Those Daring Young Men

One hundred years ago, Ralph Johnstone became the first American pilot to die in an airplane crash. We take a look back at the perilous early days of flight.

One hundred years ago, on Nov. 17, 1910, Ralph Johnstone became the first American pilot to die in an airplane crash. We take a look back at the perilous early days of flight.

Born in Kansas in 1880, Johnstone began his daredevil career performing bicycle tricks for vaudeville shows. It was a fitting beginning to a career in aviation, given that Orville and Wilbur Wright, inventors of the fixed-wing aircraft, were also bicycle enthusiasts. In fact, an employee at the Wrights bicycle shop, Charlie Taylor, is generally credited with helping build the first aircraft engine.

Flying was a dangerous business at the turn of the century. One of the Wright Brothers’ inspirations — Otto Lilienthal, a German flight pioneer known as ‘The Glider King’ — died in 1896 after breaking his spine in a glider crash in Berlin (his dying words: “small sacrifices must be made”). Percy Pilcher, a British glider pilot, had been experimenting with powered flight and hoped to test a triplane he designed, but a fatal glider crash in 1899 robbed him of the opportunity.

Smithsonian Institute secretary Samuel Langley, whom the Wright Brothers consulted in their early days, made two disastrous attempts at piloting, the second of which resulted in him being pulled from an icy river by rescuers. Excoriated in the press (one newspaper wrote, “We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time, and the money involved, in further airship experiments”), his health suffered following the accident and he died of a fatal stroke in 1906.

Their experiments at Kitty Hawk in 1903 proved that manned, powered and controlled flight was possible, but the Wright Brothers found themselves confronting the question that faces any inventor after coming up with a workable prototype — who was going to buy this contraption and how should it be marketed?

Wilbur Wright in his airplane, France, 1908

Onlookers gather at Ralph Johnstone crash site in Denver, Colorado, as a doctor attends to Johnstone, Nov. 17, 2010.