Sunday, July 17, 2022

A Review of Aircraft Research & Development, Prototyping, and Manufacture in the Philippines

Part 1

By Ernesto B. Ferreras Jr.  

      

Curtiss Model D (Curtiss Pusher) Biplane

By uploaded by Colputt at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia by SreeBot, Public Domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16806541

       
       A biplane named the Honolulu Skylark was the first aircraft to conquer the Philippine sky in the afternoon of February 21, 1911. American barnstormer James C. ‘Bud’ Mars took off in the biplane and climbed to a height of 1,000 feet above the carnival grounds at the Luneta. 

James ‘Bud’ Mars

By J. Ellsworth Gross (1862-1933) - https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/OnlineLibrary/photos/images/h91000/h91002c.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79074413

     
      Another biplane called the Red Devil piloted by its builder, Capt. Thomas Baldwin, flew over Manila six days later. The Filipino people witnessed a historic event, the kind of which has continued to thrill us ever since.

Baldwin’s Red Devil

By Cliff - Flickr: Baldwin Red Devil, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25697464


      Mars and Baldwin were barnstormers who performed in exhibitions to demonstrate the new “science of flight” that was started by the Wright Brothers eight years earlier. The Skylark was a Curtiss pusher biplane that had its engine and propeller located at the rear. 

Thomas Scott Baldwin

By Bain News Service - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ggbain. 09424.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons: Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5047590


     In 1914, another American named Tom Gunn, a Chinese-American aviation pioneer dubbed as the ‘Wright of China,’ displayed the same type of aircraft in Manila.

Tom Gunn

BURL BURLINGAME AIRCHIVE

No comments:

Post a Comment