Old Missoula

Aviation Gets Early Start in Area

The first “flying machine” to fly into Missoula was built and piloted by Walter Beck in September 1913.

The flight almost ended in disaster when the ship hit the preliminary squall of a thunderstorm as it emerged from Hell Gate Canyon en route to Missoula. The flight occurred only a few years after the Wright Brothers had demonstrated the success of their heavier-than-air flying machine.

In 1910 great progress in aviation was being made in the United States and in Europe. About a year later Beck was making local aviation history in what people called his “crate.”

Flight Attempt

Two thousand persons gathered one Sunday in a field near Ft. Missoula to view the first public attempt at flight in Missoula. Only two weeks before, Eugene Ely, a contemporary of the great Beechey, had been in Missoula and had managed to soar 500 feet into the air.

Col. Kenyon’s soldiers from Ft. Missoula served as gatekeepers. Paid gate receipts that day were between $700 and $800. Beck’s plane was described as having a motor at the rear end with the driver out in front of everything holding a little wheel and bracing his feet against a tiny rail. Behind him was a propeller, whirring much too close to the controls in the opinion of the spectators.

Wind Takes a Hand

Beck ran his plane down the field until a sudden puff of wind hit the machine and lifted it off the ground. But something was wrong. The tail wind was too strong and his heavier-than-air machine began to settle with the motor running wide open. Before him loomed telephone wires. Spectators scampered. Beck hit the wires. Within seconds the wires were torn from the poles and Beck and his flying machine settled to the ground.

Beck was bound to the seat by a wire which had fortunately fallen across his chest. The propeller, still spinning, fanned a woman’s hat out into the field.

After his flying fiasco in Missoula, Beck took his plane to other points in Montana, Idaho and Washington. Some time later a new plane was built and it was the one used in the successful flight into the Garden City. Shortly after the United States entered World War I, Missoula’s pioneer pilot went to California where he served as a civilian instructor for army flyers. Afterward he leased a field at San Diego for two years and taught flying.

Beck’s first ship had a 32-horsepower engine and a 23-foot wingspread. Beck never landed with the motor running in the first 20 or 25 times that he went up. He would fly as long as it would go and then find some place to land.

In those days Beck had to dismantle his ship and send it by express to cities to make flights. During 1911 he made a number of exhibition flights in the Northwest. On some of the flights in Missoula, he would have to dismantle the ship to bring it back to the takeoff point after a landing.

Builds Second Plane

Piano wire was used for the trusses on the ship and the lumber was purchased in Missoula, along with everything but the wheels and a few parts. During the winter of 1911 and 1912 Beck built his second airplane. It was a 52-horsepower with four cylinders. That was the airplane which he used on his flight from Bonner to Missoula through Hell Gate Canyon in 1913.

One of the first airplanes owned in Missoula was an old Standard bought by Lonnie Brennan after the “flying bug” had bitten him following a trip to Spokane with a pilot who stopped in Missoula. Brennan bought the old plane in Spokane and formed a company with Arthur W. Stephenson. Through the agreement Brennan owned the plane, and half the company’s profits were to go to Stephenson providing he taught Brennan to fly.

Light Inadequate

In 1922 Stephenson attempted to land the ship by the dim glow of car lights in Missoula. The light proved inadequate. The plane crashed into the Bitter Root power line, cutting off light in the valley for 12 hours. No one was injured, but it was necessary for Brennan to buy another plane. He did this only to crack up in Greenacres on his third solo flight.

Brennan lost another plane when he crashed at Hamilton in 1925. His next plane, purchased from Jack Lynch of Butte, was the ship used by Charles Lindbergh and Lynch in their barnstorming tours. It was the same plane which flew films of the Dempsey-Gibbons fight at Shelby to Chicago. A. E. Barnett, who later became an associate of Bob Johnson of Johnson’s Flying Service, was the pilot.

An early day Missoula flyer, Dominick de Fiore, self-styled the “Flying Wop,” was killed while flying a commercial job in California.