Flying, however, was such a new endeavor that mere months of experience qualified Ely for the risky attempt. The previous November, he’d taken off in a Curtiss plane from a specially built 83-foot wooden platform on the bow of the light cruiser USS Birmingham in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

The plane didn’t have a lot of speed and dove off the edge of the ship. The wheels actually dipped into the water, and spray splattered on Ely’s goggles. Instead of making a triumphant circuit of the harbor and landing at the Norfolk Navy Yard, he quickly landed on a beach and counted his blessings.

But Ely performed flawlessly in his 1911 shipboard landing. And within the hour, he took off from the deck of the Pennsylvania and returned safely to land in San Francisco.

He was not so lucky later in the year, when he was killed during a flying exhibition in Macon, Georgia, just shy of his 25th birthday.

The military significance of Ely’s shipboard landing and takeoff was staggering, leading directly to the development of the aircraft carrier, which remains, since World War II, the most dominant non-nuclear naval weapon.

Source: Wikipedia

Photo: Eugene Ely makes the first landing on a ship, in San Francisco Bay, 1911.

An earlier version of this article appeared on Wired.com Jan. 18, 2007.

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Authors: Tony Long

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