Barnstomers and Early Aviators
The Triumph of Instrument Flight
Copyright 2009 Franklyn E. Dailey Jr.
- Barnstomers and Early Aviators
- Budget Flying Clubs
- Aviation Records
- VFR to IFR
- Early Airline Development
- Flight Across the Atlantic
- P-40s to Iceland
- Alaska Based Navy P2Y-1's
- Buckner Goes to Alaska
- Ship-to-Ship Battle
- Naval Flight Training
- NAS Instrument Training
- Aleutians Anti-Submarine Warfare
- Search & Rescue
- Gyros and Flight Computers
- Baseball Team Lost in Flight
- Tomcats and Boeing 777s
- Order Book
Contact Author Franklyn E.Dailey Jr.
A few of those events are unforgettable. Citizens around the world, including young people just learning to read and write, joined in the triumph of Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo non-stop flight from New York to Paris. That flight spanned two calendar days, leaving Roosevelt Field on Long Island in the early daylight of May 20, 1927 and landing in the early evening at Le Bourget Field, Paris on May 21, 1927.
In differing sectors of the aviator spectrum in the 1920s were barnstormers, mail pilots, military pilots and very late in that decade, a few airline pilots. The diversity in human interests is reflected in the fact that pilots in these very different flying professions had almost all come to aviation as the result of the impetus given to aviation by World War I.
Two flights, known now to almost no living persons, come frequently to the author's mind. One was recorded in two small-town newspapers. The other was recorded only in human memory. These occurred within two months, and within two years, respectively, after Lindbergh and his Spirit of St. Louis made it to Paris.
In July 1927, a barnstormer came to my town, Brockport, New York, in his biplane. He landed on Gifford Morgan's farm, just east of the town. Morgan was a leading citizen in Brockport. After pilot Ray Hylan made his peace with owner Morgan for temporary landing rights, he solicited "ride" business from the "locals."
The Peters family lived just down and across the street from our home on South Avenue. Their eighteen-year old son, Stephen, had graduated from high school and was working in Ed Simmons' drug store for the summer. Steve was greatly admired by the small fry on our street. In July of 1927, Stephen and his parents had just returned from a trip to New York City where Stephen had taken two local flights over the harbor in a seaplane. Upon his return home, Steve was quite excited to discover a Curtiss biplane, a Jenny, in a field right next to his hometown. The Jenny, with pilot Ray Hylan, was ready to take up passengers.
Steve took two flights in the afternoon of July 19, 1927, in the front passenger seat of the Jenny, with Hylan, the pilot, at the controls in the rear seat. Then, after attending a twilight baseball game, Steve drove back to the "airfield" and made a deal with Hylan to go up once more. It was now dusk. News reports from the July 21, 1927 editions of the Brockport Republic Democrat and nearby Holley, New York's Holley Standard provide details on what happened next.
From the lead lines in the Republic Democrat: "A very sad accident occurred at 10 minutes after nine Tuesday evening when Stephen Peters Jr., 18-year old son of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Peters of South Avenue, was instantly killed when the plane in which he was riding crashed into the roof of Dr. Morris Mann's house on State Street. Steve, as he is better known to his many friends, had two previous rides in the plane and was very much enthused about flying."
The Holley Standard began its story with these lines.
"In order to gratify a desire for `some extra thrills' expressed by Stephen Peters of Brockport at the beginning of a flight Tuesday night, the pilot of the plane, Roy Hylan of Rochester, attempted a tail spin which ended in a crash in which Peters lost his life and Hylan was severely injured. After leaving his landing field a half-mile east of Brockport, Hylan took his plane up gradually until he was six hundred feet above Main Street where he decided to satisfy Peters' flare for thrills by going into a tail spin."
Steve Peters was dead at the scene while Hylan was taken to the Brockport Sanitarium. When Hylan regained consciousness, he stated, according to the Holley Stamdard, that he "made a tailspin which he could not control."
The Brockport paper closed its coverage with these lines.
"Many people have remarked about the plane flying very low and the pilot was questioned about it the afternoon of the accident. Mr. Hylan claimed he always flew 500 feet or more above the ground and that that height was considered safe."
Both news sources referred to the pilot as Roy Hylan, but he later became well known in aviation circles as Ray Hylan. He operated the Hylan Flying School in Rochester for many years. In 1959, he was in the news for the donation of his Boeing F4B-4 Navy fighter to the Smithsonian Institution. Hylan died in 1983. When the Jenny crashed in Brockport, Ray Hylan was just three years older than his eighteen-year old passenger. The Brockport paper had noted, "He (Hylan) has piloted aeroplanes for the past year and was considered one of the best drivers in this section."
That accident was not an isolated experience in U.S. aviation in the 1920s. For this writer, then six years old, it was a first connection with aviation and a first connection with death.
Illustration 1 shows a Curtiss Jenny. It is one of the carefully restored vintage airplanes at the Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York, located in the southern part of the state at the foot of Keuka Lake. This type of aircraft saw considerable service as a training plane for U.S. World War I pilots. The plane was used to carry mail in the early U.S. airmail service, and was a favorite of barnstorming pilots in the 1920s. The Jenny at the Curtiss Museum is equipped with a Curtiss ninety-horsepower OX-5 liquid cooled aircraft engine.
Illustration 1 - A Jenny at Glenn H. Curtiss Museum
Barnstorming is a segment of flying that has no counterpart today. Russia's space program sold seat space to Dennis Tito for $20,000,000 for his rocket flight to the space station. That might herald the birth of a new era of barnstorming. With the moon and Mars on the U.S. space agenda, more self-financed astronauts may get in line.
Pilots, especially, hearken back to their own first flight. The author's occurred, as a passenger, at Leroy, New York in the summer of 1929. The airport, way ahead of its time and a prototype for airport design, was the Donald Woodward Airport. It was named after a local aviation enthusiast who put up the money to complete an air facility in 1928, with four paved runways, hangar with corner tower, passenger ramp and space for parked aircraft.
The Leroy airport was an early general aviation airport that few small cities, let alone small towns, would ever match. Before the airport took shape, the western New York village of Leroy was known mostly for being the home of the Jell-O manufacturing plant. The airport added to the town's prominence. Leroy was also the site of one of those early light beacon links in the visual flight navigation path spanning the United States.
My hometown, Brockport, New York, was not far from Leroy. Young boys had no difficulty claiming some of the prominence of a nearby town. This occurred most frequently when the nearby town generated some excitement. Aviation was excitement.
At the Leroy Airport, a World War I aviator, Lieutenant Commander Russell Holderman, USNR, piloted a Stinson Detroiter aircraft on a summer Sunday in 1929 in which my father, mother, sister and I were the passengers. Pilots like Holderman were the civil aviation instructors of the era, the pilots of Sunday rubberneck flights, and the contract pilots flying the U.S. mail.
Illlustration 2 is a reproduction of a photo that includes the Detroiter. It is the little single engine high wing monoplane in the mid-background of the photo. The plane in the foreground is a Boston & Maine Airways' Lockheed 10A Electra, whose instrument panel this story will come to later.
These aircraft are on the ramp of the Boston airport, the "home port" of Boston & Maine Airways. That airline became Northeast Airlines. It expanded from its original New England region to become the last trunk airline formed in the United States. Portions of its story will be found in Chapter 5.
Illustration 2 - Stinson Detroiter in near background
The photo has been cropped to feature the Stinson. The original photo is in the Walker Transportation Collection of the Beverly, Massachusetts Historical Society. (Errata: I accepted the Beverly (MA) Historical Society's identification of this aircraft as the Stinson Detroiter. Pilot (and reader) Mark Sellers quickly informed me that it is not a Detroiter but a Stinson Gullwing. Pilot Robert Mudge went on to amplify that it is a gullwing design, but in Stinson nomenclature it is a Stinson Reliant. I appreciate the corrections. Frank Dailey, author.)
Eddie Stinson, and the Stinson family, located in Detroit, Michigan, designed and produced a number of fine aircraft. The Detroiter was one of them.
I did not know it at the time but Russell Holderman was also the Donald Woodward Airport's Manager and had a hand in the airport's design.
The Stinson at Leroy in 1929 had a glass panel in the bottom of its small cabin through which the three passengers in the rear could look straight down. This was an opportunity they exercised just once during that flight, pleading later that they did not like the feeling it gave them.
The right front seat of the Stinson was mine for this, my first, flight. It did not permit the downward vertical look. Through the window on the right side forward, one could see Niagara Falls. As flights go, it was just a 20-minute tour of western New York State. My father paid 30 dollars to a ticket agent near the plane. My younger sister and I went for $5 each and the adults had to pay $10 each.
I do not believe Dad ever flew again. Near Huntsville, Ontario, we vacationed for short periods in two summers at a resort named Limberlost. The resort was on one of those countless, see-to-the-bottom, lakes of Canada. Mother took many rear cockpit flights there in a single engine biplane, pontoon equipped. The aircraft was a DH (de Havilland) Moth, and it was piloted by a Major Wrathall.
Russell Holderman later became the Gannett Newspapers' chief pilot, in command of a coveted Lockheed Lodestar. About 30 years after that 1929 flight, I had left active duty as a Navy pilot and transferred to the Naval Air Reserve. My father invited me for lunch at the Rochester Club on East Avenue in Rochester, New York. Dad was a stockbroker and occasionally took clients to the Club. This day, my Dad had an ulterior motive. He introduced me to Lieutenant Commander Holderman, who, I learned, was a regular at the Club, with his own accustomed luncheon table.
It takes no stretch of reason to figure out that the Gannett Newspapers' Lodestar, with its experienced, instrument qualified pilot, was a major help in newspaper owner Frank Gannett's effort to build a national newspaper empire from a two-newspaper base in Rochester, New York. The flagship publication of that news organization is USA Today.
At Leroy on that summer Sunday in 1929, there were other aircraft parked at the airport. Most were the single engine biplanes of early aviation. A few of the aircraft parked at Leroy that summer were single engine, high wing monoplanes. All were painted orange. I was told that the plane type was a Curtiss Robin.
Pilots and mechanics based at Leroy were themselves recognized, by better known aviation peers, as key contributors in aviation's early years. For that reason, when Donald Woodward's airport at Leroy held fly-in events, it attracted many well-known national and international figures, all pioneers in early aviation.
With the entrepreneurial investment of Woodward, and the pioneering pilots that his foresight attracted, the town of Leroy was early on aviation's map. In just a few years after 1929, larger U.S. cities became the essential airline embarking and debarking points for the growing number of paying passengers. As the pilot proficiency base grew and radio aids were installed across the United States, the introduction of radio receiving instruments became a requirement for commercial aircraft. The tools for instrument flying were falling into place. Scheduled flights with paying passengers multiplied. Towns like Leroy drifted into history. California, Texas and Illinois became leaders in the number of aviation early adopters. Distance was a spur to flying.
Many pilots, like Russell Holderman, moved on to salary-producing aviation careers. The barn-storming pilots elected to make their living in more of a free form that perhaps identified them more as lovers of flight for the sake of flight and not as just an alternate means of transportation. Even the famed Charles Lindbergh did time as a barnstormer.
An imaginary arrow, with a U.S. mail pilot in a Jenny at its feathered end, and a pilot like Holderman in a Stinson up toward its flint arrowhead, would be pointed along the path toward instrument flying. Holderman in his Lodestar had arrived.
Every time an airplane went overhead in the early years of flight, persons of all ages turned their eyes skyward. Most vivid is my memory of the giant Navy dirigible, the USS Akron, passing over my home in western New York in 1931 on November 11, Armistice Day. She was creeping along under a very low overcast in restricted visibility, trying to stay in visual contact with ground reference points on the south side of Lake Ontario as she made her way back from a western trip to her home port of Lakehurst, New Jersey.
That dim gray wraith that took up so much space in the moisture laden sky was a discussion topic for folks in our town for months afterward. I can make a pretty good conjecture now that the Akron's Commanding Officer that day did not feel that his dirigible, his flight instrumentation, and he, were capable of simply plunging into the clouds and heading directly for Lakehurst. Visible checkpoints like nearby Rochester on the south shore of Lake Ontario were the navigation aids he trusted.
A man-made connection existed between two U.S. dirigibles and heavier than air flight. The Akron and her sister ship, the USS Macon, were both rigged with a hangar and suspension for a small aircraft. A number of aircraft flights from the two dirigibles and airborne recoveries to them were made successfully. Both dirigibles met their ends in separate crashes that involved fatalities. These crashes had nothing to do with their embarked aircraft.
Today, I see giant C-5 jet transport planes taking off from or approaching Westover Air Reserve Base (ARB) in Chicopee, Massachusetts. I hear sleek Boeing and Douglas jet transports shushing overhead toward Bradley International Airport at Hartford, Connecticut, as they pass down the instrument runway approach path directly over my home. When I am out in my neighborhood, I always turn my head skyward on the chance that the approaching aircraft will "break contact" as it emerges from clouds.Order Book
Franklyn E. Dailey, Jr. June 3, 2004
Copyright 2004