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Featured Article
Image of The Week
By Sigur Whitaker.
Carl Fisher was always looking for a new angle to publicize the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and to bring money into its coffers. In June 1910, the Speedway played host to an “Aviation Week” featuring Wilbur and Orville Wright, who were credited with the first sustained powered flight. The Wrights, based in nearby Dayton, Ohio, were among the leading aviators of the time. The Wrights planned to have five planes and five aviators at the Speedway, three of which were shipped from the training grounds at Montgomery, Alabama, and assembled at the Speedway.
Aviation Week was billed as the first national aviation meet. The assembled aeroplanes used an aerodrome three hundred feet long, sixty feet wide and one hundred feet high constructed in September 1909. It had enough space for ten aeroplanes and two fully inflated dirigible balloons.
The five-day event highlighted lap races and exhibitions by the Wright brothers’ flyers. The Wright brothers announced they were going to try to establish new records during Aviation Week with two exceptions—speed and distance because the flights were over the Speedway grounds In total, there were eleven entries in the aviation meet, six were on the Wright Brothers team and four were from Indianapolis. The eleventh plane was entered by Lincoln Beachey who later gained fame racing his aeroplane against Barney Oldfield. Beachey’s plane was the only monoplane participating in the meet. When the monoplane was in the air, it had the appearance of a bird with movements more graceful than the biplane. The Wright Brothers biplanes did not have wheels necessitating the use of a monorail to launch into flight.
Aviation Week opened with Orville Wright making a flying exhibition of two laps around the Speedway. The aeroplane was launched from a monorail and reached an altitude estimated at 125 feet. Height records were broken by 21-year-old novice Walter Brookins, who flew a Wright biplane to an altitude of 4,384 feet, a world record. Brookins' ascent lasted 30 minutes, 25 seconds. While reaching this height, he broke records for ascending to 2,000- and 4,000-foot distances. Later in the afternoon after the program events had been completed, Speedway co-founder Carl Fisher had a brief ride in an aeroplane piloted by Orville Wright. During the flight, they hit a bump that impacted his nerves. After landing back on earth, he told the newspaper reporters “I’ve enough.” Speedway co-founder Jim Allison planned to go up in a biplane, but it was damaged after catching fire from a gasoline explosion.
While the Speedway was hosting the first day of Aviation Week, it had to share headlines with aviator Charles Hamilton who set a new distance record flying 88-miles from Governor’s Island to Philadelphia in a Curtiss aeroplane. The flight took 1 hour and 51 minutes. On his return trip, he had flown approximately 70 miles when his motor malfunctioned. He landed in a swamp near South Amboy, New Jersey. The difficulty was caused by Hamilton failing to clean his spark plugs. He carried letters from the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City to the governor of Pennsylvania and the mayor of Philadelphia. He was the first to fly mail from one city to another.
The Speedway partners anticipated a large crowd for the events. However, the opening day of aviation week was a disappointment in terms of crowd support—a mere 1,000 spectators. But those spectators were thrilled by the flying exhibited by the Wright Brothers proteges.
There were an estimated 5,000 spectators on hand on the second day of Aviation Week. Carl Bumhofer’s wind wagon, a regular stock Overland automobile aided by a wooden airplane propeller, participated in a race against a Wright flyer piloted by Brookins who won the race. Brookins went around the track in 4 minutes, 58 seconds. Brookins put on an exhibition flight that had him a mere 100 feet above the track. A representative from Overland said the wind wagon had been handicapped because of the use of a small propeller. A larger propeller was broken. One of the highlights of the day was being able to view the Wright flyer up close.
On the third day of the event, the aviators’ wings were clipped by strong winds, estimated at 25 mph. Lincoln Beachey’s attempted flight was cut short when he smashed his rudder on the ground.
The largest crowd for Aviation Week, estimated at 19,000, gathered at the Speedway when rain resulted in a delay of the events. Fighting strong winds, Brookins stayed aloft for eight minutes, 35 seconds doing figure eights and while staying at an altitude between 150 and 200 feet. Then the rain squall came interrupting the events. They resumed with more exhibition flying, but as evening fell, most of the crowds left and missed Orville Wright and Brookins soaring over the Speedway until it was too dark to continue.
On the fourth day of Aviation Week, Brookins set a new world’s record. His instruments indicated he had reached 5,300 feet, but engineers determined the actual height was 4,938 feet.
Between 600 and 1,000 people were expected to arrive by train from Dayton, Ohio, to attend Aviation Week. They hoped to see Brookins give a dazzling display of his flying acumen. The previous day, Brookins thrilled the crowd by making a complete circle in his biplane in six and two-fifth seconds at an elevation of 100 feet. He described his flight, “I was going sixty miles an hour and was at an angle of 82 degrees, thus lacking only 8 degrees of being at a right angle or ‘straight up and down.’ Had I tried to turn at 90 degrees, the plane would have been useless and gravity would have sent the machine flopping to the ground.” He performed the stunt on a whim. Later in the day, Brookins performed a series of death-defying spirals. He had begun flying only four months before. Wilbur Wright said that Brookins would not try to duplicate the circular flying stunt again. He said, “I don’t think he or anybody else could do it again and get away with it. It isn’t once in a lifetime that the wind is as kind as it was to Brookins yesterday. One little gust hitting that machine at the moment he was at his deepest angle would have sent him on over and heaven only knows what the result might have been.”
Shortly after Brookins' feat, another Wright Brothers flyer, Ralph Johnstone, smashed the Speedway record for duration in the air, sailing for 44 minutes.
On the final day of Aviation Week, Brookins again broke the height record—this time going up 4,938 feet as the sun was going down. Then, his motor started to malfunction and he turned it off. He landed uninjured in a plowed field a quarter of a mile from his intended destination. Hundreds rushed to the site fearing he had been killed. Instead, they found him casually smoking a cigarette.