The Crowd Pleasers: A History of Airshow Misfortunes from 1910 to the Present

By Pete Fusco

An adventure-filled romp through one of aviation’s most notable, dangerous and entertaining pursuits: airshows! In the early days of aviation, all flights were airshows. Spectators gathered whenever a new flying machine attempted to leave the ground—the trick was to get them to pay. Takeoffs and landings did not sell tickets but people lined up, money in hand, to watch a “dip of death,” in which an aviator would dive from as high as he or she dared and pull up at the last second. Risk always sells and flying was man’s riskiest endeavor yet. From the start the “exhibition pilots” stood out. Everything about an aerobatic routine requires a degree of skill and a commitment to practice inconceivable to even most pilots, presenting innumerable risks to life and limb. And with risk, often, comes tragedy. The Crowd Pleasers is a sweeping history of air show accidents beginning in 1910 with the death of Charles Rolls, co-founder of Rolls-Royce, and ending in the present day. It brings to light some of the most notable air show accidents of all time and explores the aviators behind them. Their stories, their motivations. In so doing, it illuminates the role played by choice, social circumstance and fate in these often devastating accidents, and the lives attached to them. A must-read for all aviation buffs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Jan 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781510728202

Pete Fusco

Pete Fusco is a retired commercial pilot. During a break from his aviation career, he worked as a reporter and feature writer for the Dayton Daily News in Ohio. He currently lives on Lake Conroe, just north of Houston, Texas.

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PART ONE:

THE BEGINNING

THERE were three ways to pursue flying in the years immediately following the Wright brothers’ thunderous achievement in 1903. If you had the resources, you could simply purchase an airplane and the flying lessons to go with it. Or, since it was your airplane and there were no rules, you could teach yourself to fly it, with the added benefit of learning how to rebuild it a few times. If you lacked resources but had managed to acquire some basic piloting skills—or could convince someone you had—you might become a member of a factory demonstration team. Some experience was required but nothing beyond the ability to take off and land successfully a dozen times between mishaps. For the bolder aspirant, a third option was the flying circus, a spectacle that exploited the entertainment value of aviation rather than the practical. The public was fascinated with airplanes and the flying circus was there to cash in, a mating of new technology and old entrepreneurship.

Many new recruits to the business of flying had sharpened their reflexes and proven their mettle racing motorcycles and automobiles, both very dicey occupations at the time. When flying machines arrived, the risk takers saw them as yet another vehicle to distance themselves from mortals, who were now literally below.

No matter how they got there, the pioneer airmen, without asking too many questions, climbed into a thorny new invention not far removed from the drawing board and looked straight ahead at an adventure that promised greasy hands, long hard days, bloodied faces, broken bones, and better than average odds of an early death. They could hardly believe their good fortune.

1

ARRIVING ON WINGS

THE bronze statue of Charles Stewart Rolls in Monmouth’s Agincourt Square in Wales might cause someone to wonder why the co-founder of the Rolls-Royce automobile company is holding a model airplane in his hand. Not just any airplane, but a Wright Flyer, the same type in which he was killed at a flying exhibition in Bournemouth, England, on July 12, 1910.

While thousands of spectators watched, the popular Charlie Rolls competed against other aircraft in an alighting contest. The object was to land, or alight, engine at idle, as close as possible to a twelve-foot circle marked on the ground, not the easiest feat in a modern aircraft and difficult to imagine in a Wright Flyer. The winner won 250 pounds, a sizable sum in 1910 and a measure of the risk involved. Rolls, who came from wealth, was not after the money; his chauffer had driven him to the meet.

Rolls turned into the wind and targeted the circle. At this point, according to eyewitness accounts, he was too high and wide to the right. Rolls turned to the left, descended steeply and aimed at the target. As he maneuvered, perhaps too abruptly, there was a loud snapping of wood in the tail structure, which separated from the ship. The front-mounted elevator was next to fail. The Wright fell straight to the ground. Rolls was thrown clear but died from injuries a short while later. He was thirty-two years old.

The statue in Agincourt Square captures Rolls studying his aircraft, as if forever conjecturing what might have been done to prevent the tragedy. Probably very little. Historians refer to aircraft of the day as powered gliders. Genetically they were closer to powered box kites. As is the case with aircraft design to this day, every effort was made to reduce weight. But with only bamboo, spruce, lacquered linen or flax, and bulky primitive motors, the result was a heavy, comparatively frail, and often underpowered aircraft. Inefficient propellers and drag from the maze of brace wires and struts also worked against the first aircraft designers and pilots.

More powerful engines would have helped and were available but the insubstantial airframes of the time were not able to handle the increased power. There were instances of too-powerful engines causing disastrous airframe failures. An oversized after-market power plant literally tore apart a Bleriot XI flown by the French aviation pioneer Ferdinand Delagrange during an exhibition at Bordeaux in 1910, resulting in his death.

Wilbur Wright gave Rolls his first airplane ride in the autumn of 1908 and later taught him to fly. By the end of 1909, Rolls had resigned his position as technical manager of Rolls-Royce to devote full time to aviation. Had the world not lost his vision, enthusiasm, and mechanical prowess, Rolls intended to start his own aircraft manufacturing business, the Rolls Aeroplane Company. He likely would have contributed to the development of more reliable, durable and safer aircraft, the same qualities for which the automobile marque that bore his name was already famous.

Rolls was serious about everything he did, which included successful auto and cycle racing careers, and 170 balloon ascents. By the standards of 1910, he was an accomplished airplane pilot. Six weeks before his fatal flight, Rolls became the first person to fly a double-crossing, or round trip, of the English Channel without landing in France. Over French soil, he dropped a note addressed to the French Aero Club. He had written on the note, Dropped from a Wright Aeroplane. Rolls had every right to be proud of the ship that would soon fail him, for he had flown his Flyer a remarkable two hundred times.

The Wright Flyer that Rolls flew had been built under license in France and may not have been up to Wright U.S. factory standards. Rolls had, in fact, almost rejected delivery due to inadequate workmanship. He decided to keep it and made the necessary corrections. Aircraft of the period, by any measure, were works in progress from the day of their first flight, constantly being modified, although not always necessarily improved.

In preparation for the Bournemouth competition, Rolls and his crew had replaced the Wright fixed-tail section with a movable tail section, an adaptation to allow easier pitch changes that was not sanctioned by the Wrights. The question will always be whether the work compromised the structural integrity of the tail, causing it to break away. Another thought at the time was that, since the French-built Flyer had less spacing between the propellers and the tail brace wires, the propeller blades might have vibrated enough to cut the wires that supported the elevators.

Rolls may also have been trying to prevent harm to spectators. Some eyewitnesses said that Rolls, when he realized he was too near the grandstands, made a hurried and excessive movement of the controls, which may have caused the structural failure. It would not have been the first time an airframe of the period failed due to over-control.

While the Wright machine was among the easier aircraft of the period to fly, it was not forgiving. The Wrights used wing-warping for lateral control instead of ailerons. Wing-warping produced much more induced drag, which in turn increased stall speed. Nor were the Wright Flyer’s flight controls particularly user-friendly. They were so foreign from what has evolved that a modern pilot would not be able to fly one without considerable instruction and a bit of luck. On the Wright aircraft, the pilot’s left hand operated a lever that controlled the elevator while the right hand controlled a combination of wing-warping and rudder—think shooting pool with a cue in each hand. A forward movement of the right stick resulted in left roll, a backward movement rolled the ship right. This was only if the pilot was in the left seat. If seated on the right side, the left hand worked roll and yaw, while the right hand controlled pitch from a second elevator control. The closest thing to a throttle was a foot-operated spark control.

To add to the confusion, Orville and Wilbur did not agree on a standardized system; each preferred a slightly different arrangement. A Flyer could be ordered with the Orville or Wilbur method of control. In general, Wright aircraft built in the U.S. had an Orville system of controls; those built in Europe were fitted with the Wilbur method. Prudent pilots checked the owner’s manual before attempting flight.

The Wright Flyer Rolls flew had a safety record similar to that of other aircraft manufacturers: Poor. Thirty-three aircraft crashes occurred between 1908 and 1910; a quarter of these were in Wright aircraft. In fairness, there were comparatively more Wright aircraft in circulation during those two years. Rolls was among the first exhibition pilots to die in an aircraft and the twelfth pilot worldwide in the seven years since the Wrights’ first flight in 1903. Statistics differ, but it’s generally agreed that 80 percent of all exhibition pilots before the start of World War One were killed in crashes. Eight of ten!

Most of the pioneer airmen were realistic, even stoic, about the odds. Rolls was no exception. He gave an off-handed but prophetic quote to a newspaper reporter before his last flight. All good engineering calls for casualties… It was once my ambition to arrive at the Golden Gates on wheels, now wings….

It would be convenient to dismiss the death of Rolls and the other early airmen as the predictable end of daredevils flying unstable and flimsy crates. The evidence, however, does not support this. Based on interviews and comments from the era, the early exhibition pilots were not anxious to die in their aircraft. While some flew mainly for the excitement and the money, all the pioneer airmen knew that every flight was a contest that matched their will and nerve against a new science reluctant to give up its secrets. If for no other reason than self-preservation, the pioneers were after those secrets. They approached the task with the same guarded confidence and stoic acceptance that remains unchanged with test pilots of the jet and space age. The pioneers accepted risk as the ante-up to a grand new game. Survival, plus a scrap of knowledge, was the prize.

There was also the love of flying, born the instant the Wright Flyer left the ground at Kitty Hawk. Certainly the first human able to form a thought had envied the birds, an envy that festered for tens of thousands of years. In a stroke, the Wright brothers had shattered the chains that bound man to Earth, a miracle long-awaited. In Rolls’s own words, a fresh gift from the Creator, the greatest treasure yet given to man.

But the divine gift was not for everyone, at least not in the beginning. The sky was a lovely but treacherous siren that beckoned bold voyagers to risk death on the rocks for a whisper of her beguiling song. Charlie Rolls—and every airshow pilot who would follow—longed to hear the siren’s song, even if it meant taking his chances among the rocks in a newly-discovered ocean rather than watching from the safety of shore.

One might think there was universal sympathy for Rolls who, after all, had been a national hero and a martyr to the new cause of aviation, but it was not so. It’s difficult to believe now, but there existed at the time a group of anti-aviationists with no appreciation of Rolls’s sacrifice. The anti-aviationists publicly proclaimed that Rolls had thrown his life away.

Statue of Charles Stewart Rolls in Agincourt Square, Wales.

Wreckage of Charles Rolls’s aircraft after fatal accident.

2

VICTIMS OF THEIR OWN COURAGE

THADDÄUS Robl did not like to disappoint his fans. They returned the favor by growing angry and insisting that he fly during dangerous weather conditions. It cost him his life on June 18, 1910.

Before Thaddy Robl became a famous exhibition pilot in Germany, he had been a world-class champion in a competition known as paced racing, a sport as difficult to comprehend today as it was popular at the time. There exists more information about Robl’s paced-racing career than his flying career, but they are inseparable for an understanding of the man and his early death.

Paced racing at first appears to be an elaborate Google hoax. Surely it never happened, except it did. Robl was one of the best. He was a stayer, the main player in the sport. Before motorized vehicles entered the scene at the turn of the century, the stayer rode a bicycle behind a tandem bicycle propelled by as many as five cyclists, the pacers. A coach sat at the back of the tandem bicycle, acting as a wall that created a draft. The stayer remained as close as possible to the back of the tandem bicycle to take advantage of the draft, which afforded him added speed.

Almost as soon as motorcycles were invented, they replaced the tandem bicycle. Paced racing became motor-paced racing, an effort to make the sport more interesting for the spectators. And more dangerous for the stayer, who was now expected to keep up with a motorcycle instead of a tandem bicycle. The speeding motorcycle provided even more draft and helped the stayer achieve top speeds exceeding 80 mph, while yet still on a bicycle! In the greatest understatement of all time in any sport, a history of paced racing declared that speeds increased when motors were added.

The stayer, trusting his life to the operator of the motorcycle, kept his head down and pedaled as hard as he could, all the while breathing poisonous carbon monoxide fumes, praying the rear tire of the motorcycle or his own front tire did not explode in his face and resisting the temptation to yank the cheerleading coach off the back of the motorcycle. Yes, there was still a coach, who early on had the added chore of operating the motorcycle throttle while a second person steered. Races, some lasting for days, were cross-country or on board tracks known as velodromes. Many early stayers, who wore neither helmets nor gloves, were killed or injured. A photograph from the period shows a bandaged Robl, no explanation given or needed.

A bandaged Thaddäus Robl in his paced racing days.

Robl, a native-born German, dominated paced racing during the first part of the twentieth century, winning five European and two world championship titles between 1900 and 1907. When Robl retired from the paced-racing circuit in 1909, he turned to the one enterprise that promised even greater stimulation: Exhibition flying.

The aeroplane offered everything needed to feed Robl’s unflinching nerve and bold spirit: speed, smelly gasoline engines, crowds, good money, fame, and few rules. Compared to the terrors of the velodrome, flying must have seemed tame to Robl, once described by a journalist as a man of indomitable pluck.

The former stayer caught on quickly to the new flying dodge. By 1910, Robl was an exhibition pilot touring Europe, although according to one source, he may have skipped the inconvenience of first obtaining a flight license. The lack of official flying credentials, not unheard of at the time, mattered little to Robl’s fans. They knew him as an unhesitating risk-taker and born showman who always delivered.

Robl’s unfortunate and all-too-avoidable death is described by Charles C. Turner in his exhaustively-detailed 1912 book, The Romance of Aeronautics, a required read for fans of early aviation. An excerpt from a chapter indelicately titled The Death Toll of the Air tells the story:

… Robl was killed at Stettin (Germany) while flying an Aviatik biplane in a high wind, Turner wrote. This accident was caused by the clamoring of a mob of thoughtless spectators who demanded a flight in spite of the unsafe conditions.

The Pomeranian Society for Aviation, which hosted the Stettin event, urged Robl and the other pilots not to fly that day because of an approaching line of storms. The other performers agreed but Robl, a man who in his stayer days once got up after being briefly knocked unconscious, climbed back on his bicycle, got behind the motorcycle, and won the race, was not so easily benched. Nor, apparently, did Robl want to fail his boisterous fans. There’s also the possibility that he may not have wanted to fail himself.

Details of the fatal crash are sparse. What is known is that Robl, after circling the spectators twice, entered a dive from about 200 feet. He never recovered from the dive. A thunderstorm raged overhead and Robl might have been caught in a downdraft, or what’s known today as a microburst. He was observed pulling back hard on the controls but the strong vertical wind and perhaps an accelerated stall may have caused the crash.

An assessment of Robl’s accident in the November 1910 issue of Pan American Magazine stated, … accident or miscalculation of machine when close to the ground. Pedantic it may be, but the analysis from long ago still applies to most aircraft accidents.

Victim of His Own Courage, a cruel combination of compliment and gloat, is how the August 1910, issue of Aeronautics magazine captioned Robl’s brief obituary. It was in keeping with the times: Pilots of the era seemed to neither expect nor did they receive sympathy when they were killed.

A photograph taken five minutes after the crash shows doctors attending to the fatally-injured Robl. What appears to be a large collapsed tent in the background had been his aircraft, variously described as an Aviatik or a Farman biplane. It matters little. Both the Aviatik and Farman of 1910 vintage were typical of the times, which is to say, almost safe enough on a calm day but vulnerable to extreme weather.

The thirty-three-year-old Robl was the first German killed in a non-military aircraft accident and the eleventh person overall in the world. Unfortunately, Robl would not be the last victim of a rowdy, demanding crowd.

In September 1911, about a year after Robl’s death, the New York Herald carried a story about J. J. Frisbie, a forty-two-year-old flyer from Ireland. Frisbie was killed in Norton, Kansas in his Curtiss Pusher, which had been damaged in a crash earlier in the day. Frisbie went up, against his better judgment, only when, according to the Herald reporter, driven to it by the taunts and jeers of the crowd. The spectators hooted and shouted faker when Frisbie tried to explain the circumstances. Once in the air, he tried to turn the aircraft but it tipped and he lost control. The ship glanced off a barn and crashed. Frisbie died an hour later.

Sometime in the 1980s, Frank Price, a storied Texas airshow pilot, showed a visitor a list of names he had written on his hangar wall. Price said, These men are all dead. They were all airshow pilots. Do you know who killed them? When the visitor replied that he didn’t know who was responsible for the deaths of the men on the list, Price said, simply, The crowd.

3

STARDUST

IN 1910, Orville and Wilbur Wright needed pilots to demonstrate and sell their new Model B Flyers. They formed an exhibition team but soon faced the same problem that has always stymied aircraft operators: finding pilots who would listen to them. To ensure obedience and conformity in the pilot ranks of the new team, the Wrights handpicked some of the members and trained them to fly, the Wright way.

It almost worked, except that flying emancipated the untamed spirits dormant within team members Ralph Johnstone and Archibald Hoxsey, two mavericks more inclined to follow their hearts than instructions from their bosses. Worse, as far as the Wrights were concerned, Johnstone and Hoxsey pushed the limits of their Wright Model B’s to compete with each other, even as they did their job demonstrating the aircraft.

On October 30, 1910, Johnstone doubled the existing world altitude record with a flight to 8,471 feet, validated, as was required, by a barograph taken aloft. A couple months later, on December 26, Hoxsey achieved an altitude of 11,474 feet. At such astounding heights, it didn’t take long for the press to tag the two pilots the Stardust Twins, or sometimes, the Heavenly Twins. Both nicknames stuck.

As the Twins gained celebrity status through their altitude records, they began doing stunts