January The Wright Company rents space from the Speedwell Motorcar plant
in Dayton, Ohio and begins to manufacture airplanes.
January 10 to 20 — The
Los Angeles Air Meet, the first
air meet in the United States, takes place at Dominguez Field.
January 17 The Wright Company hires A.
Roy Knabeshue to put together an exhibition flying team, the
"Wright-Fliers." Knabeshue begins to scour the country for
candidates.
Spring
Zeppelin airships, which
first flew in 1900, begin the first regularly scheduled air passenger
service. Between 1910 and 1914, this service carries over 35,000
passengers between German cities without a single mishap. Orville
Wright is one of those passengers.
March 2
Lt. Benjamin Foulois solos in Signal Corps No. 1
at Fort Sam Houston, after becoming the "only pilot ever to
learn to fly by correspondence" with Orville Wright.
For more than a year, Foulois is the US Army's only active
pilot and
Signal Corps No. 1
remains its only airplane.
March 8 — Baroness Raymonde de Laroche,
France, (her real name was Elise Deroche)
becomes
the first woman pilot to be granted a license to fly.
March 10
French pilot Emil Aubrun makes
the first night flights.
March 24
Orville Wright and Charlie
Taylor arrive in Montgomery, AL with five students and an airplane in
tow. They open a flight school at a location that will one day become Maxwell Air
Force Base. The Wright's first civilian students are Walter Brookins,
Arch Hoxsey, A. L. Welsh, Spencer Crane, and J. W. Davis.
Only Brookins, Hoxsey, and Welsh made it as pilots.
March 28
Henri Fabre makes the first
successful take-off from water in a seaplane that he designed and built.
Spring and Summer Lt.
Benjamin Foulois makes some important improvements to Signal
Corps No. 1, including adding seat belts and a wheeled
undercarriage.
April 27 to 28
Louis Paulhan, flying a Farman,
wins the first great air race, from London to Manchester in England. This
race impresses many, including Wilbur Wright, who predicts for the
first time in print that airplanes with one day cross the Atlantic Ocean.
May 10
Orville Wright leaves Walter
Brookins in charge of the flight school in Montgomery, Alabama and returns
to Dayton to train students at Huffman Prairie, now refurbished with a
larger hangar. Among his students are Frank Coffyn, Ralph
Johnstone, Phil O. Parmalee, J. Clifford Turpin, Howard Gill, and Leonard
Bonney. All of these men became pilots for the Wright-Fliers.
May 29
Glenn Curtiss flies 151
miles (243 kilometers) from Albany to New York City on the first cross-country flight in
America. He wins the New York World Prize of $10,000.
Summer
The Wright Brothers ask Arch
Hoxsey, a member of their exhibition team, to test a Wright Model
A that can be configured with the elevator in front, in back, or
both. Toward the end of the summer, Hoxsey is decided that the aircraft
flies best with the elevator in back. The Wrights also develop a wheeled
undercarriage, perhaps responding to reports from
Lt. Benjamin Foulois at Fort Sam
Houston.
June
— Lt. John W. Dunne, England, complete and tests the D.5,
the first successful powered flying wing and perhaps the first
inherently stable powered aircraft of any sort. Later this year he will
demonstrate the D.5 before an audience from the Royal Aero Club
that includes Orville Wright.
June 2
Charles S. Rolls, flying a
Wright
Model A, makes the first round-trip flight over the English
Channel and back again.
June 30
Glenn Curtiss makes the first
bombing runs from an airplane, dropping dummy bombs over Lake Keuka near
Hammondsport, NY.
July 10
Walter Brookins becomes the first pilot to fly over a
mile above the earth, achieving an altitude of 6234 feet
(1900 meters) in a Wright Model A over Atlantic City,
New Jersey.
August 20
Lt. Jacob Fickel fires a
Springfield rifle from an airplane piloted by Glenn Curtiss at a
target on the ground over Sheepshead Bay Speedway, Brooklyn, New York. He
scores one hit. This is the first time a gun is fired from an aircraft.
August 27
James McCurdy and Fredrick Baldwin, flying a
Curtiss biplane, receive and send telegraph messages on a Horton wireless set over Sheepshead Bay, New York.
It is the first time that a pilot in the air communicates with people on the
ground.
September 2
Blanche Stuart Scott
becomes the first American woman to solo an airplane. She was taught to
fly by Glenn Curtiss, although she never received a license.
September 23
Georges Chavez crosses the
Alps in a Bleriot monoplane, flying from Brig, Switzerland and
reaching a record altitude of 2200 meters (7,218 feet), but is fatally
injured in a crash landing at Domodossola, Italy.
October 3
Capt. Bertram Dickson,
England, flying a Farman biplane,
collides with Rene Thomas,
France in an Antoinette monoplane over Milan, Italy in the first mid-air
collision. Both pilots survive.
October 11
Former President Theodore Roosevelt goes aloft with
Arch Hoxsey at St. Louis, Missouri, becoming the
first US commander-in-chief to fly.
October 22 to 30
The Belmont International
Aviation Tournament, the first international air
meet in America gets underway at Belmont, NY. It offers a whopping $75,000
in prizes to draw aviators from all over the world. At this meet, the Wrights
unveil
what will become their most popular airplane, the Wright Model B. Like
their earlier craft, the Model B is a pusher biplane with wing-warping.
But is has a conventional tail and a wheeled undercarriage. They also bring a
special airplane -- the Wright Model R, dubbed the "Baby
Grand" -- to win the speed contest. During speed trials, it flies a
70 mph and is the favorite to win the race. But it crashes before the
competition begins.
October 25
Capt. Yoshitoshi Tokugawa, Japan, builds and
flies the first Japanese aircraft, the Kai-1. It's patterned
after a Farman design.
November 7
Phil Parmalee flies the
world's first air-freight shipment two bolts of silk cloth from Dayton to
Columbus, Ohio in a Wright Model B. The cloth is delivered to Morehouse-Martens
Department Store, where it is cut up into swatches and sold as souvenirs.
That same day Didier Masson flies a biplane designed by
E. Lilian Todd over Long Island, New York. Todd is first woman
aeronautical engineer.
November 14
Flying a Curtiss biplane, Eugene
Ely takes off from an 83-foot-long wooden deck built on the U.S.S.
Birmingham in Hampton, Roads, VA. This marks the birth of the
aircraft carrier.
November 17
Ralph Johnstone, a member
of the Wright exhibition team, fails to
pull out of a spiraling dive and dies in a crash. He is the
first American pilot to lose his life in an airplane.
|
Need
to 
he
pioneer aviation era literally flew by, lasting just
a little more than a decade from the first wavering flights at Kitty
Hawk to the beginning of World War I when the first "second
generation" aircraft began to emerge, combining both maneuverability
and stability. This rapid development is all the more remarkable
when you consider that for the first few years, the Wright brothers
were the only pioneers. A few visionaries in America and Europe made
brief hops in a handful of airplanes, but nothing approaching the
Wright Flyer in its final 1905 form. This despite the fact that
these builders had access to the Wrights' published patents. It
wasn't until the Wrights began demonstrating their airplane in 1908
that the rest of the world fully understood the necessity of
three-axis control and how to use it.
