National Air Tour

Dearborn, Michigan, October 4, 1925.  The spectators began arriving at the

flying field very early in the morning.  They walked, they pedaled bicycles,

they rode motorcycles and drove touring cars, they came on streetcars and buses and trains, from Dearborn and Detroit and Ann Arbor, from Grand Rapids and Saginaw and Kalamazoo, from Chicago and Buffalo and New York City.  By three o’clock on this rainy Sunday afternoon there were 35,000 people at the Ford Airport, waiting to see the aeroplanes come flying in from Cleveland.

 

The air tour was scheduled to depart from Henry Ford’s new airfield at

Dearborn, visit twelve cities in the Midwest and return six days later.  Its

announced purpose: “To end the dominance of the military and the

emphasis on thrills and stunt flying, demonstrate the reliability of travel by air on a predetermined schedule regardless of intermediate ground facilities.”  

 

Moline had a fine landing field, Des Moines a poor one, only 1400 feet long, and the bigger airplanes zoomed low and went on without stopping, to the shame of the local committee.  The tour had become a reckless, wideopen race anyway, with Tony Fokker the worst offender, determined that his tri-motor should be first to land at every stop. Fokker, in fact, was blamed for the traffic jam at Omaha where Casey Jones landed his big Curtiss squarely on top a motorcycle left in mid-field by Howard Wehrle, a local town committeeman — a poor place, everyone agreed, to leave a cycle. But mechanics worked all night and Jones went on with the others next day.

 

Heading down the Missouri for Kansas City they ran into a wild storm, great

jagged streaks of lightning, black thunderclouds towering up ahead like

angry giants.  The flyers dodged and zigzagged in the gusty wind and torrents of rain, flying ever lower to the angry river and wildly tossing treetops.  Some were all but blinded when a great torch of lightning slammed across the sky and into a big red barn, just beneath their wings. The barn exploded in towering flame, and this was enough, these pilots sought shelter in the nearest pasture they could find.  The next day, Ed Knapp wrecked his brand new Waco trying to take off from the tiny clearing where he went down, but the others went on east through more rain and fog to reach Cleveland on Sunday, a day behind schedule.  The Dearborn weather was very bad too, but the advance Army ship got through and so the others took off for the last lap, risking life and limb to bring the passion of aviation to America.

 

The National Air Tour will be a timeless feature film for the entire family.