The Last of the Early Birds Still Soar Like Eagles : Pioneers Are Satisfied That They Helped Contribute to Today’s Aviation Successes

Year by year, the old soldiers of aviation are fading away.

Of 596 men and women who seven decades ago qualified for an air corps that would call itself the Early Birds of Aviation Inc., only 19 survive.

Henri Fabre, pilot of the world’s first seaplane in 1910, died in France last year at the age of 101. That leaves Sir Thomas Sopwith, 98--near-immortal for having outlived his fighter planes and all the World War I aces they created--as the oldest member of the association and the breed.

Forrest Wysong of Laguna Hills is 92 and knows he will be the Early Birds’ last president before the office must be assumed by an associate member, a son or daughter, widow or grandchild of a pioneer. At a Baltimore gathering in 1980, only eight original members attended. In Los Angeles last year, the number was less.

Meeting in Seattle

Who knows how many there will be for September’s 58th annual reunion in Seattle? One thing, however, is known. The day will come when an associate will rise and move: “That whereas all qualified members of an aeronautical organization formed by those who flew solo before Dec. 17, 1916, have now taken their final flights, it is proposed. . . .”

“And that’s when you become a historical group,” secretary Jo Lees Cooper said. “That’s when we become the Early Birds Historical Society.”

Cooper, of Pasadena, is a perfect affiliate, one of 147 associates keeping the group alive. Her late father was Early Bird Walter Lees. Not a household name, perhaps. But he did teach Billy Mitchell how to fly. Now his daughter is making sure that men such as Walter Lees don’t become forgotten forerunners, that their histories are written and taped before it’s too late, that their reunions are publicized--and that as many of those 19 old-timers as possible attend the final gatherings.

Ironically, Cooper noted that a number don’t attend reunions because of the expense of commercial flights. She gets crusty at the implication. “Yet these (Early Birds) are the people who put ‘em (airlines) in business. Without these guys, we’d all be traveling by train.”

True. The earliest Early Birds were a worldwide brotherhood of men whose names became companies and endowed airplanes. Glenn Curtiss. Glenn Martin. Allan Lockheed.

Some are better known for their feats: Cal Rodgers in 1910 was the first man to fly across the United States, even if his Wright biplane did take 49 days. Louis Bleriot made the first aerial crossing of the English Channel in 1909. Igor Sikorsky in 1939 designed and later built and flew the world’s first helicopter.

But maybe there’s a greater tribute to the antiquity of the Early Birds in recalling the fliers who were never considered for membership: Charles Lindbergh (first flight: 1922), Wiley Post (1925), Amelia Earhart (1921), Chuck Yeager (1942), Jimmy Doolittle (1917) and Eddie Rickenbacker (1917).

Early Birds must have gone aloft alone by airplane, balloon, glider, or airship before Dec. 17, 1916.

That deadline commemorates the 13th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight. More important, it predates the United States’ entry into World War I by four months.

Military Trains Pilots

And that, sniffed Early Bird organizers, marks the moment when the gentlemanly standing and dare-devilment of aviation became somewhat tainted by the wholesale training of airmen by the military.

So, in 1928, over a happy dinner that involved pilots and aviation writers attending a flight exposition in Chicago, the Early Birds were formed. Membership sprawled worldwide among men and women who had shared a single feeling: “With tears streaming through our leaky goggles, trousers slapping against our spindly legs, we experienced the thrill that only we Early Birds were to experience,” said one founding father, Russell Holderman. He died in the ‘60s.

They also held a common purpose: “To get together and shoot the breeze about how great we were,” Dr. Paul Garber said. Garber, 86, also is a Ramsey Fellow and historian emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. “I’m the oldest thing around here . . . except the mummy on the third floor.”

Garber, like so many Early Birds, soloed beneath a wobbly homemade glider. The ribs were barrel staves. Plans were a mental approximation of an existing design. Mother donated the wing fabric, a dressmaker’s bolt of red chintz.

On Aug. 15, 1915, he was towed behind a car into the wind and became airborne not too far from what was then an outskirt of Washington. “I must have got about 50 feet high and I easily cleared some 5-feet-tall trees,” Garber said.

“I recently pointed out those trees to somebody and told how I glided over them. They are 75 feet tall now . . . at the corner of California Street and Massachusetts Avenue.”

Early Birds were inspired by watching public flights of the Wright brothers. Many members were balloonists. Those who chose to obtain pilot licenses applied not to the federal government but to the Aero Club of America. Flights were a matter of intrepid trial and bruising error because so many Early Birds taught themselves how to fly. As did Sir Thomas Sopwith.

He crashed on his first flight at Brooklands Aerodrome near London in 1910. Less than a month later, just before lunch, he taxied a biplane for the first time, took off in the afternoon and had his pilot’s certificate (No. 31) from the Royal Aero Club of Great Britain by teatime.

Only five years later, with their designer at the ripe old age of 27, Sopwith Pups and Camels and Snipes and Triplanes were becoming mechanical heroes of World War I.

‘A Lot of Crashing’

In those early years, he said, “You could do quite a lot of crashing without hurting anyone . . . not like now when you hit the ground very hard indeed.”

Today, Sir Thomas lives on his 2,000-acre estate near the village of Kings Somborne in the South of England. He is deaf and blind. But the mind is clear and with the assistance of an aide, retired Army Lt. Col. Derry Radcliffe, Sopwith even handles a brief, three-way transatlantic telephone interview.

“I’ve always felt most honored to be numbered among the Early Birds . . . of whom very few are now left,” he said. “I also think back to 1910 when I obtained my pilot’s certificate and contemplate the vast strides in aeronautical development that have been made in the 75 years since.

“We have progressed from no instruments at all to the highly sophisticated aircraft and spacecraft of the present day. Indeed, when I first saw the (British-built) Harrier Jump Jet (a vertical take-off fighter) in the air a few years ago and watched it hover and fly backwards, I thought I had really seen everything.”

But then a relative from the United States brought Sopwith news of a different sort. He was flattered and intrigued, said Radcliffe, to know that a Sopwith Camel piloted by Snoopy still was cursing and fighting the Red Baron through the Peanuts comic strip.

Now the Early Birds are so few. Yet so rich from their roles in bringing aviation from gliding hops in box kites to daily Atlantic crossings by Concorde at twice the speed of sound.

Glenn Messer, treasurer of the Early Birds, is 91 and living in Birmingham, Ala. He is blind. But his mind still holds the sights of the ‘20s and ‘30s when he barnstormed as the wing-walking founder of Messer’s Flying Circus.

Hit a Fence

Walt Addems of Atherton is 87. His aviation career began in July, 1916, with a ride over an Illinois pasture beneath a home-built glider towed by an Oakland Tourer. “On that first flight I hit a fence and landed on my hands and knees,” he said.

The involvement with flying barely was easing off when he retired as chief pilot for United Airlines in 1959. The career came to a definite end in 1982 when, at the age of 83, he flew a restored World War I fighter, a Nieuport 11, to the San Diego Aerospace Museum.

“When I gave the Nieuport to the museum I figured that we were both giving up flying,” he said. “I’m interested as always and, sure, I miss it . . . so I go out to the field at Livermore every two or three weeks. Just to watch the airplanes.”

Percival Spencer, on the other hand, doesn’t intend to give up flying airplanes, designing airplanes or building airplanes.

He’s 88 and that’s much older than the National Air and Space Museum in Washington that displays an amphibian he designed, the Republic Seabee. Spencer soloed as a 13-year-old glider pilot (aboard a tailless thing of spruce, bamboo and bleached muslin) in 1911. And as holder of pilot’s certificate No. 486, he is believed to be the nation’s oldest active pilot.

“I can even recall reading in the Hartford (Conn.) Courant about the Wright brothers’ first flight,” he said. “It struck me as: ‘Well, that’s progress. Now we have a heavier-than-air machine flying around. Let’s go.’ ” In 1914, golfing cap on backward, Spencer went. He soloed his first power plane, a biplane flying boat he built around a design by Glenn Curtiss.

In 1930, he was flying Ford Tri-Motors for Pan-American World Airways.

In 1944, he was a production test pilot flying P-47 Thunderbolts for Republic Aircraft.

In 1970, he began working on the S-12 Spencer Air Car, a four-seat amphibian sold to home builders in kit form. That business still is going, with Spencer and partner Dale Anderson, 75, working seven days a week from their hangar-office-workshop at Whiteman Airport in Pacoima.

There is only one aviation ambition left to Spencer.

“I’d like to live as long as I can and fly as long as I can.”

Forrest Wysong has never met Sir Thomas Sopwith.

Early Aircraft Carrier

And that’s too bad, because Wysong is one of the few men alive who, as a young U.S. Navy aviator on temporary detachment to a Royal Air Force squadron, flew a Sopwith Camel in anger over France during World War I. In the same humpbacked biplane, he took off from a wooden ramp atop the guns of the battleship Texas as an early experiment in aircraft carrier operations.

Those were informal, rudimentary days. . . .

Wysong became a pilot by building and flying a pusher biplane while still an engineering senior at North Carolina State in 1915. He was commissioned as an ensign in the New York Naval Militia because he knew how to fly at a time when the Navy was ready to train pilots but didn’t have any instructors.

Wysong qualified as a naval aviator by taking off in a flying boat (a Curtiss Model F), flying one figure eight and landing close to a buoy. And his 14-carat gold wings were a belated gift from his commanding officer and from Bailey, Banks & Biddle, a Philadelphia jeweler, because the Navy wasn’t issuing wings in those days.

“I got the set marked 52 (from the Navy’s first batch of 100 pilots) and my good friend Charlie May got 52 on the back of his,” Wysong said. “Then another guy got a 52 so the Navy compressed it all down and I became Pilot No. 52.

After the war, Wysong worked as a designer on the Lockheed Electra--the airplane that Earhart flew to her 1937 disappearance over the Pacific. Then it was Douglas Aircraft and flying and assisting the design work of everything from the DC-3s of the ‘30s to the DC-8 jets of the ‘50s.

But his era clearly was those early days.

“That’s when you were either crazy or had a death wish for airplanes, a circus thing, something that wasn’t here to stay. Flying was a carnival stunt with no real purpose. Then the very serious purpose came along, the military purpose, and we became spurred for anything to do with aviation.

“We were young, energetic and very patriotic. But we also were totally unconcerned and unaware that we were history. It was just a wonderful adventure.”

So say all of them.

No matter what has happened since, say Wysong, Addems, Spencer, Messer and Garber, they relish the time when they, aviation and the century were young.