Airplane Disasters

The First Air Fatality

Even people with little knowledge of aviation history know that Wilbur and Orville Wright, two American bicycle repairmen, inventors, and entrepreneurs, invented the first successful powered aircraft. Their first flight came in 1903 at Kitty Hawk in the Kill Devil Hills along the beaches of North Carolina. People may not know, however, that Orville Wright was also involved in the first fatal air accident.

The Wright brothers spent much of their time after perfecting the Wright Flyer trying to sell it to the U.S. Army. The Army would not consider a contract for airplanes unless the Wrights could prove their flyers could carry more than one passenger. At Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1908, the Wrights began a series of demonstrations to prove just that. Orville successfully flew Lieutenant Frank Lahm on September 10, then Major George Squier on September 12. On September 17, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, a member of the Army board assessing the aircraft, went up with Orville. During the flight, however, one of the Flyer's two propellers fell away. The plane was essentially a powered version of the cloth and wood gliders the Wrights had flown at the start of their experimental flights, and Orville tried to glide the crippled craft down.

The plane's weight characteristics, with a faltering engine and a passenger, were different from a glider's, however, and Orville could not get it under control. It crashed nearly nose first into the ground before a crowd of 2,000 people. Both Orville Wright and Lieutenant Selfridge were trapped under the wreckage of the flyer. Spectators pulled both men alive from the crash, but Selfridge died later that day of a skull fracture. Wright suffered leg, hip, and rib fractures. Selfridge, the first fatality of the aviation era, is buried in Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C.

First Commercial Air Accidents

The first commercial air accidents occurred soon after the end of World War I. The war had served as a school for many pilots who sought to make a living from the skill in peacetime. On August 2, 1919, two former Italian military pilots took off from Venice, Italy, in a Caproni Ca. 48, a tri-wing wartime bomber converted to carry passengers. Records are inconsistent, but from 12 to 15 passengers were aboard. At about 3,000 feet, the plane's ungainly wings buckled and collapsed. Some of the passengers tried to [Page 102]escape by jumping from the passenger compartment, but everyone died in the crash.

...