircraft carriers were made by the British. Early in 1917, the Royal Navy tried flying Zeppelin chasers from a platform on the bow of a former ocean liner. Since more pilots survived than when the practice had been to fly from the turret tops, a “fly-off” deck was built in place of the forward 18-inch gun of the new battle cruiser Furious. Then a Royal Navy flight lieutenant, E. N. Dunning, talked her captain into letting him land aboard. With the ship steaming into the wind at 30 knots, Dunning brought his Sopwith Pup in from astern level with the deck, made an S-turn in front of the bridge, and slowed enough so that men were able to grab his wings and drag his plane to a stop. It was the first shipboard landing since Ely’s. Five days later, Dunning tried it again. This time the plane got away from the deck crew and skidded over the side. Dunning was killed.
10. While the Captain entertained at lunch and the guests toasted Ely and the birth of naval aviation, the sandbags were removed from the platform, and the plane turned around for the return flight.
11. At 11:58 A.M., 57 minutes after his landing, the plane rolled off the ramp, and under Ely’s skillful handling the second flight from a ship’s deck was accomplished.
Shortly thereafter, the Furious had a “flying-on” deck added aft, where an American naval officer saw them experimenting with sandbags on lines like those Ely had used. Off-center landings caused planes to swerve. So they discarded the cross-deck lines, and the Furious went to sea in March 1918 with her flying-on deck covered with taut fore-and-aft wires high enough so that a plane’s axle skidded along them with the wheels clear of the deck. Anchor-like hooks protruding from the axle snagged the wires and kept the plane from bouncing.
Fast landings and rough air from the stack ahead of the landing area caused discouragingly frequent fatalities. Nonetheless, in 1920, the United States paid the British $40,000 for the right to use this gear on the Navy’s first carrier, the Langley. It was installed first on a big turntable set up at Chambers Field in Norfolk.
Commander Kenneth Whiting and Lieutenant Commander Godfrey deC. Chevalier, the captain and the officer of the Langley, respectively, turned the turntable over to a young aviator, Lieutenant Alfred Melville Pride, and told him to develop an arresting gear for the Langley. When Pride landed on the turntable, axle friction on the wires was seldom enough to stop him safely. Several times he ended up beyond the end of the wires with his plane on its nose or its back. Navy experts suggested that he wrap something around the wires in order to increase their drag, but Pride had other ideas. He knew all about Ely and, for sound engineering reasons, he liked his cross-deck lines. However, planes had changed so he could not use the little hooks on a slat.
His planes landed on two wheels and a tail skeg. His first problem was to find out how to attach a hook so the plane would not flip over on its back and also how to keep it on the deck until it caught up a cross-deck cable. He hung a weighted line across saw horses and practiced making passes at it with an Aeromarine, a plane so slow he could drift it backwards across the field when flying into a moderate wind. After a practicable hook was perfected, he replaced Ely’s dragging sandbags with weights that could be lifted in a tower. In this way the energy absorbed could be calculated. His first weights were 13-inch shells for obsolete guns, bridled so that several were picked up in succession as a cross-deck line ran out.
12. The plane dropped almost to the water, then rose and leveled off at 2,000 feet. Thirteen minutes later Ely flew back over Tanforan.
Thus the arresting gear developed by Pride and used in the early Langley operations consisted of lowered British fore-and-aft wires, superimposed on Ely’s cross-deck cables connected to lifting weights. In landing, the hook caught a cross-deck wire; the plane came to a quick halt and was held down by the fore-and-aft wires.
A few years later, L. C. Stevens, a flying naval constructor, demonstrated that the fore-and-aft wires merely slowed up operations. Although they had been installed on the carriers Lexington and Saratoga, they were all eliminated in 1929. Since then the U. S. Navy’s carrier arresting gear has been an improvement of Eugene Ely’s system adapted to larger planes. Heavy steel cables have replaced his cross-deck lines, and they are attached to higher-capacity energy absorbers than his jury-rigged sandbags.
In 1933, the President of the United States posthumously presented the Distinguished Flying Cross to Eugene B. Ely for showing how to make carriers practicable. The existence of the U. S. Navy’s carrier arresting gear was then a closely held military secret and it could not be mentioned. So the citation read in part:
. . . for his extraordinary achievement as a pioneer civilian aviator and for his significant contribution to the development of aviation in the United States Navy. . . . His feat of flying aboard the USS Pennsylvania in 1911, assisted by retarding gear of primitive design, called attention for the first time to the possibilities of landing airplanes on shipboard. He had previously flown an airplane from a cruiser. These acts were the forerunners of our present aviation forces operating with the surface fleet.
By that time the U. S. Navy had named a ship honoring Langley, who could not, and the Wrights, who would not attempt to fly an airplane from a ship. Later it would name a ship for Curtiss, who did not want anyone to fly from a ship. But there has never been a ship named for Eugene Ely, who first did the trick. As the world’s first naval aviator and the man who pointed the way for unnumbered carrier pilots, Eugene Ely deserves to be better remembered.