Pioneer Pilots : County Was Friendly Territory to Early Aviators

Climbing south out of John Wayne Airport on one of the many commercial flights that depart each day, if the plane is banked just right and the air is clear, some of the passengers can make out a flagpole at the approach to Balboa Pier in Newport Beach.

At the base of the pole, engraved on the tarnished plaque that is California Registered Historical Landmark No. 775, is the brief story of an event whose influence accounts in part for the fact that the passengers are up there at all.

“First Water-to-Water Flight,” it reads. “Glenn L. Martin flew his own plane, built in Santa Ana, from the waters of the Pacific Ocean at Balboa to Catalina Island, May 10, 1912. This was the first water-to-water flight and the fastest over-water flight to that date. Martin, on his return to the mainland, carried the day’s mail from Catalina--another first.”

Newport Beach is not Kitty Hawk, and Glenn Martin is not Orville Wright. Yet in aviation circles, Orange County has always been considered fertile territory for innovation, daring and progress in the air.

A fresh reminder of the county’s status in the aviation world appeared recently with the third printing of “From Jennies to Jets,” a book tracing the history of flight in Orange County. Written by Vi Smith, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, the third edition examines aviation in the county from the first powered flight here (“Jennies” refers to the Curtiss JN4Ds flown in the early 1900s) to the burgeoning aerospace industry of the 1980s.

The book points out that many of the most accomplished and famous pilots, designers and aviation business people in the history of flight have worked and flown here.

From the earliest days of aviation to the present, Orange County has seen:

- The first airplane to fly successfully in California. Built by Glenn Martin in an abandoned Methodist church at the corner of 2nd and Main streets in Santa Ana, it flew for 12 seconds eight feet above the James Irvine ranch Aug. 1, 1909.

- Martin’s water-to-water flight in 1912.

- Pioneering parachute jumps at about the same time by 4-foot, 8-inch daredevil Georgia (Tiny) Broadwick.

- The establishment, in 1923, of Eddie Martin Airport, now John Wayne Airport, one of the busiest in the country.

- Numerous attempts at world speed, altitude and endurance records.

- Howard Hughes belly-flopping his small monoplane into a beet field in Santa Ana while trying to set a speed record in 1935.

Flying visits by Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.

- A total of 34 airfields operating in the county at once, in 1934.

- The legendary stunt flying of Paul Mantz, Frank Tallman and Frank Pine.

- The establishment of a burgeoning aerospace industry, fed by a dozen major corporations.

Why should Orange County, known in its early days for nothing more glamorous than citrus crops and bean fields, have become a mecca for pioneers of the air, a favorite haven for some of the most flamboyant and skilled fliers of their times?

“There were only a few of us (pilots) down here in those days, but we all had aviation in mind,” said Eddie Martin, the last of the innovative Martin family, which dominated Orange County aviation during the 1920s and 1930s (the flying Martin brothers--Johnny, Eddie and Floyd--were not related to Glenn Martin).

‘This Was the Ideal Place’

“I’ve always preached that this was the ideal place in the U.S. to fly and teach students, mostly because of the open country. There was nice air, with a gentle breeze from the southwest, and you could set down anywhere if you had to.”

Martin, with help from his brothers, not only established what was to become John Wayne Airport but started a flying school there that still exists as Martin Aviation. With his brothers, he built and flew planes and played host to famous aviators from around the United States. As a pilot for American Airlines in the 1930s, he once flew Eleanor Roosevelt and her son, Elliott, from El Paso, Tex., to Burbank. His early pilot’s license from the National Aeronautic Assn. is signed by Orville Wright, who was chairman of the NAA. Now 84, Martin lives in Santa Ana.

“It was strictly a Western-type frontier out here,” he said. “There were no legal limitations on aviation. You could do whatever you wanted to do.”

And they did. Martin and dozens of other adventurous fliers took off and landed early craft on beach sand and dirt roads, swooped, stunted, dived, rolled, went for altitude, went for speed, tested the strength of their planes--always secure in the knowledge that if something went seriously wrong there would be hundreds of square miles of open, flat land to glide down to.

“We had forced landings about every 25 to 30 hours in those old ships,” said Martin. “But in this area, that sort of thing was just duck soup.”

Open Fields, Few Cars

“It must have looked like a land of great promise to them,” said Vi Smith. “I can’t think of a parallel (to Orange County) in the aviation history of any area. There were open fields all around, and often you only saw cars on a two-lane road on Sundays. (The pilots) would take people up for rides and bring them back for $2. It was a business. I haven’t met one of them whom I didn’t consider an absolute genius as a businessman. They just had a great time, I think.”

Smith’s book chronicles Orange County aviation from its tragic beginning--balloonist Emil Markeburg ascending over Santa Ana and falling to his death during a Fourth of July celebration in 1900--to its current status in the crowded realm of commercial aviation and aerospace technology.

The county was, she said, home base for the natural stick-and-rudder man who knew how to turn a dollar. In the earliest days, the epitome of that type was Glenn Martin, the shy young aircraft designer heavily championed by his mother, who later founded the giant Glenn L. Martin Company (now the Martin Marietta Corp.) that built aircraft as diverse as bombers and “flying boats.”

Stunt Pilots Started Firm

In the growing years, it was Eddie Martin and his brothers, and barnstormers and daredevils by the dozen.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, however, perhaps the best-known aviator/businessman in Orange County was Frank Tallman, arguably the greatest of all stunt pilots. Tallman, in 1961, together with another gifted stunt pilot, Paul Mantz, collaborated on a business at Orange County Airport. The enterprise, Tallmantz Aviation Inc., became known both as a stunt flying operation and for its Movieland of the Air Museum on the property, an extensive collection of antique airplanes, one of the most complete in the country.

Mantz was killed in 1965 during filming of a stunt for the movie “Flight of the Phoenix.” Tallman died in 1978 when his twin-engine Piper Aztec crashed into the Santa Ana mountains near Holy Jim Canyon in rough weather.

Tallmantz Aviation and the museum were run by Tallman’s wife, Ruth, and her sister, Martha Pine--wife of Tallman’s chief pilot, Frank Pine--until last year, when the operation was sold. The museum’s entire airplane collection was purchased by Florida exhibitor Kermit Weeks and moved to that state to be displayed in a museum, Smith said.

‘Really Loved the Fliers’

“Orange County had a lot of charisma,” Ruth Tallman said. “There was so much open space on the Irvine Ranch, and you were always welcome there if you were a pilot. They really loved the fliers with their old airplanes. Everybody loved to see something different. You’d hear the tower say, ‘Hey, where’d you get that plane? You want us to have a truck pick you up?’ Orange County was one of the friendliest places in the U.S. for pilots. It had a real reputation for that.”

The ancient planes often flown by Tallman and Pine for movie stunts found a uniquely safe topography in Orange County, Martha Pine said.

“There was really no traffic to worry about, but some of those old planes didn’t have wheels or brakes. They landed on skids, so you needed to land them on dirt or grass. You could do that here. And for the movies, you could duplicate almost any condition you wanted to in Orange County.”

The Newport Beach Back Bay, she said, was once used to represent the white cliffs of Dover, and the lush greenery of the Irvine Ranch made perfect European-style World War I locations.

And, said Tallman, one of her husband’s most famous stunts was performed near what are now the ramps leading from the San Diego Freeway to Laguna Canyon Road. Filming for “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” Frank Tallman flew a twin-engine plane through a roadside billboard that had been built on a knoll near the site.

Stunts Drew Crowds

Eddie Martin said he used the same techniques decades earlier to drum up business when he was getting his flying school started.

“I had an old Nieuport 28, and I’d fly over Santa Ana and do a few stunts and draw a crowd,” he said. “By the time I landed, all these cars would be lined up with people wanting to know what was going on.”

Aviation in the county once was a cottage industry, a wide-open sort of boom business that appealed to the clannish circle of fliers of the day. In the latter half of the century, the business of flight in Orange County has been taken over by giant corporations; federal regulations, shrinking open land areas and heavy air traffic have ended the barnstormer’s trade.

“It’s a tremendous business today,” Smith said. “In the last few years, I’ve found most of the aviation news on the business pages of the paper. Everything has gone commercial and technical. There’s not much room to experiment or even to fly. The airports are like jails. No one’s really to blame, though. No one realized how important Eddie Martin’s airport would become to the county.”

‘A Closed Society’

Still, the aviation clan remains close-knit.

“It’s what you might call a closed society,” Ruth Tallman said. “No matter where you go in aviation, everybody seems to know everybody else. Aviation people from all over used to drop in on us at the museum.”

Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, donated the nose needle from the first supersonic plane, the Bell X-1, to the Movieland of the Air, she said. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, once told her husband, she recalled, that he first became serious about a career in aviation after visiting Tallman in Glenview, Ill., and watching him rebuild a Sopwith Camel, a World War I-era biplane, in his basement.

And famous pilots like Yeager, astronauts and others still stay in touch with members of the Orange County fraternity of fliers.

“There was such a sense of freedom here,” said Martha Pine. “And there was a terrific, I mean terrific, sense of humor among the pilots, and a real sense of the lore of aviation. I don’t find that anymore. It was a beautiful relationship between man and machine and the area they flew in.”