Then Ely noticed the horizon darkening with another squall and he began to wonder why the Birmingham did not start. He looked at Chambers, pointed at the approaching blackness. The captain nodded. He knew it would be close, but he could do nothing. Thirty fathoms of chain were still in the water.
Gene Ely checked everything again, and stared at the squall ahead. He seemed about to lose his chance because the Navy was too slow. At 1516 he decided he would wait no longer for the ship to start steaming into the wind. If ever he was going to fly off that ship, it had to be now. He gave the release signal.
Harrington, who knew the plan, hesitated. Ely emphatically repeated his signal. The mechanic yanked the toggle, watched the plane roll down the ramp and drop out of sight. Water splashed high in front of the ship. Then the plane came into sight, climbing slowly toward the dark clouds. Men on the platform and bridge let out the breath they had held. One of them spoke into a voice tube, and the wireless operator tapped out, “Ely just gone.”
In 1910, Curtiss pilots steered with their rudder, balanced with their ailerons and kept the elevator set, by marks on its bamboo pushrod, either at a climb, level, or a glide position. In order to dip and pick up a bit more speed, Ely took off with his elevator set for glide. Off the bow he waited the fraction of an instant too long to shift to climb. The machine pointed up, but squashed down through the air.
Gene felt a sudden drag. Salt water whipped his face. A rattle, like hail on a tin roof, was louder than his engine. He tried to wipe the spray from his goggles but his gloved hand only smeared them, so he was blinded. Then the splashboard pulled the wheels free of the water. The rattle stopped. He snatched off his goggles and saw dirty, brown water just beyond his shoes.
6. The wireless operator tapped out, “Ely just gone” as the frail little biplane left the deck of the Birmingham, 14 November 1910, and the first flight from a surface vessel became an accomplished fact. (National Archives)
The seat shook. The engine seemed to be trying to jump out of the plane. Ely’s sense of direction left him. There were no landmarks, only shadows in the mist, and that terrifying dirty water below. He swung left toward the darkest misty shadow. He had to land quickly. On the ground he might stop the vibration, take off again, and find the Navy Yard. He wondered if the bulky life jacket that fouled his arms would keep him afloat if the plane splashed.
A strip of land bordered by gray, weathered beach houses loomed ahead. Five minutes after the mechanic had pulled the toggle, Ely landed on the beach at Willoughby Spit. “Where am I?” he asked Julia Smith, who had dashed out of the nearest house.
“Right between my house and the yacht club,” she said.
It sounded funny but it wasn’t. He knew the splintered propeller would not take him to the Navy Yard. He had failed. He blamed himself bitterly for the split second delay in shifting the elevator. Now he knew how to do it without hitting the water, but would he ever get another chance?
Boats full of people converged on the yacht club dock. Their enthusiastic congratulations confused him. “I’m glad you did not head for the Navy Yard,” Chambers told him. “Nobody could find it in this weather.” Captain Fletcher agreed. John Barry Ryan offered him $500 for the broken propeller. “A souvenir of this historic flight,” he explained.
Ely figured that in not making the Navy Yard, he had failed, and Chambers and Ryan spent the evening trying to convince him that he had succeeded. His particular landing place was unimportant. It would soon be forgotten. The world would remember that he had shown that a plane could fly from a ship, and that navies could no longer ignore aeroplanes. Ely did not cheer up until Chambers promised to try to arrange a chance for him to do it again. “I could land aboard, too,” was Ely’s comment.
The next morning Ryan’s valet wrapped the splintered propeller in a bathrobe and carried it into his pullman drawing room. There Ryan gave a champagne party until train time, presented Ely with a check for the propeller, and made him a lieutenant in his U. S. Aeronautical Reserve. After the train pulled out, Gene spent the check on a diamond for Mabel.
The morning of 15 November 1910, the Birmingham flight filled front pages all over the United States and Europe. Foreign editors speculated that the United States would probably build special aviation ships immediately. American editors, more familiar with naval conservatism, said the flight should at least lead Secretary Meyer to ask for appropriations for aviation. But Wainwright’s friends belittled the performance. A ship could not fight with its guns boxed by a platform. A masthead lookout, they said, could see farther than Ely had flown.
And so it went and so it would go for a long time, this argument between the Navy’s black shoe conservatives and the brown shoe visionaries.
1. The first flight to a “carrier deck” was accomplished by Eugene Ely in San Francisco Bay on 18 January 1911, when he landed on the slightly inclined wooden platform, 30 feet wide and 120 feet long, which had been built on the stern of the USS Pennsylvania for the occasion. A ramp sloped downward at a 30-degree angle at the after end of the platform. Twenty-two years later, Ely received posthumously the Distinguished Flying Cross.
CHAPTER THREE: THE SHIP AND AIRCRAFT MEET
The first flight from ship to shore, from forecastle of the cruiser Birmingham to Willoughby Spit, resulted in a blaze of publicity. In Washington, Captain Chambers endeavored to take advantage of such favorable atmosphere. But the interests of the bureaucrats in that bureau-infested city soon proved to be different from the aims and desires of Chambers.
Nobody denied that aeronautical research was needed, and everybody wanted the appropriations and the prestige that went along with it. When Chambers suggested a national laboratory, he was quickly seconded by the National Aeronautical Society and the Smithsonian Institution. Charles Walcott, who had taken the Langley pictures to Theodore Roosevelt, headed the Smithsonian. He announced the reopening of Langley’s old laboratory as a very inadequate nucleus for expansion.
But Chief Constructor R. M. Watt objected. A national laboratory would be needless—a costly duplication. Construction and Repair’s ship model basin could do all the necessary research, if only a few extra pieces of equipment were added. H. I. Cone, engineer in chief of the Navy, claimed that his Bureau had the necessary equipment, and offered the use of the Engineering Experiment Station across the Severn River from the Naval Academy. President Taft opposed a separate laboratory and, in spite of continuous agitation by Chambers and his backers, no national aeronautical research organization was formed for over four years.
Another scheme that bristled with controversy was Chambers’ plan for a small naval air organization. He wanted an Office of Aeronautics, headed by a director responsible to the Secretary of the Navy, to coordinate all aviation developments. Because Chambers thought naval planes would be like ships’ picket boats, he assumed they would be similarly bought, maintained, and operated. The Bureau of Construction and Repair would take care of the airframes; the Bureau of Engineering would provide motors and wireless; the Bureau of Navigation would equip, man, and operate them. And someday the Bureau of Ordnance might arm them.
Chambers ignored the interbureau rivalry and blamed naval aviation’s slow start on ignorance and lack of interest. Hence an informed coordinator to help everyone seemed a natural solution. He seems to have expected to have the office going within a week or so after he had suggested it. Although he knew Wainwright and the Secretary would oppose anything aerial, the stubborn opposition he encountered in other quarters took him by surprise. Watt, still trying for exclusive control of aircraft by the Bureau of Construction and Repair, said that no other bureau, except possibly Engineering,