Pittsburgh may not have been the first in flight, but the engineering, innovation and events that took place in this region were important in the country’s aviation history.
Around the same time as Wilbur and Orville Wright were attempting to become the first to successfully fly a motor-operated airplane, astronomer and physicist Samuel P. Langley was working in Pittsburgh as the first director of the Allegheny Observatory.
He was also fascinated with aviation, according to Patrick Mulvihill, assistant professor and chair of the management department at Point Park University’s Rowland School of Business.
“His work and his research and the folks at the University of Pittsburgh were beginning to develop the frontier of powered flight here,” Mulvihill said. “He and [the Wright Brothers] were kind of running parallel in terms of that dream of powered flight.”
Powered flight means a propulsion system drives the craft, instead of previous machines that were gliders or powered by hot air.
Langley’s Aerodrome No. 6 was able to fly about 5,000 feet in 1896, but it wasn’t operated by a person. Langley tried to launch a manned flight of another Aerodrome in 1903, but failed. A little more than a week later, the Wright Brothers would see success in Kitty Hawk, N.C.
“It could have been either one of them,” Mulvihill said. “It’s just the way history worked out.”
Today, Langley’s plane hangs from the ceiling of the University of Pittsburgh’s Wesley W. Posvar Hall.
While the Wright brothers are accepted by most historians as the first to successfully flight a manned aircraft, another man with Pittsburgh ties has been debated by some groups as having accomplished the feat before the Kitty Hawk event.
Susan O’Dwyer Brichman is a retired educator and author of the book “Gustave Whitehead: First in Flight,” which purports that German immigrant Gustave Whitehead could have successfully flown a powered machine before the 1903 flight.
In 1899, Brinchman said Whitehead, along with his assistant, made the first manned powered flight in Pittsburgh — but it wasn’t considered successful.
“He did hit a building because he was flying down city streets, there were no airports,” Brinchman said. “It was down Wilmot Street (not Boulevard of the Allies) that, we think, he made that flight, based on what witnesses said and newspaper information at the time.”
The event has been disputed through the years, including by curators at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Barnstormers on Brunot
New inventions often need a flashy or convincing advocate to generate interest by the public. In the new industry of aviation, stunt pilots — known as “barnstormers” — became those ambassadors.
In Pittsburgh, flying clubs began to form in the early 1900s, attracting local business people and enthusiasts to train as pilots and connect. The Pittsburgh Aeronautical Club was one group that had formed in the region, and invited an aerial exhibition of powered flight to an airfield that had been built on Brunot Island. The event would feature Glenn Curtiss, an industry pioneer, and his famous “June Bug” aircraft.
During his August 1910 visit, Curtiss flew from the island over parts of the North Shore and out west toward Moon Township before circling back around and landing near an astonished crowd.
“He was probably the first big person that Pittsburghers could watch [fly],” Mulvhill said. “I think it set the stage for a lot of other development in the area.”
That development came primarily in the form of dozens of airfields in southwestern Pennsylvania. With little regulation on the aviation industry and pockets of unused farmland, airfields were created in towns including in Bridgeville (Mayer Airfield), McKeesport (Bettis Field) and Fox Chapel (Rodgers Airfield).
At Rodgers Airfield, famed pilot Amelia Earhart landed in 1928. The visit was planned, but Mulvihill said the landing was not.
“The landing was all beautiful and good until she hit a little bit of a ditch on the runway, which made her plane nose over and wreck,” he said. “The precursor to modern-day potholes, I would assume.”
Good Question! asker Bill Winslow recalls hearing that his former neighborhood of Blackridge in Wilkinsburg Borough once had a small airport.
“It was probably in the 1920s or 30s,” Winslow said. “I’d just like to get a little more history about that airport, [like] when it opened and when it closed.”
Winslow is right. From 1930 to 1938, near Graham Boulevard in Wilkinsburg, a 51-acre airfield had one small hangar, a 1,500-foot runway, and was home to flying clubs and spectacular air shows. Wilkinsburg Historical Society president Anne Elise Morris said when it opened, a so-called “air circus” was part of the festivities with stunt flying and parachute jumps.
One of the most notable pilots there was a 19-year-old named Teresa James. She was a quick learner who had a flare for entertaining crowds.
“She started learning all about the stunts and the spins and the loops and the hammerhead stalls and all these daring maneuvers that she thought would really wow an audience,” Morris said.
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James was a pioneer in women’s aviation, and would later go on to become one of the first members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots and eventually a commissioned major in the United States Air Force Reserves. In recognition of her service and local celebrity, Morris said James was asked to fly airmail from the Wilkinsburg Airport to Bettis Airfield as part of the 20th anniversary of the postal system. That same year, 1938, the Wilkinsburg airport closed to make way for new residential development.
Northeast of Pittsburgh in Indiana County, a small airport called Hamilton Field opened in 1929. A local kid named Jimmy Stewart became fascinated by flight, and after becoming a famous actor, the local airport was named after him.
“He tells a story about his younger days at [Hamilton Field] and these barnstormers showed up,” said Rick Fuellner, airport manager for the Jimmy Stewart Airport. “Everybody was excited to go for an airplane ride, and Jimmy Stewart’s father said, ‘No, you’re not going.’ And [Jimmy] finally convinced [his father] to let him go do this, but they brought the family doctor with them in case they crashed.”
At the airfield that would later become the Latrobe Airport and now the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, Point Park’s Patrick Mulvhill said another innovation was taking place for the airmail industry.
“They actually created a system that allowed the plane to come and essentially hook on and pick the airmail up without actually having to land the airplane,” Mulvihill said. “So that was a first in the United States.”
Prior to the invention, airmail delivery was slowed by take-offs and landings, so the non-stop system used in Latrobe eliminated delays. It utilized a system of grappling hooks, trains and mail sacks and would later be adopted around the country.
Today, the region has two major airports: The Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin, which opened in 1931 on land that was once an industrial dumping site. Pittsburgh International Airport, opened in 1952 and last year became the first in the country to use an on-site microgrid to power the airport with natural gas and solar energy.
Mulvihill said he’s not surprised the Pittsburgh region has such a rich aviation history.
"We like to push forward. We like to be the first. We like to create and innovate."
