American Aviation Historical Society

We would like our AAHS members to meet Tyson Smith, our new AAHS President! Tyson has a BS degree in Mass Communications, from Middle Tennessee State University. Tyson has worked as a 3D Spacial and Graphic Designer at several design agencies, with such clients as Disney, Netflix, Dior and Coachella. He worked also with the National Football League in developing museum-grade displays to highlight the history of football during the Superbowl.

Tyson has, with the help of his talented wife Klara (who provides AAHS’ bookkeeping support), developed his own apparel brand, ‘Maiden Voyage Clothing Co.’, that sells primarily through social media outlets such as Instagram, Facebook, and their website. Tyson has also developed events exclusively for Facebook and Instagram, and plans to bring this valuable expertise to the branding of AAHS.

AAHS is sorely in need of expertise that reaches outlets more often used by younger generations, and Tyson has just the experience (and interest), to kickstart AAHS in this direction. Tyson gives us his introduction to aviation history, below. Welcome, Tyson, from all of us, we’re so glad to have you!

Jerri Bergen

Tyson Further Explains

As far back as I can remember, the romance of flight has always been in my peripheral. The earliest vivid memory I recall was my dad and I flying a kite together. Once he got it airborne, I remember him tucking the spool handle through one of the belt loops on his blue jeans and inviting me to layback on a blanket in the park to enjoy watching it dance in the air. The green grass, warmth of the sun and big, blue sky live on in my mind. Perhaps this memory has woven itself into my subconscious and why I have and always will be fascinated with flight.

During that time, my dad was serving in the U.S. Air Force. We lived on base and I enjoyed playing with the other children of the families stationed alongside ours. After the service, my dad found a job in Nashville, Tennessee as a machinist at, what was at that time, Avco (in the former Vultee plant built for WWII) and we settled in Smyrna, TN. I grew up hearing about all of the aeronautical and aerospace projects my dad was working on and recall once getting to visit the factory.

As I got older, I began to take an interest in film and being a child of the Eighties, I feel fortunate to have grown up with such films as Indiana Jones and The Rocketeer (two of my favorites)

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They were some of the most heroic pilots of WWII. They were quick-thinking pilots in command while flying their troops or supplies into battle. Then, if they survived a crash landing, they were transformed into airborne infantry soldiers. They flew on the darkest nights over oceans, mountains and deserts and landed in swamps and jungles and on city streets - sometimes through the deadly gunfire of their own forces. Many died, but thanks to the glider pilots of WWII, thousands of other lives were saved and battles won. The veteran war correspondent, and later television news anchorman, Walter Cronkite, who flew into Holland in a Waco CG-4A glider to report on the ill-fated Market Garden campaign said, "I don’t recommend gliders as a way to go to war. If you have to go, march, swim, crawl - anything, but don’t go by glider!"

At the beginning of WWII, the U.S. military didn’t have any gliders. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, Maj. Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold was briefed on the success of Nazi glider troops’ invasion of Fortress Eban-Emael and the island of Crete. Arnold declared, "We shall have a glider force second to none in the world." So the scramble began to set up training centers, procure both glider and tow aircraft, find qualified instructors and attract recruits.

Maj. Lewin B. Barringer, a glider pilot in civilian life, was appointed by the Army Air Corps to run the show. He contacted manufacturing companies and private flight schools and sent dozens of recruiters from state to state to line up instructors who had glider experience.

One of those recruiters happened to drive through Plymouth, Mich., and stopped at Triangle Field, where Lyle A. Maxey, Paul "Ed" Laine and Chuck Kohls were members of the Detroit Glider Council. They all agreed to become glider instructors for the U.S. Military, so in January 1942, the three young men headed by car to the Twenty-nine Palms Air Academy in the California desert. Maxey recalls, "We drove continuously and made the trip in about three days. The Air Academy was in a startup mode when we arrived, and we had to go through ground and flight checks to get commercial glider pilot licenses so we could act as paid instructors."

Ed Reeder, another instructor at 29 Palms, explains there were four basic types of student: "Most students came from the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) as members of the Enlisted Reserve Corps. Others were transfers from the Aviation Cadet program where they’d had sixty hours of flight and ground school, similar to CPT. Some also came directly from the military ranks, and the smallest group were CAA private pilots."

Lyle Maxey adds, "The first six classes of students were commissioned officers who had already completed powered, fixed-wing flight training - regular Army Air Corps pilots, probably about 50 or 60 who would form a cadre of operational flying groups of deployed glider units."

Some of the glider units contained celebrities. Flight Officer John L. "Jackie" Coogan, the childhood film star, was one of Maxey’s students at 29 Palms. "On night operations, on our dry lakebed he [Coogan] would tell dirty stories for two hours every night for about a month and never repeat himself," Maxey recalls. Coogan later served with distinction in the China Burma . . .

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>In the modern age of pressurized, jet-powered airliners that cross the country in around five hours, it seems incredible to recall that just over a 100 years ago, the idea of flying nonstop across the North American continent was pushing the very limits of endurance for both man and machine. Two of America’s most accomplished test pilots would make a bid to complete that great challenge of early aviation in one of the largest airplanes of its time. While their story has often been overshadowed by subsequent advancements, the journey behind the first nonstop transcontinental flight would provide a basis for later flights to go higher, further and faster, and it deserves to be remembered.

Just eight years after the Wright brothers flew near Kitty Hawk, N.C., Calbraith Perry Rodgers took a Wright EX Flyer from Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., to Pasadena, Calif., in a series of stops over the course of 49 days in the autumn of 1911. Since then, subsequent fliers did much to reduce the length of time necessary to complete the arduous journey, aided with the rapid development of aviation as a result of WWI. By 1922, the most noteworthy transcontinental flight was that of Lt. James "Jimmy" Doolittle. On September 4 of that year he took a modified de Havilland DH-4B from Pablo Beach, near Jacksonville, Fla., to Rockwell Field (now Naval Air Station North Island), San Diego, Calif., in 22 hours, with a single refueling stop at Kelly Field, San Antonio, Texas. Even before Doolittle set off on this flight, another flight was being planned at McCook Field, near Dayton, Ohio, to cross the country nonstop. In order to accomplish this flight, however, a special aircraft was needed to have the capacity to carry the extra fuel and oil tanks necessary to make the flight.

The idea for a nonstop transcontinental flight was developed by two Army Air Service test pilots stationed at McCook Field during the winter of 1921-1922. These two pilots were First Lts. Oakley G. Kelly and Muir S. Fairchild. It would be Kelly who in 1922 would present the idea to the commanding officer at McCook Field, Col. Thurman H. Bane. Kelly recalled in a letter written in 1959 to National Air and Space Museum curator Louis S. Casey,

"In order to promote the idea, a large map of the United States showing the proposed route from New York to San Diego was posted on the wall in my office near the entrance to the pilots’ locker room. Shortly the inevitable happened, when Col. Thurman H. Bane, Commanding Officer of McCook Field at that time, came walking in to don flying clothing and paused to inquire, "What’s this?" In those days a good story was necessary to secure approval of a cross-country trip of over 100 miles. Later events indicated that from that moment we were on our way except for approval from Washington, and the all important feature of finding an airplane that was capable of making the flight."

Bane approved of the flight but had to seek approval on behalf of Kelly and Fairchild from Gen. Mason M. Patrick, Chief of the Air Service, for the flight to proceed. However, bureaucratic approval was far from the only issue in the way of the planned transcontinental flight.

One issue that Kelly and Fairchild faced at this stage was that there was no aircraft in the Air Service capable of being modified for the nonstop flight. There was some consideration towards acquiring a Junkers-Larsen JL-6, a licensed American development of the German Junkers F 13 all-metal monoplane. The expense of the conversion and the fact that the design was of German origin at a time when WWI had only ended four years prior caused the higher ups in the Air Service to reject the JL-6 without serious discussion. However, another foreign design would present itself for consideration with the arrival of two large transport aircraft from the Netherlands.

Across the Atlantic, one of the most prominent aircraft builders employed by Germany during WWI was re-establishing himself and his company in the Netherlands, one of the few European countries that had stayed neutral during the war. Anthony Fokker, a Dutch national born in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia), had become one of the most successful aircraft manufacturers in Germany during the war. Together with the German designer Reinhold Platz, Fokker Flugzeugwerke GmbH had developed some of the most advanced fighter designs in the Imperial German Air Service. These ranged from the Eindecker series to the Dr.I triplane and the D.VII biplane fighter, which had been singled . . .

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This is a story involving a watch, aviation history, horology (the study of time and its measurement) and a forgotten technique for recording time.

The story starts with the acquisition in 1984 of the watch pictured. At the time, all that was known about it was the timepiece was from the WWI and that it was a pilot’s watch. The watch carries only two distinctive marks, both on the movement. One is a serial number (5831) and the other is a Swiss cross.
At first glance, it is a fairly ordinary pocket watch, but two smaller dials (called subdials) and two seconds hands indicate that this watch has a "chronograph" capability. In non-horological terms, the watch both keeps time and acts as a stopwatch, to record periods of elapsed time. The lower subdial indicates the seconds connected to the time and the upper subdial counts the number of full minutes measured by the chronograph. The chronograph is started, stopped and reset by pressing the crown at the top of the watch, which also winds the watch. The watch’s timekeeping is set by depressing a small button just visible on the edge of the case, opposite the 11.

The large seconds hand measures the chronograph’s seconds and this was where the mystery started. Note that this hand runs along a scale that runs from 0 to 300. It did not take long to ask what this scale measured, and it was this question that took nearly 30 years to find the answer.

The obvious path was to start asking the professionals about this. However, every major watch collecting organization and every watchmaker queried between 1985 and 2018 could not come up with an answer. They did comment on what it wasn’t measuring. It was not a tachometric scale, one that allows a chronograph to directly calculate speed or distance based on elapsed time1. Nor was this any of the scientific scales, such as "pulsometer" used by doctors to read the pulse rate of patients, or a "decimeter" which allowed a direct reading of hundredths of a minute.

Even after the internet became popular, repeated internet searches over a period of 15 years failed to turn up anything other than more people asking the same question, but no real answers were available.
This problem remained unresolved until the first clue was uncovered in 2018. A friend noted that 300 divided by 5 is 60, which, obviously, is the number of seconds in a minute. That correlation was a bit confusing until remembering that watches . . .

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The following feature consists of a spectacular and historic sequence of photographs which have never before been published. These very fascinating photos have been made available to us by the original photographer, Mr. John Noble. John was a student in St. Louis back in the 1920s, and spent a great deal of his spare time among the aviators at Lambert Field taking pictures. .

The event with which we are concerned took place on June 2, 1925. On that day, Charles A. Lindbergh, recently returned to St. Louis with his newly won commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Service Reserve, and already regarded as one of the most capable fliers at Lambert Field, had agreed to test-fly an experimental airplane.

The aircraft to be tested was a two-seat biplane designed and built at Lambert Field by Ben Bell, who worked as a mechanic for the Robertson Aircraft Corporation. Bell was no newcomer to the airplane business; in 1923 he had built a five-place cabin biplane based on a Standard J-1 airframe. This ship had been ahead of its time, with the pilot fully enclosed in a cockpit at the front end of the cabin, just behind the engine. Unfortunately for Bell, the pilots didn’t care to fly his cabin biplane, primarily because they were unaccustomed to flying without being able to feel the wind in their faces.

Bell’s biplane was unusual in several respects. Its single-bay, equal-span wings were of uncommonly low aspect ratio, and the airfoil section employed was rather thick. The plywood-covered fuselage was quite short and unusually wide (apparently to provide plenty of shoulder room for pilot and passenger). Power for the nice-looking homebuilt airplane was provided by a Curtiss OXX-6 V-8 engine.

After Bell had thoroughly warmed up the engine, Slim Lindbergh climbed aboard the craft and took off. Upon gaining sufficient altitude, he began putting the plane through its paces. Lindbergh himself described the tests in his book, The Spirit of St. Louis.

"I’d been doing acrobatics at an altitude of about 2,500 feet. In wingovers and banks, the plane answered its controls fairly well; but its stalls were mushy, and it had a tendency to fall off after certain maneuvers to the right.

"Tailspins were the last items on my test list. I tried a right spin twice, unsuccessfully. The plane simply wouldn’t fall into one. But it had snapped into a left spin, and snapped out just as quickly when I reversed the controls. Then, I’d tried two full turns to the left, and found my controls useless - blanketed out by wings and fuselage. Full rudder and stick had no effect. Bursts from the engine did no good. The plane kept right on spinning, nose high, flat, lunging slightly.

"I don’t know how many revolutions it made all told - probably eight or ten. My mind was working too fast on other problems to count them. I rode it down for close to two thousand . . .

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It must have seemed like a good idea at the time - perhaps even brilliant.
Mexico was experiencing a severe shortage of new pilots to man the increasing numbers of primarily second-hand air transport types that had been promised to the country to revitalize its grass-roots airline network.

Determined to train hand-picked candidates of their own, the Mexican leadership somehow prevailed upon the hard-pressed wartime Allied Munitions Assignment Committee (Air), via a detailed requisition submitted through the venue of the hugely successful Lend-Lease program, to allocate ". . . suitable light training aircraft" to equip two new quasi-governmental pilot training schools, one in Puebla and the other at Agua Calientes.

The MAC (Air) instantly recognized an opportunity and, shoving the original Mexican requisition for Piper L-4 Cubs aside, altered it instead for an equal number of obscure Interstate L-6 Cadets, the only examples of the genre to be sent abroad via Lend-Lease.

As this unusual requisition unfolded, it may well be described in retrospect as the Interstate L-6’s finest hour as a type.

But First, Some Background

After Pearl Harbor, civil production of the Interstate S-1-A1 Cadet in its several variants suddenly ground to a halt, and the Interstate Engineering Corporation, a pre-war parts jobber at El Segundo, Calif., like nearly all of its brethren, turned to the task of becoming part of the "Arsenal of Democracy."

The S-1, offered with a variety of engines from 50 hp to 90 hp, was a rather late-starter in the light aircraft business, and the prototype Cadet did not fly for the first time until April 20, 1940. It was aimed primarily at the growing market for aircraft of this class to supply the schools of the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) and lesser-known War Training Service (WTS).

The first aircraft of its basic type to be mass produced on the West Coast, the number one aircraft of an initial batch of 20 came out the hangar doors on December 21, 1940, with about 120 more in the sub-assembly stage and materials on hand for 200 more.

The factory set its sights on producing one aircraft per day, but this soon fell by the wayside as orders started filling the mailbox, despite the fact that a finished Cadet cost customers nearly three times what a stock Piper J3C-65 was going for at the time. However, consumers and school operators were also aware that Interstate had hit the "sweet spot." The S-1-A was faster, more robust and could demonstrably be operated in more demanding field environments than even the versatile Cub.

By May 1941, a mass flight of 15 S-1-As departed California for customers on the east coast and, by the time production was halted due to the war, it appears from extant records that at least 313 S-1-As were built - at least 16 of which remain current on the U.S. Civil Register as such. It has frequently been alleged that a number were engaged with Civil Air Patrol units on coastal patrol duties during the war. It has been found that this was yet another legend handed down by word-of-mouth and which, in the post-war years, gained a life of its own.2 At least one was exported to Australia, and three were acquired by the Andrew Flying Service, Honolulu, which was at the time in the Territory of Hawaii - Manufacturers Serial Number 88, 89 and 110, which became NC37245, NC37246 and NC37268. It was one of these aircraft that suffered the unfortunate distinction of becoming the first U.S. civil aircraft to be lost in the war, when . . .

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The "Flying Man," Otto Lilienthal, demonstrated in the early 1890s that man can fly with artificial wings, but his success with monoplanes depended on constant body movement, requiring strength, flexibility, agility, coordination, and endurance. After studying Lilienthal’s effort Chanute wanted his flying machine to be perfectly manageable, automatically stable and strong enough in every part to make it safe and easy to fly. His biplane glider, developed and flown in the Indiana Dunes in the summer of 1896, proved to be a key step in the evolution of the flying machine. Believing that it could be the prototype for other enthusiasts, Chanute became the conduit of encouragement. In the decade to follow, almost every famous, and not so famous, aeronautical enthusiast obtained and used the readily available drawings of the biplane glider to first build one and then experience flying and gravity, before introducing their skills and imagination to improve the design.

After a successful civil engineering career, the 51-year-old Octave Chanute resigned his high-paying position as chief engineer and assistant general superintendent at the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad Company in 1883 to start a private consulting practice. Leaving the constraints of a full-time job should provide more time to do the things that he wanted to accomplish before stepping out.[1] No, he did not experience a mental collapse, he simply considered doing the unthinkable: he wanted to help solve man’s age-old dream to fly with mechanical wings. "This presented the attraction of an unsolved problem, which did not seem as visionary as that of perpetual motion. Birds gave daily proof that flying could be done."[2] And if successful, this would be the greatest accomplishment in his life, and he would achieve a goal that had captivated dreamers and experimenters throughout recorded history.

Background

To conceive "locomotive aerienne" Chanute knew that he had to tackle the negative attitude of the general public toward anyone showing an interest in manned flight, and he had to design a flying machine capable of carrying a man. The public opinion would change sooner or later, but the flying machine concept was indeed complicated. In typical engineering fashion he took the heuristic approach and defined a series of questions: What are the basic aerodynamic requirements? What should the wing look like? How does air flow over or under a wing? What are the forces acting on wing surfaces as they cut through the air? Creative thinking, observation, and experimenting, he thought, should yield answers.

Discussing "Scientific Inventions" at the American Association of the Advancement of Science, Section D, in 1886,[3] Chanute briefly mentioned the possibilities of aerial navigation, "inasmuch as I have noticed that whenever an imaginative writer pretends to give an account of future mchanical achievements, the first thing which is described is always a flying machine."

Keeping his ears and eyes open for anything aeronautical, Chanute read that World’s Fair organizers in Paris planned on holding an aeronautical congress in 1889. Participating would provide a good opportunity to meet like-minded professionals, so he volunteered to serve as the United States delegate and present a paper.[4] Chanute was sure that the neighbors in Chicago would never hear about him being part of an aeronautical congress, and no one would point fingers at members of his family in the grocery store. The four-day aeronautical conference in Paris was a good education, as many respected experimenters shared their knowledge and discussed their experiences. But listening to the more than 100 attendees, Chanute also detected "utter disagreement and confusion" and became concerned if artificial flight was really as absurd as some people thought or if an intellectual could solve it?

The Civil Engineer Goes To Work

With the industrial movement being in full swing, engineering education evolved as technology advanced. Robert Thurston, the new director of the Sibley College of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University, introduced lecture series by nonresident lecturers to raise the standard of technical education. The 58-year-old Chanute accepted the invitation to discuss his aeronautical . . .

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Chriss J. Peterson was born at Albert Lea, Minn., September 19, 1877, into a large family. He is known to have had at least three sisters. He attended local schools and at an early age enlisted in Co. F, 1st South Dakota Volunteer Infantry at Sioux Falls, S.D. The unit deployed to the Philippines in the Spanish-American War in 1898. After being discharged, Chriss signed a up for a two-year enlistment as a Corporal in the 11th U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, Troop K on July 31, 1899, serving until his discharge on June 30, 1901. This unit saw fierce guerilla-style fighting in the Philippines with K Troop engaging about 250 insurgents on May 9, 1901, shortly before the volunteers’ enlistments expired on June 30. It was the last significant battle before the 11th U.S. Volunteer Cavalry was disbanded.

Peterson returned to the U.S. and moved west to pursue a ranching life. Locating in Utah, he worked for a period of time at various jobs, including being a cook, on ranches there. Next, he tried his hand at barbering in Tucker, Utah, a small railroad town on U.S. Route 6 and the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad line just west of the steep grade to Solider Summit in the Wasatch Mountains.

In November 1910, a friend induced Peterson to go with him to Denver, Colo., to attend an air meet to be held there November 16 to 19. Peterson had never seen any flying machines and was not particularly interested, but he finally consented to go. Three Wright aviators, Ralph Johnstone, Arch Hoxey and Walter Brookins had been engaged to fly at Overland Park near Denver for this event. Before departing for Denver, the pair learned that Johnstone had been killed in an accident (on November 17). They hurriedly left hoping to get there before all the aviators had crashed to their deaths. Following Johnstone’s death, Hoxsey took over the flying while Brookins departed with Johnstone’s remains to his home in Kansas City. Peterson and his friend were able to see Hoxsey fly on the remaining days of the event.

Peterson was so thrilled by Hoxsey’s aerial performance that he was overcome by the spectacle. He told his friend, "Man, there’s real sport. Someday I’m going to fly like that." His enthusiastic decision made during Hoxsey’s flights remained and the following year he joined with other aviation enthusiasts in an unsuccessful attempt to start an aeronautical venture in Denver. Peterson’s determination to learn to fly kept growing and by 1913 he had saved enough to go to Dayton where he enrolled for flight instruction at the Wright Company Flying School. He started his lessons during mid-September receiving instruction from Oscar Bindley. Other students there at the time were Howard Rinehart, Lindop E. Brown and Albert B. Gaines. Peterson proved to be an apt pupil and made excellent progress.

In mid-October Peterson and Gaines took their flying license tests together, with Peterson being issued FAI License No. 270 on October 18, 1913, at Simms Station, Ohio. His test flights and the required spot landings were . . .

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This issue of the Forum focuses on uncataloged images from the AAHS archives donated from various members of the Society. These images, and thousands more, are targeted for processing in AAHSPlaneSpotter where volunteers assist in cataloging them. Interested in helping? Go to www.AAHSPlaneSpotter.com and check the system out.

The FORUM is presented as an opportunity for each member to participate in the Journal by submitting interesting or unusual photographs. Most of the images come from contributions to the AAHS archives. Unfortunately, with older images the contributor information has been lost. Where known, we acknowledge them.

Negatives, slides, black-and-white, or color photos with good contrast may be used if they have smooth surfaces. Digital submissions are also acceptable, but please provide high resolution images (>3,000 pixels wide). Please include as much information as possible about the image such as: date, place, msn (manufacturer’s serial number), names, etc., plus proper photo credit (it may be from your collection but taken by another photographer).

Send submissions to the Editorial Committee marked "Forum of Flight," P.O. Box 483, Riverside, CA 92502-0483. Mark any material to be returned: "Return to (your name and complete address)." Or you may wish to have your material added to the AAHS photo archives.

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"End of an Era; The Last Reno Air Races"
Vol. 68, No. 4 - Winter 2023

It would appear that the author allowed his word processing program’s spelling and grammar editing algorithm to apply "artificial" intelligence, instead of the real thing. For the record, "Cook Cleveland" and "Cleveland Cook" should read Cook Cleland.

Worse than the author’s sloppiness, in my honest opinion, is the lack of editorial oversight by the appropriate members of the editorial board. Hopefully the next issue of the Journal will get a better pre-flight inspection.

W.H. Badstubner

Editor’s Note: Yes, Mr. Bastubner is correct in that we flubbed this one. The assumption, which was incorrect, being that the author had cross-checked and verified this type of information. As we can’t be experts on all subjects published, we have to rely that authors don’t make these types of errors. Obvious typos and reversed names should be caught, and we’ll try to make sure they don’t slip through our reviews. We’ll also correct, or request the author do so, things like mismatched timelines in the article, incorrect identifications when we catch them and other obvious errors.

For those that want clean corrected copies, the AAHS has for several years posted corrected versions of articles on the AAHS website, which has been done for this particular one. We encourage all our members to let us know if and when we flub it. That way we can post corrected versions and for those relying on printed copies, we can issue an errata such as this.

"Harry L. Ogg and His Private Air Office"
Vol. 68, No. 4 - Winter 2023

We received a message from Susan M. Knapp, Harry Ogg’s granddaughter in which she expressed her appreciation to the Society for publishing this story. She stated,"Great article about my grandfather, Harry L. Ogg! Barbara Schultz did a fantastic piece. "Father" as we called him was a fantastic grandpa. He let us build things!

Many thanks,

Susan Ogg Knapp"

It is always refreshing to receive comments like this. It encourages us to know that we are doing the best we can to capture and preserve American aviation history.

AAHS Plane Spotter

With over a million images in the AAHS archives, we face the same challenge that any organization has of making a large collection accessible to its audience. The AAHS created a web based tool that directly addresses this challenge - AAHSPlaneSpotter.com. This tool allows volunteers to work from the comfort of their home with only the requirement being to have internet access.

Each volunteer is assigned a group of high resolution photos to catalog, as best they can, from the image content - make, model, registration number, s/n, etc. In this way, the . . .

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Sitting in the airport cafe on a foggy morning, an L-2 bravely doing pattern work in the low overcast, I ponder the low visibility conditions of aviation history. Many long standing organizations have shuttered their doors, due to lack of support and resources; the balance between success and ruin being precariously close.

One of these organizations is Aerofiles, a well-known aviation history website begun in the early 1990s by AAHS member K.O. Eckland, who wanted to record and preserve histories of early, obscure aircraft. After its introduction to the Internet in 1992, Eckland’s Aerofiles quickly became a trusted site for information on all kinds of powered, fixed wing aircraft, agency registration data, and photos.

By 2008, Eckland’s Aerofiles was seeing 11,000 visits per day (per website stats), and publishing aircraft updates from enthusiasts around the world. The work was still largely the effort of K.O. Eckland, who passed away in May 2009 at the age of 83. We at AAHS (also users of Aerofiles) contacted the Eckland family, offering to take on the responsibility maintaining Aerofiles to preserve K.O.’s legacy. The family declined, saying they would be continuing their father’s work themselves.

>By 2012, however, the Aerofiles website was no longer being updated. The Eckland family (a son and two daughters) had migrated to Paradise, California. While escaping the 2019 fire, which destroyed all the known residences (and we suspect much of K.O.’s personal collection), the family seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.

AAHS has continued the effort to locate and connect with the Eckland family regarding the transfer of responsibility of Aerofiles to AAHS. Certified letters were sent to all known addresses of direct relatives, returned as undeliverable. Purchased background information provided phone numbers and email addresses - all non-functional. All known living former associates were contacted, hoping to find someone with information. We even approached the Aerofiles Internet domain administrator asking if they would reach out to their registrant asking them to contact us. Everything was a dead end.

Then a source turned up a new address in just the past couple of weeks. So we again have extended our offer and are waiting to see if we can finally establish contact. In the meantime, we are taking steps to preserve the Aerofiles content and have been in contact with a number of individuals that formally supported Aerofiles offered to assist keeping a future Aerofiles website updated. We have established a domain (Aerofiles2.com) in order to create an enhanced, updated version of the site, with the data in a standardized format and a functioning search engine.

Our mission of aviation history preservation can sometimes be foggy, as we must always choose where to spend our limited resources, and try to predict what preservation efforts today will provide the greatest future dividends. In the case of Aerofiles, it is clear. We will continue to honor K.O. Eckland’s legacy of aviation history preservation.

Other actions we’re taking to expand our ability to preserve more history is through the grant submissions to organizations that have similar preservation objectives to ours. We are collecting information now with the help of volunteer Alexander Barnes, for a grant submission to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which can be up to a 50 page submittal. Alex also has plans to help AAHS submit several other grants throughout the year. A successful grant award will go a long way for helping get our slide collections digitized and available to the public. Thank you again, Alex!

In more exciting news, for the future of AAHS, we are introducing Tyson Smith (AAHS member since 2015) as our new AAHS President! As you know, I’ve performed the President’s role for over a decade, and a few years ago, we chose to create a separate CEO and President’s position, to essentially ‘divide and conquer’ the many important tasks it takes to keep AAHS viable.

While it’s taken us some time to successfully fill this position, I am entirely confident that Tyson has the creativity, energy and interest to help AAHS reach another generation of aviation enthusiasts. After all, why WOULDN’T a guy who has a DC-3 cockpit in his backyard not make an excellent president?

Jerri Bergen
AAHS CEO

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