Aeroplane Flight and Wreck
P und R: unbekannt. Vermutl. UK 1910.
Der Pilot in diesem Film ist vermutlich der international bekannte Flugpionier Samuel Franklin Cody aus Iowa, der im Auftrag des britischen Militärs um 1906 den Doppeldecker British Army Aeroplane No. 1 konstruiert hat. (KK)
The Wright Brothers’ 1909 Flight
P: Edison. USA 1909
Edited by Paul Glenshaw with footage from the National Archives, Wright State University, and the College Park Aviation Museum
“Airplane inventors Wilbur and Orville Wright are famed for making the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flights on 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Lesser-known are other flights of theirs which played an important role at the dawn of aviation history. In 1909 Wilbur was invited by the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Committee to make paid exhibition flights to help mark 300 years of New York history, including Henry Hudson discovering Manhattan and Robert Fulton starting a successful commercial steamboat service on the Hudson River. The committee wanted the Wrights to demonstrate flights over the water around New York City. Orville was making flights for customers in Germany, so Wilbur, who had just finished training U.S. Army pilots, accepted the job. (…)
On Monday, October 4, Wilbur took off at 9:53 AM. He flew north over the Hudson along the west shore of Manhattan, passing Grant’s Tomb, then returned by the same route, finishing the 21 mile, 33-minute flight with a safe landing on Governor’s Island. As many as a million people witnessed the flight. This was the exact flight that Curtiss had been unable to make. Before the flight, Wilbur attached a red canoe to the bottom of the airplane as a safety precaution in case of an emergency landing in the water. After Wilbur’s death in 1912, Orville put the canoe in Hawthorn Hill, his estate in Oakwood, Ohio, as a memento. This first airborne canoe was later moved to Carillon Historical Park in Ohio and exhibited in a room adjacent to the Wright Flyer III in Wright Hall.”
Clement van Maasdijk
R: F.A. Nöggerath Jr. P: Filmfabriek F.A. Nöggerath. NL 1910
Kopie: EYE Film Amsterdam
“On July 31 and August 1, 1910, the Dutch aviator Clement van Maasdijk gave two flight demonstrations during Heerenveens air week. Van Maasdijk flew in a Sommer biplane that was powered by a Gnome engine with seven cylinders.(…) At 7 o’clock, three hours after he took his Sommer out of the hangar, he makes a flight of exactly one minute and sixteen seconds at an altitude of thirty meters. We also see how the biplane lands on the grandstand of the former Thialf ice-rink. The next day, during his second flight over Heerenveen, Van Maasdijk achieved an altitude of 120 meters. After his landing, he was grandly honoured by about four thousand spectators.
Throughout the rest of August, Van Maasdijk gave demonstrations throughout the country. On August 27, 1910, he died when his plane crashed near Arnhem.”
TRAUM UND EXZESS, S. 213 f.