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

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       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

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     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

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