Iowa pilot introduced Missoula to air travel
June 26, 2011 11:00 pm • By KIM BRIGGEMAN of the Missoulian
He was a showman, no doubt about it. Eugene Ely was dashing and daring, fast becoming a national aviation hero by the summer of 1911, and destined to die within the year for his bravado...
...Now here was Ely, on June 28, flying above it all on a breezy summer day, the first man to stage a public aeroplane exhibition in Missoula. On the second of three spins from the baseball field at Fort Missoula, Ely circled above the paying crowd of 3,000, then sped toward the mountains to the south. Backed by a stiff tailwind, he and his Curtiss pusher biplane – “pusher” because the propulsion came from the back of the plane — were soon lost from sight except for the flashes of sun on the whirling propeller blade.
Somewhere over the Bitterroot Valley, Ely wheeled around and popped back into focus. As he approached the throngs at the fort, he swooped toward earth, skimming within feet of agog spectators and sending them skittering...
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Ely was a known commodity among pioneer aviators, though his legacy wasn’t fully appreciated at the time. He was part of a stable of barnstormers that aviation entrepreneur Glenn Curtiss put together to show off the Curtiss line of craft.
The previous fall, Ely had become the first man to make a successful seaboard launch at Hampton Roads, Va., and in January he had landed his Curtiss on the deck of an armored cruiser in San Francisco Bay. Those were among the first tottering steps toward naval aviation, and 100 years later, Ely is duly recognized for his role in its development. A larger-than-life bronze, depicting Ely in the leather football helmet and the inflated bicycle innertubes/lifejacket he wore in flight, is part of the Naval Aviation Monument on the boardwalk at Virginia Beach, Va...
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Ely had some narrow escapes at previous Montana stops. At the first Good Roads congress in Billings the previous June, he’d encountered a dangerous crosswind and failed to get more than a few feet off the ground on one short flight, and he drifted off the roadway and broke a wheel on a second.
This year, crowd control problems resulted in near injury and a damaged machine in Butte, and months-long litigation to secure pay in Great Falls.
But two flights in Kalispell on June 21 had gone smoothly. An estimated 5,000, a crowd even bigger than Ely drew in Missoula a week later, filled the grandstand at the fairgrounds and watched from all available points – rooftops, hillsides, fences and the nearby buffalo pasture. Ely “highly complimented the crowd for its consideration,” newspapers reported.
The Fort Missoula exhibition was set for 5 p.m., the last event on the agenda of the two-day Good Roads convention. A band concert preceded it at 2:45 p.m. Troops from Fort Missoula supplied crowd control, and there were no reports of unruliness.
A Missoulian account suggested that, while the exhibition was “something well worth traveling miles to see,” Ely made it look almost too easy.
The unidentified reporter, likely Arthur Stone himself, described the “gasp of admiration from the crowd” as the biplane shot across the baseball field and took to the air.
“The aviator rose high above the field, now dipping above the heads of the crowd, now wheeling and turning easily against the stiff breeze,” the reporter wrote. “The flight itself did not seem wonderful enough.
“The aviator handled the machine so easily that it seemed natural and simple.”...
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In his 1966 book “Montana and the Sky,” Frank W. Wiley said that at Ely’s Lewistown stop two days earlier, the 31-year-old pilot told reporters he would give only a few more shows before going into the business of building and selling planes.
But Ely was still flying on Oct. 19. Near the end of a week’s worth of exhibitions at the Georgia State Fair in Macon, he was late pulling out of a dive. After the crash he jumped free of the wreckage, but his neck was broken and he died minutes later.
From The Missoulian