Aviation History: Curtiss JN–4

The birth of general aviation

February 1, 2019

The Curtiss JN–4 Jenny, America’s most significant aeronautical contribution to World War I, was used to train an estimated 95 percent of all U.S. and British pilots who flew in the conflict. To design his first tractor aircraft—all his previous products were pushers—Glenn Curtiss brought in B. Douglas Thomas, who had worked for both Avro and Sopwith Aviation Company in England. The JN–4D was powered by a 90-horsepower Curtiss OX-5 liquid-cooled V-8 engine.

Photography by Mike Collins

Those daring young men

Barnstormers toured the country in search of a crowd

The end of World War I produced a new breed of aviator: the barnstormer. Home from the fighting in Europe, without jobs and anxious to remain flying, pilots began traveling from town to town in Curtiss JN–4D Jennys. They offered rides for pay and eventually refined their loops and rolls into exhibitions, which they performed in groups.

In some parts of the nation, aviation was still new and exhilarating, and if people on the ground stopped and pointed when a pilot flew overhead, he could almost be guaranteed to make a few dollars if he landed in a farmer’s field for a day or so.

Sometimes the barnstormers worked with wing walkers—or else they walked their own airplane’s wings while a friend flew the airplane. Sometimes they invited volunteers to jump out with parachutes.

One of these barnstormers, Roscoe Turner, convinced the president of the Gilmore Oil Company to purchase a Lockheed Air Express and employ him as the pilot—and he offered to make every flight with a lion cub in the airplane, to capitalize on the company’s lion trademark. The lion cub—named Gilmore, of course—flew with Turner until it outgrew the airplane. Turner earned the company lots of publicity by using the Lockheed to break cross-country records.

After the war, Curtiss installed a 150-horsepower Hispano-Suiza engine and mail compartments on some JN–4Ds for the U.S. Air Mail Service. But pioneering airmail ships may be the smallest of the Jenny’s postwar stories. Many of the more than 10,000 Jennys built became surplus following the armistice in 1918. The availability of relatively inexpensive war-surplus aircraft, combined with discharged Army pilots who wanted to continue flying, led to the launch of the barnstorming era—and the beginnings of general aviation as we know it today. Few commercially produced airplanes even existed at the time, and they were far more expensive than the returning pioneer airmen could afford.

Ready-to-fly Jennys that reportedly were sold for as little as $300 made aviation accessible—and encouraged a wide variety of aerial entrepreneurs. Clyde Edward Pangborn was one of them. He volunteered to fly for the Army Signal Corps and after the war, with Ivan Gates, formed the Gates Flying Circus. Pangborn became known as “Upside Down” because he would roll a Jenny onto its back and then glide inverted. Pangborn wasn’t always behind the stick, however; a photo shows him falling in May 1920 while attempting to descend a ladder from a flying Jenny into an automobile at Coronado Beach, California. Daredevil wing walker Gladys Ingle would routinely move in flight from the wings of one Jenny to another.

Largely because of the barnstormers, the Jenny first popularized aviation and introduced flying to the American public. In addition to barnstorming aerobatics, the Jenny gave many Americans their first airplane ride. And while it probably was not their intention, the barnstormers kept aviation in the public eye as they introduced the nation to the potential for both private and commercial flying.

The barnstormers and mail pilots who survived went on to launch commercial aviation in this country. Some offered charter services and flight instruction. Others chose to compete for airmail contracts, establishing the first scheduled air carrier routes—which later were followed by the earliest passenger airlines.

80th Logo Excerpted from Freedom to Fly: AOPA and the History of General Aviation in America, published by AOPA on the occasion of its eightieth anniversary.

Web: www.aopa.org/freedomtoflybook

STRANGE AIRCRAFT

Goodyear Inflatoplane

Blow it up and go

February 2019 Pilot Briefing In the Cold War 1950s, words such as reconnaissance, agents, and hostile territory were in the lexicon. To rescue pilots who could be shot down behind enemy lines, the U.S. Army in 1956 commissioned the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. to design and build an inflatable rubber airplane. It could be stored in a container that would be dropped from a truck or aircraft to pilots stranded on the ground. The Goodyear Inflatoplane—also called an Inflatibird—was made of a high strength-to-weight-ratio rubberized fabric called Airmat. The engine-driven air compressor could inflate the aircraft at 8 psi in under six minutes. Just 12 were made before the U.S. Army admitted that it could not find “a valid military use for an aircraft that could be brought down by a well-aimed bow and arrow.”