Fly Navy: Discovering the Extraordinary People and Enduring Spirit of Naval Aviation - Hardcover

1
A JOURNEY BEGINS

 
SOME TIME AFTER MY VOYAGE on the Nimitz, I found myself looking across the waters where naval aviation’s century-old tradition began. Nothing about this particular place resembled the warm, sun-washed cruise across a smooth Eastern Pacific Ocean that I had experienced with the VFA-14 Tophatters (their VFA designation stands for fixed-wing [V] Fighter Attack [FA]). The Pacific of my transit was a summer lake compared to the wintry Chesapeake Bay that I found off the shore of Hampton Roads, Virginia. Whitecaps danced on the churning gray water and ominous clouds above made the water grayer still. A biting wind howled across the channel and cut straight through my jacket.
One hundred years ago, on a similarly inhospitable November day, a ship very unlike the Nimitz carried a plane very unlike an F/A-18 out into this very channel. The lone aviator aboard the USS Birmingham couldn’t swim, didn’t like the water, and was known to get seasick. Instead of a polished, carbon fiber helmet with an electronic display like the one worn by Lee Amerine, Eugene Ely wore a leather football helmet along with shoulder pads, and looked more like a turn-of-the-century linebacker than the world’s first maritime aviator. His training, attire, and aircraft differed from what I encountered in the men and women aboard the Nimitz in almost every conceivable way—but Ely had exactly the same spirit.
Wilbur and Orville Wright also shared that spirit, and on windy Atlantic dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, they had performed the first great feat in modern aviation history—simply getting airborne. Thus, in 1903, the Wright brothers had opened an entirely new and unconquered realm to pioneers and daredevils alike. In the air, records waited to be broken; new dares awaited the brave. There were plenty of takers, and Eugene Ely would become one of the most famous.
Eugene was eighteen when the Wright brothers flew, and he had already become fascinated by the internal combustion engine and the speed, danger, and freedom it could offer. In the late 1800s, when automobiles were quite rare in Eugene’s rural corner of Iowa, he began driving and maintaining cars for a local Catholic priest who rightly saw cars as the future of transportation. Eugene became a crack mechanic and standout driver in the process, expert at repairing cars and pressing their limits. From his first minute behind a steering wheel, he loved speed, and Father Smyth only encouraged him. The pair ruffled feathers throughout the community as they flew over the local roads, the accelerator pressed to the floorboard.
“Ely got a little too smart for the old priest,” remembered Iowa minister Louis Rohret, who knew Ely as a boy. “[He] used to take the priest’s car away with the intent of making some difficult repairs to it. Instead, Ely would run races at the country fairs. The fact that Ely was running in these races finally got back to Father Smyth and he fired him.”1
Chastened but not in the least discouraged, Eugene struck out for the West to make his mark. He arrived in San Francisco in 1904 where he used his knowledge of engines to become a respected mechanic. His entrepreneurial spirit soon led him to start a car rental company, forerunning naval aviator Jack Taylor’s Enterprise Rent-A-Car by half a century. Ely operated the business out of San Francisco and remained by the Bay long enough to marry the petite and attractive Mabel Hall. Then the couple left for Oregon where Eugene indulged his growing interest in aviation—which proved well-matched for his adventurous nature and relish for risk.
In early 1910, Ely flew his first aircraft—a Curtiss biplane—and promptly crashed it. Completely unbowed, he bought the plane from its owner, repaired it, and taught himself to fly. He was simultaneously an airplane mechanic, engineer, and pilot. All the skills that aviation would require, he possessed; he played the roles of the modern navy’s enlisted ranks and officers alike. All the men and women involved in flying and maintaining navy aircraft can trace their roots to this young man from Iowa.
Eugene was a pioneer, expert, and daredevil who rapidly built a reputation as a skilled pilot and expert maintainer. But by late 1910, he had yet to distinguish himself from the other young bucks of aviation who were aiming for distance and altitude records. He began working with entrepreneurial aircraft designer Glenn Curtiss, who had designed the first plane Ely crashed. Curtiss was an exceptionally creative inventor who had designed and raced motorcycles before he began building aircraft. Together, he and Ely devised a plan that could transform aviation.
The two men had met in Winnipeg, Canada, during a demonstration show. Ely’s keen interest in the mechanics and theories of flight caught the attention of Mr. Curtiss, who was regarded as the day’s leading aviator and plane manufacturer. Curtiss recognized talent and immediately hired Ely as an exhibition pilot.
Curtiss well understood the possibilities of aviation; he also had interest in profiting from it. With a mutually beneficial contract in mind, he began to approach the U.S. Navy, which had been resisting overtures to develop a real aviation program. To encourage their consideration, he spoke out publically, saying, “The battles of the future will be fought in the air. The aeroplane will decide the destiny of nations.... [America’s battleships] cannot launch air fighters, and without these to defend them, they would be blown apart in case of war.”2
He emphasized his point by using aircraft to successfully bomb ship-shaped targets off the coast of New York. That needled the well-established ranks of battleship admirals and also caught the attention of Captain Washington Chambers, the man responsible for exploring aviation’s potential for the navy.
The three men—Curtiss, Chambers, and Ely—met at a New York air show late in 1910 and discussed launching and landing an airplane aboard a navy vessel. Chambers knew that a German company had plans to do the same, and the three felt a mutual sense of urgency—they wanted themselves, along with their country, to be first. The truth was, however that, like Wilbur Wright, Glenn Curtiss thought flying off a ship might be too dangerous for a pilot to attempt. But Eugene Ely had lost neither his confidence nor his desire to put himself in the record books. Ely and Curtiss proposed staging the flight free of charge and Chambers agreed to build a runway aboard a ship. So it came that seven years after the Wright brothers’ landmark flight on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, twenty-four-year-old Eugene Ely would earn his place among aviation’s pioneers by flying a plane off a ship.
At its base in Norfolk, Virginia, the U.S. Navy had constructed an eighty-three-foot-long wooden platform on the bow of the cruiser USS Birmingham. From his plane’s position at the platform’s end, Ely would have fifty-seven feet for takeoff. The navy had craned aboard the Hudson Flyer, a Glenn Curtiss–designed biplane already famous for a record-setting flight, and on a blustery November morning, the world’s first aircraft-carrying vessel sailed into the Elizabeth River. Crowds had gathered in boats and along the Hampton Roads shoreline to see if Curtiss and his pilot could pull off their feat, which many observers considered more stunt than military experiment. Time would prove them quite wrong.
Several storms rolled across the Chesapeake early that afternoon and the Birmingham dropped anchor to await better conditions—a decision that agitated Ely considerably. The aviator had spent months preparing for this moment and now felt much like a focused, well-prepared runner who arrives at the starting line only to have officials delay his race. He wasn’t the only one frustrated by the inaction. Captain Chambers had risked his reputation on this venture and he feared that if Ely couldn’t launch, the observers from Washington would leave scoffing at his idea.
A window in the weather finally appeared and the aviator pressed the opportunity. The ship’s captain complied and issued the order to begin raising the anchor. Ely’s momentary relief evaporated when he discovered the agonizingly slow pace with which the ship reeled in foot after heavy foot of anchor chain. His impatience and frustration returned. Over the next half hour, he fidgeted, paced, and fumed; he checked and rechecked his plane. He was ready, his engine was ready, his plane was ready, and the weather—for the moment—was also ready. So what if the ship’s anchor wasn’t? He decided to launch.
At 3:16 P.M. on November 14, 1910, Ely gave his idling engine a final rev. Just like modern aviators before a launch, he flexed his rudder and elevators. He signaled a crewman to release the fasteners holding the plane. The crewman hesitated, knowing the captain had not issued an official launch order. Ely repeated the command more emphatically and the crewman complied. The biplane’s fifty-horsepower motor pushed it down the slightly inclined deck toward the cold, gray river and a good deal of uncertainty. The primary question in Ely’s mind as he rattled forward was whether the little biplane would have enough speed and power to clear the water. Since the ship wasn’t under way and thus wasn’t generating any wind, Ely prayed his wings would have enough lift to get airborne. He’d find the answer at the deck’s end.
The plane’s wheels cleared the deck. Instead of rising, however, the biplane began dropping quickly toward the river. The possible and quite unwelcome answer to Ely’s question flashed into his mind, but he wasn’t giving up. He pulled hard on the controls, using every bit of his skill to avoid a crash—which he did, barely. The wheels dipped into the water and the furiously spinning propeller scraped the waves, slightly damaging the blades. Cold water sprayed over Ely, but he continued urging the plane upward, and thankfully, the determined little biplane slowly began rising away from the water. Ely worried about the effects of his brush with the water and heard the engine begin to vibrate disturbingly. Being a nonswimmer, he had no interest in remaining over the bay any longer than necessary and he scratched his original plan to land at the Norfolk Navy Yard. Instead, he landed on a nearby beach five minutes later, having opened a new era of sea power.
*   *   *
Ely and Curtiss set themselves to accomplishing the other half of their plan. They realized that simply flying a plane from a ship would not truly open the sea to aviation—they needed to make a successful shipboard landing as well. Two months later, the twosome traveled to San Francisco to make history once again.
January 18, 1911, dawned overcast and chilly but at 11 A.M., the weather lifted and Ely took off from Selfridge Field, just south of the city. He winged his canvas, wood, and wire biplane toward San Francisco’s crowded waterfront where the cruiser USS Pennsylvania waited offshore with a 127-foot by 32-foot wooden landing platform on its stern.
Before he embarked on this day’s mission, Ely’s primary challenge had been to determine how to stop his plane on the short platform before he crashed into the ship’s superstructure—the decks that rise above the ship’s hull. A similarly short landing had never been accomplished, so he had no existing model to guide him. Interestingly, or perhaps amazingly, he devised a system that has fundamentally remained unchanged for one hundred years.
Ely had lined up a series of sandbags along each side of the landing platform. Between each pair of bags stretched a length of rope. A pair of rails ran parallel along the length of the platform, raising the perpendicular ropes so special hooks on Ely’s landing gear would catch them. As the landing gear snagged more bags, the increasing drag would slow and stop the plane—in theory. If not, a barricade waited at the platform’s end. Today’s system of hydraulic arresting cables and a tailhook, while more advanced, stems from Ely’s initial ingenuity.
Eugene was at once a thrill-seeker and an astute risk manager. He outfitted his plane with pontoons to prevent it from sinking into the bay should it crash. He used a set of bicycle inner tubes as a life preserver. He also saw that a canvas net girded the landing platform in case the plane veered overboard.
That morning, Ely’s biplane approached the waiting ship, circled over the choppy water, and then began its final approach, coming in at approximately thirty-five miles per hour. A sudden updraft lifted the plane above Ely’s desired glide slope at the last moment, and he had to recover quickly. He skillfully put the plane back on slope and set his wheels down near the middle of the landing strip. The plane snared half of the deck’s sandbags, and Ely stopped short of the barricade, having made history’s first arrested landing.
Captain C. F. Pond, the Pennsylvania’s commanding officer, called Ely’s feat “the most important landing since the dove came back to the Ark.”3
The young pilot landed a celebrity, and Captain Pond hosted a lunch for the attending dignitaries before Ely returned to his plane, started its engine, and rolled forward toward his second shipboard takeoff. On this occasion, he easily cleared the water below and rose into the sky above San Francisco Bay.
Upon landing amidst a throng of cheering soldiers at Selfridge Field, Eugene said, “It was easy enough. I think the trick could be successfully turned nine times out of ten.” Then the soldiers carried off the young civilian aviator in triumph. The next day, the San Francisco Examiner proclaimed, EUGENE ELY REVISES WORLD’S NAVAL TACTICS.
Naval aviation’s journey had begun.
*   *   *
Looking over San Francisco Bay a century later from the deck of the retired aircraft carrier USS Hornet, I contemplated how far naval aviation had progressed. I stood on a flight deck nearly eight hundred feet longer than the temporary wooden structure that had received Ely. Hornet’s deck had launched thousands of bomb-laden planes on missions against Japan in the Pacific. It had felt the heat of supersonic jets leaving for missions over Vietnam, and it had welcomed home Neil Armstrong and his crew after mankind’s triumphant first steps on the Moon. In all, the carrier had launched more than 115,000 missions during her 30-year career.
Yet today, even the imposing forty-thousand-ton Hornet seems small compared to a modern goliath like the Nimitz, with her twin nuclear reactors, ninety-seven-thousand-ton displacement, and air wing comprised of state-of-the-art aircraft. Having walked the decks of both ships, I realized how far innovation and spirit like Eugene Ely’s have brought naval aviation.
No guides or rulebooks existed for the pioneers who sought to link aviation with sea power. Theirs was an entirely new discipline, with no forerunners to lead the way. Consequently, many men gave their lives trying to push the limits of flight. Less than one year after making history on San Francisco Bay, Eugene Ely died when his plane crashed during a demonstration flight in Macon,...