Brace for Impact. Peter Pigott

their aerial displays advertised as “Death Mockers!” and “Guaranteed Crazy Flying!” — giving their audiences a lifelong aversion to flying — the barnstormers had a detrimental effect on advancing commercial aviation, especially its safety aspects. Every year, to reassure the public, the Air Board published statistics on how safe the industry was — the number of miles flown between accidents multiplied annually, proving that flying was safer than driving an automobile. But that didn’t sell newspapers, and then as now, a single aircraft accident generated more media coverage than a thousand successful flights.

      Typical for the period was a barnstormer crash at Bowness Park in Calgary on June 6, 1921. Convened at Edmonton on January 6, 1922, the court of inquiry was called to consider why the JN-4 (C-GAAM) owned by Calgary’s McCall Aero Corporation had crashed. There were no fatalities, and pilot R. Fleming stated that the aircraft stalled as it started into a turn, then hit an air pocket, rendering him unconscious so that he had no recollection of the accident. One of the three board members was Captain W. “Wop” R. May, DFC, and through the summer of 1919, he and “Freddie” McCall, DSO and MC with Bar, the owner of the aircraft, had worked for the Canadian Fair Management Company using this very JN-4 to perform a daily stunt show over the Calgary Exhibition Grounds. May had left for Edmonton on August 30 to fly Detective J. Campbell from Edmonton to Coalbranch, Alberta, in pursuit of a murderer — the first use of an aircraft by a Canadian police department — but McCall had continued to fly the JN-4 in exhibition work until the fall of 1920.

      The aircraft had been in tension throughout the winter of 1920–21, Fleming said, but he admitted that the rigging might have been poor. A recheck of the rigging hadn’t taken place, since it had only been “looked over” before the flight. William Pearce, a former RAF mechanic and the only eyewitness to the crash, gave evidence that the pilot didn’t stall in the turn but “appeared to get into an air pocket.” The board conceded that “it was public knowledge that several accidents had happened in Calgary owing to atmospheric conditions.” On examining what remained of the aircraft, they concluded that the cause of the crash was because the machine had been “faultily rigged” and also that the atmosphere at Bowness Park at the time had been “lumpy.” That the aircraft had been used for wing-walking led the board to write: “We are further of the opinion that the machine would be under a certain amount of strain when the man Maybee was moving about on the wings.” But they were “unable to attach the blame to any one individual as there was not sufficient evidence as to the actual accident.” Closer inspection of machines of this age and more air engineer courses were recommended. With regard to the atmospheric conditions, J.L. Gordon, the director of flying operations, wrote on February 13, 1922: “To my knowledge there is no such thing as an ‘air pocket.’ It would appear that Air Regulations were not complied with.”[15]

      It wasn’t only because aircraft were poorly designed or maintained that fatalities occurred. As before the war, the more daring of the daredevil stunt pilots who performed in Canada were American. Omer Locklear, the most famous of them all, changed aircraft in flight by climbing to the top wing of one and leaping up to pull himself onto the bottom wing of the other. He performed this in Calgary on June 28, 1920, and again in Edmonton on July 8, only to die in an air crash weeks later — but not in Canada. Locklear had returned to Los Angeles to do stunts for a silent movie called The Highwayman. On August 2 he couldn’t pull out of a spin and crashed into an oil sludge, the explosion killing him and his passenger.[16]

      Locklear’s death did nothing to deter Lloyd Rees, who the next year, before a Regina audience, attempted to climb down by rope ladder from a Curtiss JN-4 (G-CAAM) flying directly above another (G-AABZ). The official Air Board record laconically noted: “Mr. Rees failed to retain his hold on the ladder and fell to his death.” In Canada and the United States, Locklear’s and Rees’s deaths prompted the introduction of regulations forbidding future performances by aerial stuntmen.

      4

      Lindbergh, Leo the Lion, and Air Mail Aces

      With the election of the Liberal government in late 1921, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King got his chance to jettison Robert Borden’s Air Board and remove the political appointees. Shrewd enough to realize that with an ocean on either side and Canadians seeing little need to fund an air force, King, ever a master of pragmatism and timing, disbanded the Air Board and neatly folded its responsibilities into the new Department of National Defence (DND). The board’s Civil Air Operations Branch, with Lieutenant-Colonel Scott as controller of civil aviation (CCA), was merged with the CAF on June 28, 1922, transforming all board stations into air force units and giving board personnel who had been civil servants temporary commissions in the CAF. The safety of all aircraft, civil and military, and their accident investigation was now the responsibility of the Directorate of Flight Safety in DND. As King knew, none of his political opponents would disagree with funding a military that performed community-minded services. The air services were reorganized yet again in July 1927, with the RCAF as its military branch under the minister of defence and the Civil Government Air Operations under a deputy minister. In 1930 the latter was absorbed into the RCAF.

      Nothing did more to publicize aviation in 1927 than Charles Lindbergh arriving in Ottawa. Fresh from his solo 33.5-hour flight from New York to Paris in May, he was then the most celebrated man on the planet. On July 2, 1927, Lindbergh was invited by Vincent Massey, the Canadian envoy to Washington, to help celebrate Canada’s 60th birthday. He landed the Spirit of St. Louis on Ottawa’s Hunt Club airfield, promptly renamed in his honour, and was then escorted in the air in formation by 12 U.S. Air Corps Curtiss Hawk fighters. The U.S. planes hailed from Missouri’s Selfridge Field, which had been named after Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge.

      Leading the escort, First Lieutenant J. Thad Johnson started downward as if to land but suddenly rose again to resume his place in the formation. The plane behind nudged his tail, throwing Johnson’s machine into a dive less than 100 feet from the ground. Johnson jumped out of the cockpit and tried to use his parachute. It opened, but not quickly enough to affect the fall. He was killed, his plane crashing far enough away so that the whole tragedy was out of the crowd’s sight.[1] Years later, reflecting on his good fortune at surviving into old age — in other words, not being killed when he was a barnstormer and an air mail, transatlantic, and military pilot — Lindbergh wrote: “Is aviation too arrogant? Is Man encroaching on a forbidden realm? Is aviation dangerous because the sky was never meant for him?”[2]

      Leaping onto the Lindbergh flight bandwagon was Hollywood, especially Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), which was about to enter the world of sound movies. Jackie, the second lion used for MGM’s opening logo, was the first to roar. In September 1927, the studio outfitted a Ryan Brougham aircraft (a smaller version of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis) with a cage behind the pilot’s seat and sent Jackie, now billed as “Leo the MGM Flying Lion,” off on a tour of the United States. On its way to New York from San Diego, the aircraft crash-landed in the Arizona desert. Martin Jenson, the pilot, and Jackie survived the crash, and the recovered aircraft frame can still be seen today.

      Jenson left the lion with water and his sandwiches and walked into the desert for help. Four days later the pilot was found and was able to telephone MGM. Their first question was, “How’s the lion?” Rescuers located the plane crash and the unharmed Jackie (what Walt Disney could have done with this story!). Jackie eventually went on to survive two train wrecks and an explosion in the studios. Aware there was no such thing as bad publicity, Louis B. Mayer dubbed him “Leo the Lucky Lion,” and, roaring and shaking his mane in movies such as The Wizard of Oz, Jackie achieved immortality as MGM’s logo. Typical of showbiz, he was replaced by younger lions in 1931, especially for colour movies, and was retired to live out his life at the Philadelphia Zoo, although his image and roar were still used in black-and-white MGM films well into the 1950s and even made a comeback in Hearts of the West in 1975.

      In Canada the 1927 Lindbergh visit did prompt the Canadian government to begin the Flying Club Scheme as a means of ensuring flying instruction. That December the RCAF (through the CCA) bought 10 De Havilland Moths for approved clubs across the country. In 1928 it also started courses for instructors at Camp Borden. The very short life of the Moths that went to the clubs must have caused some concern (they were always on loan from the RCAF), since