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Barnstormers, Flaming Coffins, and Death Mockers

The first years of peace promised much for commercial aviation. Civil flying had been prohibited during the war, but at its end, with so many unemployed pilots and surplus aircraft, utilitarian roles for aviation first appeared. Across Canada in the summer of 1919 makeshift aerodromes sprang up for companies such as the International Aerial Transport Ltd., in Toronto’s Leaside, which equipped itself with bargain-priced JN-4s that had cost the government $5,000 each to build the year before.[1]

Throughout the conflict, rivalled only by the ferocity they showed the enemy, the RFC and the RNAS fought each other over policy, manpower, and aircraft procurement. To overcome this, the British government set up the Air Board on May 15, 1916, which proved spectacularly unsuccessful, since officers from either service resented their rivals being invited and subsequently refused to show up at meetings. Fed up, the British government merged the RFC and RNAS on April 1, 1918, into the Royal Air Force (RAF), to be overseen by an air ministry. A year later the Department of Civil Aviation was set up with an accident investigation branch to examine both civil and military air accidents. A Certificate of Airworthiness was now required for any aircraft flying in the United Kingdom, an example the dominions were sure to follow. The Air Navigation Act of 1920 gave the secretary of state for air the executive power to make regulations for the investigation of civil air accidents, and within two years, the Air Navigation (Investigation of Accidents) Regulations were drawn up.

The Hoffar Motor Boat Company’s H-2 hydroplane crashed into a house on Vancouver’s Bute Street on September 4, 1918. Vancouver Archives.

Accident investigation in the United States had its origins in 1915 with the U.S. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which formalized investigation methodologies. From April 1917 to November 1918, the United States, despite being a late entry in the war and because of its industrial might, had its aircraft manufacturers deliver 13,984 aircraft to its military. Had the contracts continued into 1919, the manufacturers would have turned out 21,000 more aircraft the following year.[2] But if anything, the huge stockpiles of surplus aircraft proved a detriment to investing in new designs. The JN-4 aircraft and OX-5 engines still in their crates were given away at bargain prices, retarding the development of safer aircraft being built because they couldn’t compete pricewise.

When air mail in the United States was initiated in 1918, the U.S. Post Office Department was given the responsibility for aircraft inspection and regulations, some of which, like making pilots carry a heavy revolver when flying, had originated in the days of the Pony Express. The aircraft were war-surplus, licence-built De Havilland-4s (DH-4s). No safer, or more lethal, than their contemporaries, the DH-4s were called “Flaming Coffins” for good reason. The pilot sat sandwiched between the engine and the fuel tank, and after repeated rough landings, the fuselage’s wooden longerons splintered, pushing the fuel tank up against the pilot and engine and splashing gasoline onto the hot exhaust manifolds. If that didn’t kill him, what eventually did was the engine’s exhaust pipe, which ran alongside the gas tank. When cracked after too many landings, the pipe ignited the doped fabric. Since both pilot and aircraft were incinerated, the cause of a crash remained a mystery.

Jerome “Jerry” Lederer joined the U.S. Post Office’s Air Mail Service in 1926 as an aeronautical engineer, beginning a lifelong interest in flight safety. When interviewed in September 2001, he recalled:

When we lost all those Air Mail Service pilots in the early 1920s, the usual cause of death was a fire following a crash. We built a concrete ramp with a concrete wall at the end of it, put these ships under full power, and let them go down the ramp into the wall. Slow-motion pictures showed that when the airplane crashed, the fuel spilling out of the tanks — which were carried up front in the fuselage — would go onto the hot exhaust manifold and start the fire. I drew specifications for new parts and developed test methods for new ways of operating the plane.[3]

Lederer reconstructed wrecked aircraft to determine why they had crashed. Risk management, he later said, was a more realistic term than safety, since it implied that hazards were ever-present and they had to be identified, analyzed, evaluated, and controlled — or rationally accepted.[4]

Because these were the earliest cross-country and after-sunset flights in North America, it was the first time that pilots had to contend with darkness, weather, visibility, and navigation. Flying on schedule whatever the weather or time of day or night gave birth to the world’s first system of scheduled air transportation. Cross-country flying depended very much on visibility, and if an aviator wished to survive, he learned to read the earth and sky around him — when he could see both. As air mail pilots in Canada later learned, if they flew low enough and relied on the “iron compass” — the railways (stations had place names painted on the roofs), roads, and landmarks — they would find their way through.

Postwar flying was still “seat-of-the-pants.” If the pilot heard his engine labouring, that meant the aircraft was climbing. When caught in overcast conditions and flying blind, a pilot listened to his wires and engine. If the former were ringing, that meant his speed was going up and he was aimed at the ground. If he wished to complete his flight safely, the aviator would know all the farms, golf courses, and racetracks where he could land when his engine routinely cut out. Cows were his weather vanes, since they turned their tails to the wind. In the event a pilot’s compass failed, he had a sure way to determine direction: remember that rural outhouses always faced south.

Long before multiple VHF omnidirectional ranges (VORs), global-positioning receivers, and on-board computers, cross-country pilots navigated by a little black book. A barnstormer before he flew the U.S. mail, Elrey Jeppesen suffered the lack of navigational aids along his routes — all that air mail pilots were supplied with were Rand McNally automobile maps — and soon began jotting down in a notebook the location of railway lines, smokestacks, and water towers en route, as well as the phone numbers of local farmers willing to tell him what the weather ahead was like. On his days off, Jeppesen climbed those water towers with an altimeter to measure their height and checked out convenient pastures that could be used for forced landings. Other pilots watched him fill his notebook, and when he was persuaded to publish the contents, his inventory of navigational information became a “bestseller” among the flying community. Thus began the inception of standardized life-saving aerial charts (still called “Jepp charts”) that pilots even today couldn’t fly without.

Going one step better to make sure their flying mailmen were aimed in the right direction, the U.S. government laid down hundreds of 70-foot yellow concrete arrows along the route, each positioned next to a 50-foot metal tower with a rotating gas-powered light. The arrows pointed the way during the day, while the beacons did the same at night. It was thought that on days and nights when visibility was unlimited, both could be seen by lost pilots from 10 miles up.[5]

Flying at night and in poor weather did force aviation authorities to experiment with radio and teletype. In response to several plane crashes, 10 radio stations were installed in 1921 along the New York–San Francisco air route to transmit weather forecasts. The U.S. Navy Weather Service was already distributing weather information to mariners in weekly notices, and this data was adapted for the air mail program for use on the teletype machines of the day. Because early teletypes transmitted information slowly and required the volume of transmitted characters be kept to a minimum, coded contractions became part of the format, hence the NOTAM language that remains in use today.[6]

The earliest form of rudimentary control and pilot safety was where all flying began and ended — at the airfield. During the First World War, to signal takeoffs and landings, a “controller” stood on the field or roof of the nearest shack with a set of flags. He waved a green or checkered flag to tell the pilot to go, and a red flag to hold. Since this signalling system was useless at night, in poor weather, or beyond visual range, some airports had hand-held lights that aimed red or green beacons at incoming or departing pilots, a system that continues in emergency use today. But once the aircraft was out of sight, as with a sailing ship a century earlier, no one knew its progress until it arrived … somewhere. If it crashed, unless this took place in a populous area, the chances of finding the wreckage, let alone figuring out why it did so, were nil.

The evolution of airports in Canada: without paved runways, lighting, or radio until the Trans Canada Airway, airports were poorly equipped for commercial aviation. Library and Archives Canada.

When the U.S. government surrendered air mail operations to private companies in 1925, out of the 40 pilots originally hired, only nine were still alive. Not for nothing was it called “The Suicide Club.” Because of this horrendous record, with the Air Commerce Act in 1926, the U.S. government legislated into being under the Department of Commerce a national accident investigation department and Congress charged its Aeronautics Branch to investigate and to “make public the causes of aviation accidents.” The Committee on Aircraft Accidents issued Technical Report No. 357 on October 3, 1928, entitled “Aircraft Accidents: Method of Analysis,” defining the terminology and classifications of accidents to be used. An aircraft crash could always be counted on to increase newspaper circulation, so to the delight of the media, the Aeronautics Branch at first published full accident reports that included the operator’s name, the aircraft make and model, narratives, and possible causes. The nascent aviation industry fought back at what it considered information that could only alarm the public, and as a result, the branch began issuing bare annual statistical summaries with little more than weather or pilot error listed as causes.

In 1934, setting into motion a historic relationship, the Department of Commerce compromised the investigative function of the Aeronautics Branch when it renamed the branch the Bureau of Air Commerce.[7] For the real significance in the Air Commerce Act — evident in its title, wrote Mary Schiavo, the former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation — was its commitment to promote commercial aviation rather than create an aviation safety program. That would require several air disasters to take place.

It came as no surprise that at the end of the Great War, Canada followed the Mother Country (and not its American neighbour) in how it regulated civil aviation. Prime Minister Robert Borden is remembered for ensuring that Canada was represented in its own right at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. But being part of the British Empire had its privileges and entitled Canada to attend the 1919 International Convention of Paris. This historic convention on air law decided that each nation had absolute sovereignty over the airspace overlying its territories and water. And Canada had more than enough of both. Signatories to the convention, which unfortunately didn’t include Germany, Japan, or the United States, then rushed home to draft domestic aviation policies.

At a speed that must have made other governments envious, as soon as the delegates returned, they completed a set of Canadian Air Regulations that was drawn up and introduced to the Privy Council on December 30, 1918, and then approved by the governor-in-council the next day.[8] As with the British regulations, the Canadian ones conformed to the provisions of the International Convention of 1919.

The man behind this uncharacteristic bureaucratic efficiency was John Armistead Wilson, who is forgotten today in Canadian history. Born in Scotland in 1879, Wilson trained as an engineer before immigrating to Canada in 1905 to work for the Canada Cement Company. In 1910 he became director of stores and contracts for the Department of Naval Services and was later appointed deputy minister of the department. A rising star, he came to Borden’s attention in November 1918 when he wrote “Notes on the Future Development of the Air Service in Canada Along Lines Other Than Those of Defence.” Asked also to write the Air Board Act, he made use of his engineering and administrative skills to complete the first draft in two days. The legislation was introduced into the House of Commons on April 29, 1919, and received Royal Assent on June 6, 1919.

The Air Board was mandated “to supervise all matters connected with aeronautics,” including a Canadian Air Force (CAF) that was to be a non-permanent, non-professional force. The act emphasized that unlike road traffic, the new mode of transport was to be the exclusive preserve of the national government and not the provinces. The Air Board was granted wide regulatory powers over aircraft, pilots, mechanics, and air bases, and $250,000 was budgeted for its expenses. To control civil flying before technical officers could be appointed, the government at first attempted to prohibit it altogether and an order-in-council (P.C. 1379) to do this was passed on July 7, 1919.

As with the Canadian Aviation Safety Board (CASB) in 1984 and the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) in 1990, the members of the Air Board were political appointees. Appointed on June 23, 1919, the chairman, the Right Honourable A.L. Sifton, PC, KC, was from a politically powerful Ottawa family and was one of two Canadians who signed the Treaty of Versailles. The other members of the Air Board were O.M. Biggar, KC (vice-chairman and judge advocate general); the Honourable S.C. Mewburn, CMG (the minister of the militia); the Honourable C.C. Ballantyne (the minister of the naval service); Dr. R.M. Coulter (the postmaster general); J.A. Wilson (the assistant deputy minister for the Department of Naval Services); and E.S. Busby (chief inspector for customs and inland revenue). Unlike the appointees to the TSB today, no one on the Air Board knew anything about aviation or safety (who at that time did?) or had served in the First World War. But their government connections more than made up for these deficiencies.

The board was also mandated to undertake “technical research for the development of aeronautics and of co-operating for that purpose with other institutions.” For these duties the government was prepared. Prime Minister Borden had set up the National Research Council (NRC) in 1916, which now would study aerodynamics and aviation safety. Other government facilities were also pleased to provide services for the new mode of transport. Weather information for air navigation was to be collated and distributed by the Dominion Meteorological Service; its director, Sir Frederick Stupart, even had temperature, pressure, and humidity measured by Air Board aircraft at various heights from air stations across the country. The Government Radio Telegraph Service was put in charge of wireless qualifications for pilots and the issuing of radio licences. Similar arrangements were made with the Department of Marine and Fisheries for navigators’ certificates for pilots.

On June 15, even as the Air Board was organizing itself, two former RFC officers, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, flew across the Atlantic Ocean in a war-surplus Vicker Vimy bomber, foreshadowing the advent of transatlantic airliners and bombers.[9]

The Air Board first met on June 25, at which time, after consultation with the Civil Service Commission, the board’s mandate was divided into three sections, headed by Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Leckie, DSO, DSC, DFC (superintendent of flying operations of the Government Civil Air Operations Branch); Lieutenant-Colonel James Stanley Scott, MC, AFC (superintendent of the Certificate Branch — the licensing of aviation personnel, aircraft, and air harbours on land and water); and Major A.M. Shook, DSO (administrator of the internal office organization). This time, at this level, the government ensured that all senior personnel were qualified pilots and war heroes. Both Shook and Scott had been decorated, and Leckie, a future air marshal of the RCAF, had shot down two Zeppelins while serving in the RNAS.

In 1919 there were two reported aircraft accidents in Canada, but the only one to be recorded by the Air Board involved a pair of veterans. Flying a Thomas LFW aircraft on July 19, Lieutenant S.P. Kerr crashed at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. He injured himself but killed his passengers, Lieutenant W.R. Cross and his own wife, Mrs. S.P. Kerr. The cause of the accident was recorded as “stalling close to the ground after engine failure,” but there is no record of a court of inquiry, nor were Air Board personnel sent to the site. Since the Thomas-Morse Aircraft Corporation of New York only made two-seater training aircraft, how Kerr packed two passengers into the second cockpit wasn’t commented on. Then, as now, the human factor remains the largest single cause of aircraft accidents.

A preliminary survey was begun by the Air Board that November to work out what public services could more efficiently and economically be performed by aircraft than by existing methods. Forestry, treaty flights, and photography/mapping were agreed upon, and on January 2, 1920, former RFC/RAF officers recruited for the Air Board were assembled in Ottawa. Regulations were published in the Canada Gazette on January 17, 1920, and made available at the same time, conveniently for aircraft operators, was a book containing not only the regulations but also the Air Board Act, the Convention Relating to International Air Navigation, and the forms to use them. The process of keeping records of every plane crash in the country had begun. Their causes were to be investigated by a court of inquiry, and recommendations were to be made in order to avoid future such accidents.

The formal investigation of all aircraft accidents, military and civilian, in Canada was assumed by the Canadian Air Force at its formation in February 1920. When notified by telegram of an air accident, a board of inquiry was convened by the local senior flying officer to investigate the cause and report on it. The findings of the boards of inquiry were forwarded to Air Force Headquarters (AFHQ), which performed a statistical and reporting function only. No recommendations were made concerning what could be done to prevent future such accidents. All aircraft now had to be certified as airworthy, with journey and aircraft logbooks kept up-to-date. As a signal that the day of the pre-war amateur aviator had ended, all pilots’ licences were to be awarded by the Certificate Branch of the Air Board — only after study and testing. The caveat was that the licences were only awarded on the condition that the holder would serve in the CAF, if called upon.

When the first pilots’ licences were awarded in 1920 after study and testing, Billy Bishop (left) and William Barker (right) refused to do either. Put in an embarrassing position, the Air Board quietly issued commercial pilots’ licences without tests to both air aces. Library and Archives Canada.

This last restriction was guaranteed to cause friction between the Air Board and fighter aces such as Billy Bishop and William Barker. Both men felt they had served their time in the RFC with distinction. That they now also had to prove themselves to be competent pilots to examiners who, in their minds, had probably spent the war “flying desks” at home was humiliating.[10] To Bishop and Barker, Scott typified all that was wrong with the Air Board and its pedagogic regulations. Scott had only been at the front for four months before being invalided to Canada, where he was posted to Camp Borden as staff officer in charge of training. What could he possibly teach two icons about flying? Besides, a chap hadn’t needed regulations on the front to fight the Germans!

On January 24, 1920, James Stanley Scott, now the controller of civil aviation (CCA), set an example for other veterans and issued himself the first private pilot’s licence. The first air engineer’s licence was issued to Robert McCombie on April 20, 1920. On the same day a Curtiss JN-4 (G-CAAA), belonging to the Aerial Service Company in Regina, was the first civil aircraft to be registered. The first commercial pilot’s licence was earned by Reginald Groome on July 31, 1920. Eileen Vollick was the first Canadian woman to earn a private pilot’s licence (March 13, 1928) and also the first Canadian female to parachute from an aircraft — a JN-4.[11] Mrs. J.M. Miller was the first Canadian woman to earn a commercial licence (February 5, 1930). In Canada, by 1921 there were 171 licensed pilots and 109 registered aircraft.

It was another matter in the United States, where several states had been issuing their own pilots’ licences for years, just as they did automobile operators’ ones. These became invalid when the Department of Commerce’s Aeronautics Branch began pilot certification and issued its first pilot’s licence on April 6, 1927. Orville Wright, who was no longer an active flyer, was asked if he would accept “Licence No. 1” but declined the honour.[12] Three months later the Aeronautics Branch issued the first federal aircraft mechanic licence. As important for safety was a nationwide system of aircraft certification. The branch had already issued the first airworthiness-type certificate on March 29, 1927, to a Buhl Airster CA-3 biplane.

The first court of inquiry into an air crash wasn’t long in coming. On August 18, 1920, Hibbert B. Brenton died when his Boeing flying boat flipped over into the water in Vancouver’s English Bay. An experienced pilot who had flown in the RNAS during the First World War, Brenton had been attempting to qualify for his commercial licence. A day earlier he had made a test flight before Major Clarence MacLaurin, the Air Station superintendent in Vancouver.

Although it was a hazy evening — there was a mist on the water — Brenton decided to fly. At about 6:30 p.m. he taxied the Boeing out of False Creek, took off, and circled English Bay before landing. He repeated this at 7:00 p.m., climbing to a height of 1,000 feet, and attempted to land in the same spot. This time eyewitnesses saw the aircraft start into a steep descent and turn into a half loop. Two explosions were heard, and witnesses saw smoke flow out of the engine. Brenton was seen falling out of the cockpit, while the Boeing looped down and hit the water with a splash.

The newspapers estimated that the accident was seen by an audience of 5,000 locals. The tug Vancouver was towing logs in the bay. Spying the crash, the captain of the tug cut his logs loose and headed for the floating wreckage. Other boats followed, and men dived into the water around the half-submerged aircraft to search for the pilot’s body. What remained of the Boeing was pulled ashore by the Vancouver and left at Cardero Street while the search for Brenton continued into the night.

The first court of inquiry into an air crash was held in 1920 and discovered that the pilot was killed when his flying boat overturned because his glove was caught in the control cables. Vancouver Archives.

Asked by reporters what caused the crash, Major MacLaurin quite correctly didn’t venture an opinion except to say that Brenton was a good pilot. Then he telegraphed the Air Board in Ottawa to set up a court of inquiry. Both aircraft owners, Aircraft Manufacturers Ltd. and the Hoffar Motor Boat Company (the company that had just serviced the Boeing), told the press the crash wasn’t the result of a mechanical problem. The locals were aware that this was the boat company’s second unfortunate venture into aviation. On September 4, 1918, its H-2 hydroplane built for the Department of Lands and Forests had crashed into a house on Vancouver’s Bute Street.

Assembled in Vancouver on August 30, the court was composed of three air force officers: Major A.M. Lester, Squadron Commander C.M. Cudmore, and Lieutenant W. Templeton. Six witnesses were called to give evidence. Two were the policeman who had seen the crash and one was the aviator Captain Ernest C. Hoy, DFC, who spoke on behalf of the aircraft’s owners and J.B. Hoffar.[13]

No minutes of the inquiry survive, and if the design and manufacture of the rescued flying boat and its engine were examined, there is no record of it. Why did Brenton choose to fly in the increasing gloom of dusk when reference to the water would have been difficult to estimate? What were the two explosions heard from the Hall-Scott engine? The definitive conclusion of the cause of the crash, however, had been arrived at long before. After the aircraft was pulled ashore on August 18, an examination of it had revealed that one of the pilot’s gloves had jammed the pulleys between the passenger seats that carried the elevator controls.

What occurred that evening foreshadowed Major MacLaurin’s own death. Two years later he also drowned when the HS-2L seaplane he was flying plunged into shallow water on the Point Grey shore of English Bay. Witnesses saw the aircraft struggle to gain height after the engine failed. The flying boat ran into the beach and overturned, trapping MacLaurin under it.

The Roaring Twenties were defined by flappers, flivvers, silent movies, and barnstormers. On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, unemployed pilots (such as Charles Lindbergh, Alan Cobham, and Hermann Göring) in clapped-out, war-surplus aircraft worked their way across what was still a rural world, giving thousands their first sight of a flying machine — and sometimes their first flight in one. At the same time the Canadian Air Force did what it could to publicize its existence by accomplishing the first trans-Canada flight from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia, between October 7 and 17, 1920. The Air Board aircraft were being slowly worked to death on forestry patrol, photographing/mapping the country, and serving as government transport, with their pilots constantly wary of the wood shrinkage in the main spars of their wartime aircraft.

Unlike the British government, when Ottawa codified a civil air policy, it didn’t create a civil air ministry to govern it but gave the responsibility to the minister of militia. On May 23, 1920, in one of his last acts as prime minister, Borden approved a budget of $1.6 million for the continued operation of the Air Board before handing over the reins to his successor, Arthur Meighen. Opposition members, led by Meighen’s university colleague, William Lyon Mackenzie King, were loud in their criticism of this action, saying it was a waste of funds. Aviation had little practical value, they said, and the government didn’t fund race-car drivers, acrobats, and lion tamers, all of whom were in safer professions, so why should it extend this courtesy to aviators?

Aviation author Jonathan F. Vance points out: “However, it was one thing to create a regulatory regime, it was a quite another thing to convince the public that it was safe to fly.”[14] What the public knew and revelled in were the barnstormers: roving airmen who came to isolated towns to put on air shows for a couple of days, then moved on before air force officers could catch up and enforce the Air Regulations. What killed the barnstormer were clapped-out aircraft, foolhardiness, greedy carnival promoters, cow pastures used as landing fields … and running out of luck. But as a survivor of the era remarked: “The most dangerous thing about flying was starving to death.” Air Board files record that deaths at air shows were either because the “pilot failed to recover from a stall too close to the ground” or “the machine went into a spinning dive when the control column was jammed” or “he was killed when struck by the propeller when attempting to start the engine.”

With 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.