Nov. 18, 1913: U.S. Pilot Loops the Loop
By Jason Paur November 18, 2009 | 12:00 am | Categories: 20th
century, Transportation
1913: Flying at 3,500 feet over North Island near San Diego, pilot
Lincoln Beachey points his Curtiss airplane downward. He pulls back on
the controls at 1,000 feet, climbing until the nose of the airplane
falls back beyond the vertical, and he completes the first inside loop
by an American pilot.
Within weeks Beachey was =93looping the loop=94 multiple times in
succession. The maneuver became commonplace during World War I and
continues to be the mainstay of aerobatic and combat pilots to this day.
Like the Wright brothers, Beachey was a young bicycle mechanic. The
flying bug first bit him in 1905. His first experience was in balloons,
but by 1910 Beachey decided airplanes were the place to be and learned
to fly at the Curtiss Flying School from Glenn Curtiss himself.
Flight instruction at the time was crude, to say the least. Despite
crashing during his first two lessons, Beachey soloed on his third
lesson. By the next year, he was earning large sums of money as a famous
stunt pilot, touring the country with his airplane.
Beachey set a world record for altitude in 1911, climbing to 11,578
feet. He made his money as a stunt pilot, but decided to quit after
several of his fellow aviators died in crashes. Beachey said he was
unhappy with the spectacle flying had become, and that spectators were
hoping for crashes.
His retirement was short-lived, though, and soon he was asking Curtiss
to make him an airplane with enough power to perform the loop that
Russian pilot Peter Nesterov first made earlier in 1913. Beachey=92s
return to flying ended in tragedy when he lost control of his airplane
and killed a spectator who was watching from a hangar roof.
Beachey told The New York Times he =93was not attempting to loop the
loop, nor to do any other extraordinary feat at the time.=94 He again
decided to quit aviation.
But Beachey was back in the air a month later. In an airplane Curtiss
had built with plenty of power, Beachey was able to replicate Nesterov=92s
feat on Nov. 18, 1913. The New York Times reported hecompleted the loop
with only 300 feet to spare (.pdf), and that Beachey said said he didn=92t
know how he did it, =93it was all an experiment.=94
Beachey improved his technique and completed two consecutive loops Nov.
25. By the end of the year he had performed six consecutive loops.
He was soon setting records performing as many as 80 loops in
succession. He made a mock attack on the White House and the Capitol in
1914 to show the government that it was unprepared for the aviation age.
While performing in front of a crowd at the Panama-Pacific International
Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, Beachey misjudged his altitude
during an inverted maneuver and ended up crashing into San Francisco Bay
(.pdf). An autopsy concluded that he survived the crash, but died from
drowning. He was 28.
Today the loop is considered an elementary aerobatic maneuver, and the
current world record for consecutive loops stands at 2,368 by David
Childs of North Pole, Alaska.
Source: Various
Photo: Lincoln Beachey poses in his airplane.
