Civilian pilot Eugene Burton Ely at the controls of his Curtis bi-plane. He had been flying for about six months.
When a young, self-taught pilot
named Eugene Burton Ely left the deck
of the U.S. Navy cruiser USS Birmingham in a primitive stick, bailing wire, and canvas winged Curtis pusher biplane on November 14, 1910 he barely escaped with
his life and his aircraft intact but raised the curtain on naval aviation.
Ely, a 24 year-old Midwesterner from Iowa, may seem like an unlikely aviator. But in those early days of
aviation, he was not untypical of the kind of daydreaming tinkerers and speed
enthusiasts who were drawn to the new opportunities in the sky.
He was born in the farming community
of Williamsburg, Iowa on
October 21, 1886. His family soon moved
to the nearby river port and industrial center of Davenport. There he graduated eighth grade from Davenport Grammar School 4 in January 1901. He later claimed to have attended and
graduated from Iowa State University in
1904. But neither the University at Ames nor any other Iowa college or
university has any record of his attendance.
Neither does Davenport High
School. It is safe to say his formal
education ended, as it still did for a majority of young Americans, after grammar school. The higher education claims were simply
pioneering resume padding
adopted as he rose in his chosen field and at the end harbored hopes for a commission and career in a yet unformed
Navy aviation service.
The boy was attracted, like many clever
lads, to things mechanical and fast. He
taught himself, somehow, to drive
in the relatively few autos chugging
up and down the bluffs of his
hometown. He also learned how to repair
them, even making parts himself. His
first known job was as the mechanic and chauffeur to the Father Smyth, a Catholic priest in Cosgrove
who was himself bitten by the speed bug and owned a snazzy red Franklin touring car. In it young
Ely had his first taste of glory, setting a speed record for a run between Iowa City and Davenport.
Ely was restless and soon headed West
seeking fame and fortune. He was in San Francisco for the 1906 earthquake and fire. There was plenty of work in the wake of
the fire for drivers. He soon drifted
into car sales and the auto racing that
promoted the dozens of competing brands of cars.
Despite a somewhat homely long face,
he must have cut a dashing figure. He
caught the eye of teenager Mabel Hall
of the City by the Bay who he
married on August 7, 1907 when he was 21 and she was 17—young enough to require
her mother’s consent.
In 1909 he moved to Nevada City,
the Northern California gold mining
and timber center where he drove an auto
stage shuttling passengers and parcels between remote communities.
A year later the couple had moved to
Portland, Oregon where he got a job
as a salesman for E. Henry Wemme, a wealthy pioneering dealer
of Haynes-Apperson, Oldsmobile, REO, and Pierce-Arrow. Wemme was attracted to the infant
aviation industry and also became the agent
of the Curtiss Aeroplane Company for the entire Pacific Northwest. This was more impressive sounding than it
seems because not a single plane had ever been sold in the area until Wemme
bought one himself to use as a demonstrator. The
trouble was that he didn’t buy the proffered pilot lessens that Glenn Curtis offered with all his early
sales.
Ely eagerly volunteered to fly the
machine, after assembling it from parts that arrived in a crate. He was sure flying could not be harder than
driving, or much different. He was wrong. He crashed and destroyed the plane on his
first attempt to take it up.
Embarrassed, he bought the wreck from his boss, paying it off from his salary and sales commissions. In
his spare time, he painstakingly re-assembled the plane. This time he taught himself to fly from printed
instructions. By spring of 1910 he was
making flights around Portland.
With just weeks under his belt as a
pilot, that June he crated up his bi-plane and shipped it to Minneapolis, Minnesota to
participate in a major flying festival and exhibition being held there where he
met, and impressed, Glenn Curtis himself.
Curtis hired Ely to be one of his demonstration pilots. A scheduled first flight for the company at Sioux City, Iowa had to be
scrubbed because of mechanical problems so his first exhibition was at Winnipeg, Manitoba,
Canada on July 10, 1910.
The rest of the summer and early
fall was filled with demonstration dates.
On October 5 Ely was issued License
#17 from the Aero Club of America, an
indication of admittance to elite status in his dangerous profession. All the first 20 license holders, including
both Wright Brothers and Curtis were
involved in serious crashes, most on multiple occasions. The majority were killed in crashes in
their first three years in the air.
Ely's Curtis pusher dips upon leaving the take-off platform on the USS Birmingham.
That same month with his license
fresh in his pocket Ely joined Curtis in an important meeting with Captain Washington Chambers who was
designated by Secretary of the Navy
George von Lengerke Meyer to investigate possible operational uses of
aviation by the fleet. Chambers
commissioned Curtis to perform a series of tests, taking off and landing on warships. Ely was selected as the
pilot.
An 83 foot-long wooden platform was
hastily built on the bow of the
two year old light cruiser USS
Birmingham. Since no funds were available from the Navy
Budget, early flight booster John
Barry Ryan donated $500 for construction and an additional $500 as a prize for a successful launch.
The ship was moored in the waters
off historic Hampton Roads,
Virginia, not far from the site of the legendary battle between the Union ironclad USS Monitor and the Confederate
CSS Virginia (the captured and
re-fitted former USS Merrimac) which introduced an earlier new era in Naval
warfare. The water was glassy calm and winds
light on November 14 when Ely raced his Curtis pusher down the short makeshift
runway. He barely made air speed and at the end of the platform the plane dropped until is wheels splashed
in the water. Ely fought to regain
elevation and keep the plane in the air.
His goggles were covered by brine
spray seriously impairing his
vision so that he abandoned the original plan of circling the harbor and landing
at the Norfolk Navy Yard. Instead, he made straight for shore and made
a rough but safe landing on the beach.
Still, it was a successful enough
flight to claim the Ryan ship-to-shore flight prize.
Ely comes in for the first landing on the USS Pennsylvania.
Ely returned to his civilian
demonstration flight for Curtis, now a famous and acclaimed airman for his
naval feat. Then he crossed the country
to his old stomping grounds of San Francisco where the second half of his
original challenge was to be completed—landing on a ship. On January 18, 1911 Ely took off from Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno, California and landed
successfully on the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania. It was not only the first successful landing
on a ship anywhere, it introduced the tail-hook
landing arrest system designed and built by aviator and circus performer Hugh Robinson, which became essential in aircraft carrier operations
to this day.
The pilot confidently told reporters
that the landing “…was easy enough. I
think the trick could be successfully turned nine times out of ten.”
Ely was now enthusiastic about a
possible career with the Navy. He
communicated with the Navy Department offering his services. Capt. Chambers had to give him the discouraging
news that he could not enlist him because the Navy did not yet have a flying
service. But Chambers gave him every
signal that he would be a top candidate as soon as such a service was
inaugurated. He also had advice for Ely,
whose demonstration flights for Curtis, including dangerous dives and steep
turns which strained the capacity of his fragile aircraft, to cut it out
for the sake of his life and the future of aviation.
Of course, Ely, always a daredevil,
did not take the advice to heart. When
asked by his home state newspaper the Des Moines Register if he would retire
on his laurels, he said, “I guess I will be like the rest of them, keep at it
until I am killed.” It proved to be prophetic.
Ely's fatal crash in Georgia a month shy of his triumphant cruiser launch.
At an exhibition at Macon, Georgia on October 11, 1911,
just days short of his 25th birthday, Ely failed to pull out of a dive. His Curtis bi-plane crashed. Ely jumped clear just before impact but broke
his spine and died on
October 19. He was buried in his hometown
on his birthday.
In 1933 Congress posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross to Ely, “for extraordinary achievement
as a pioneer civilian aviator and for his significant contribution to the
development of aviation in the United States Navy.” An exhibit of retired naval aircraft
at Naval Air Station Norfolk is
named for him, and a granite historical
marker in Newport News overlooks the waters where he made that first
take off from a ship. To commemorate the
100th anniversary of that flight, Commander Bob Coolbaugh flew a
personally built replica of Ely’s Curtiss from the runway at NAS Norfolk on
November 12, 2010.
Lieutenant
Theodore Ellyson became the Navy’s first pilot in
1911 when Curtis offered to train an officer for free. He and Curtis went on to collaborate in the
development of a float plane and he became the first pilot to be
launched from a ship-born catapult. But it wasn’t until 1914 that a formal
Naval Air Service was formed.
Ely's headstone in his hometown of Williamsburg, Iowa.
The Birmingham’s place in naval aviation history was not over
either. Subsequently converted to a Torpedo tender she became flagship of the Atlantic Fleet Torpedo Flotilla. In 1916 when conducting operations in
support of the landing of an expeditionary
force at Veracruz during the Mexican
Revolution, she deployed two Curtis float planes, launched by catapult to scout for mines. It was the first active military operation by a US heavier-than-air
aircraft.
