A Curtiss biplane becomes the first airplane to perform a landing on a ship.
The plane, piloted by Eugene Ely, landed on a platform bolted to the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania moored in San Francisco Bay. Ely had been flying for less than a year when he was approached by the U.S. Navy to help investigate military uses for aircraft. (Flying 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 eighty-three-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 when it taxied 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 San Francisco.
He was not so lucky later in the year: he was killed during a flying exhibition in Macon, Georgia, just shy of his (some sources say) twenty-fifth 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 nonnuclear naval weapon.—TL