Authors: Tom D. Crouch
The business side of the operation was another matter. Orville regarded Herr Klose, the manager of the operation, as “incompetent
to handle the business.” He took no interest in the infringement suits pending in the German Patent Office, and paid scant attention to the company books.
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Royalty payments to the Wrights were handled in the most cavalier fashion. Pilots came into the factory and constructed their own Wright machines, which were exempt from royalty. The company was also selling machines on the installment plan, with the royalty to the Wrights coming from the final check—if there was a final check. Nor were royalties paid on company-owned training machines.
Orville spent a few days discussing the design of a new machine for the German military. It was a pointless exercise. The procurement officers demanded that the craft feature “the latest inventions of the Wright brothers in control,” so long as all of the steering was done with the feet.
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Wilbur kept his brother abreast of the latest news from home. Johnny Moisant, the young aviator who had done so well at Belmont, was touring the country with a “flying circus.” The operation netted only $600 for a three-day appearance in Chattanooga, and $200 for a single day in Memphis. Knabenshue, on the other hand, booked Brookins, Hoxsey, and Parmalee into San Francisco for $22,500. Parmalee would fly the rebuilt Baby Grand at the event.
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Wilbur did not succeed in cheering his brother. “I have about made up my mind to let the European business go,” Orville wrote. “I don’t propose to be bothered with it all my life and I see no prospect of its ever amounting to anything unless we send a representative here to stay to watch our interests.”
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Orville returned to Dayton on December 29 thoroughly discouraged. He had been gone less than a month and a half. Two days later Johnny Moisant was killed while flying near New Orleans. That same afternoon, Hoxsey and Brookins took off from Dominguez Field, Los Angeles. Hoxsey climbed to 7,000 feet in search of yet another altitude record, gave up, and nosed over into a spiraling dive. Like his friend Johnstone, he did not recover.
Only a week earlier, Frank Russell had announced that the Wright Company would pay a monthly annuity to Johnstone’s widow. Now he told reporters that they would pick up Hoxsey’s funeral expenses and contribute to the support of his mother.
Ralph Johnstone and Arch Hoxsey were the first members of the Wright Fliers to die in aircraft accidents. Others would follow. Six of the nine men who served on the team (Johnstone, Hoxsey, Parmalee,
Welsh, Gill, and Bonney) died in crashes. All but Bonney—who died in a machine of his own design in 1928—were killed in Wright aircraft before the year 1912 was half over.
The situation was as bad for other Wright pilots. Almost one quarter of the thirty-five men killed in aircraft crashes by the end of 1910 died in Wright or Wright-type machines constructed by licensed builders. Eugène Lefebvre, the first man after Selfridge to die in an airplane, was a Wright pilot. So was C. S. Rolls, who purchased one of the first machines from Short Brothers.
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Some aviators began to regard the Wright machines as fatally flawed. That was not the case. The Dayton-built Wright aircraft were the sturdiest machines in the air. If they were less stable than some other types, they repaid the pilot by giving him absolute control. These were airplanes that would do precisely what the pilot asked of them.
The same could not be said of many of the license-built machines. The aircraft in which C. S. Rolls died, for example, had been hastily modified. The collapse of that modified structure caused the crash. The same was true of the German- and Italian-built machines in which European aviators died.
The only safety problem with the Wright machines could have been remedied with a few pennies worth of belting. No aircraft of the period had seat belts. Brookins believed that Johnstone fell out of his seat during the dive. Wilbur accepted that judgment, and suggested that the same thing might have happened to Hoxsey.
The Wrights remained in the exhibition business for eleven months after Hoxsey’s crash, but profits were falling and the brothers were rapidly losing interest in “the montebank game.” They dissolved the team in November 1911.
That did not mean there would be less activity at Huffman Prairie. Orville made hundreds of flights from the old field between 1911 and 1915, testing nine of the thirteen distinct aircraft types developed by the Wright Company. Huffman remained a world center of aeronautical achievement.
It was also a teaching center. Late in his life Orville compiled a list of 115 individuals who had learned to fly there. It included the pioneers of U.S. military aviation. Lieutenants Frank Lahm and Charles DeForest Chandler, who began their instruction at College Park, completed their training in Dayton. The first naval aviators, Lieutenants Kenneth Whiting and John Rodgers, soloed at the Prairie. One junior
officer, Lieutenant Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, rose to the rank of five-star general, commanded the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, and served as the first Chief of Staff of the newly created U.S. Air Force.
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Calbraith Perry Rodgers, the first man to complete a coast-to-coast flight across America, soloed at Huffman Prairie. So did Canadian Roy Brown, who would one day be credited with the death of Captain Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s ace in World War I. Eddie Stinson, the founder of Stinson Aircraft, was also on the list.
The average student pilot of the period received nothing more than encouragement before being turned loose to conquer the air on his own. Those whom Orville Wright taught to fly were more fortunate. The world’s first pilot had given a great deal of thought to the business of flight instruction.
The experiences of “Hap” Arnold and Thomas DeWitt Milling, who arrived in Dayton for flight training in April 1911, were typical. “Our primary training took place in the factory,” Arnold recalled, “for in addition to learning to fly we found we would have to master the construction and maintenance features of the Wright machine….” With orientation out of the way, Cliff Turpin and Al Welsh introduced the novice aviators to the business of flying.
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As Arnold noted: “No two types of controls were the same in those days, and from the student’s point of view the Wright system was the most difficult.” Since 1900, the controls had grown ever more cumbersome. By 1910 the pilot negotiating a turn had to move one lever to the front or rear to initiate a bank, while bending his wrist to the right or left to operate the rudder. Nor could he neglect the elevator, operated with the other hand.
Contrast this to the Curtiss system in which a control wheel was pushed forward or pulled back to control the elevator, and turned to the right or left as a steering wheel to operate the rudder. A shoulder yoke controlled the ailerons. Every movement—pushing and pulling, turning the wheel and leaning—was natural and instinctive.
A new pilot had to
think
about flying a Wright machine, and that was a dangerous thing. To provide his students with some practice before risking life and limb, Orville developed the world’s first flight simulator—an old airplane balanced on sawhorses set up in the rear of the factory.
“It was probably taken out of commission due to its age and need of general overhauling,” recalled Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, who learned to fly at Huffman Prairie in 1912. “The motor was taken out,
but the propellers were still in place. It was mounted on a kind of wooden trestle which permitted it to tip over from side to side, and would not remain in a horizontal position if left to itself.”
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“Hap” Arnold described how it worked:
The lateral controls were connected with small clutches at the wingtips, and grabbed a moving belt running over a pulley. A forward motion, and the clutch would snatch the belt, and down would go the left wing. A backward pull and the reverse would happen. The jolts and teetering were so violent that the student was kept busy just moving the lever back and forth to keep on an even keel. That was primary training, and it lasted for a few days.
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“It was an improvised affair,” Bergdoll noted, “but did its work well for years.” One of his fellow students, Fred Southard, of Youngstown, Ohio, “used to sit in this trainer for days and days at a time and practiced so long that he could read a newspaper and keep the wings balanced without any thought of the same.” Southard was unable to transfer his expertise to the air, however. Every time he went up with instructor Al Welsh, he would push or pull the warping lever in the wrong direction. Welsh gave him up as a hopeless case, and Orville refused to let him take possession of the machine he had already purchased. Southard decided to take matters into his own hands.
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Arriving at the field early on the morning of May 21, 1912, he smashed the lock on the hangar where his airplane was stored and took off. “He got no more than fifty feet up,” recalled Bergdoll, “when the plane rolled over on one side and skidded to the ground a total wreck and Southard killed. Evidently he had pulled the warping lever in the wrong direction for the last time.”
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“Hap” Arnold took his first lesson on May 3, and soloed ten days later, a veteran of twenty-eight flights—3 hours, 48 minutes of flying time. Al Welsh, his instructor, told him it was about average.
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Most of the civilian graduates of the Wright school set up as exhibition pilots, traveling the county fair circuit, and vying for the rich distance prizes established by American newspapers. Harry Atwood, Cal Rodgers, and Bob Fowler were among the best of the bunch.
Harry Atwood left Huffman Prairie determined to win the $50,000 Hearst Prize for the first flight from coast-to-coast. There was no time to waste. According to the rules established by the Hearst papers, the prize would lapse unless the flight was completed by October 1, 1911.
Money was Atwood’s big problem. Given the primitive nature of aeronautical technology, this would be as much an expedition as a
flight. The aviator would have to equip himself with at least two airplanes, one to fly and the other for spare parts. He would also need several spare engines, a crew of mechanics, and a means of moving the ground crew and equipment across the nation in his wake.
Unable to raise that kind of money, Atwood decided on a shorter but still very impressive flight from St. Louis to New York via Chicago, where he would compete in a scheduled air meet. The publicity, he hoped, would attract funding for the longer flight. He left St. Louis in a Model B on August 16 and landed at Governors Island nine days later. The flight was front-page news, but no sponsors came forward.
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Cal Rodgers, a complete unknown, emerged as the big money winner at Chicago, earning $11,285 for the longest flight of the meet. At thirty-two, he was older than most of the pilots. He was bigger as well, six feet four inches tall and weighing almost two hundred pounds. Rodgers’s family had deep roots in America. One ancestor, Oliver Hazard Perry, defeated the British in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813; another, Matthew Calbraith Perry, opened Japan in 1854. His grandfather was a rear admiral in the Union Navy, and his father a career cavalry officer, who died just before Cal was born.
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Cal Rodgers came to Huffman Prairie in June 1911 to visit his cousin, Navy Lieutenant John Rodgers, a Wright student. Intrigued, Cal enrolled in the school himself. Confident after his victory at the Chicago meet, he convinced officials of the Armour Meat-Packing Company to sponsor his try for the Hearst transcontinental prize. Recognizing an opportunity to publicize a new grape beverage, “Vin Fizz,” the company agreed to pay for Rodgers’s airplane, to lease a train that would shadow him across the nation, and to pay 5 cents for every mile that he flew. Rodgers would pay for gas, oil, crew, and spare parts.
Rodgers traveled to Dayton to confer with Orville and purchase a new Model EX, a small, high-powered version of the Model B. He also offered Charlie Taylor $10 a day plus expenses to serve as his chief mechanic, twice what Charlie was getting at the Wright Factory. Charlie was not getting along with manager Frank Russell and jumped at the chance. Informed of the arrangement, Orville advised his old friend to think of the project as a leave of absence.
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Rodgers took off from a racetrack near Sheepshead Bay, Long Island, on September 17, headed west. His entourage—wife Mabel, Charlie Taylor, and the other members of the support team—followed
in a special three-car train steaming out of New York on the Erie Railroad tracks.
Rodgers suffered his first crash while taking off from Middletown, New York, the next morning. Brushing across the top of a willow tree, he lost control and fell into a chicken coop. He was fine but the EX required major repairs.
By September 23, he had progressed to Elmira, New York. That afternoon, he destroyed the left side of his machine in a crash.
Cal Rodgers finally rolled his wheels into the surf at Long Beach, California, on December 10, eighty-four days after leaving Sheepshead Bay. He had suffered five disastrous crashes, each requiring major repairs to the
Vin Fizz
—not to mention innumerable hard landings, aborted takeoffs, broken fuel lines, blown valves, and engine failures.
He ended the flight with a pair of crutches strapped to the wing of the airplane. He had broken his ankle landing at Pasadena on November 12 and spent a month in bed before attempting the short final leg of his journey to the Pacific shore. Only the honor of the thing sustained him—he was not even close to the one-month time limit for the Hearst Prize.
Bob Fowler, another recent graduate of Huffman Prairie, had taken off from San Francisco on September 11, heading his Model B east toward the Rockies. An ex-automobile racer, he planned to dash across the continent in twenty days. The first attempt ended the next day with a crash near Alta, California. Fowler was not injured, but his machine had to be completely rebuilt. He set off again on September 23, but turned back at the Donner Pass, still unable to make his way over the Rockies. Finally, he selected a Southern route that avoided the mountains. He landed at Jacksonville, Florida, on February 8, 1912, 112 days after his takeoff from Los Angeles.
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