Mare Island Navy Yard, with instructions not to spend over $500 on the project. The letter mentioned that the Birmingham’s platform had cost only $288, but it did not say the money had been put up by John Barry Ryan, and not the Navy!
In due course Rear Admiral Edward Barry, commanding the Pacific Fleet, named the armored cruiser Pennsylvania for Ely’s second demonstration flight. This vessel had nearly four times the tonnage and was a hundred feet longer than the Birmingham. Late in December 1910, at the Los Angeles air show, the Admiral’s liaison officer and Ely agreed to set the date sometime during the San Francisco air meet. Ely wanted to pick the weather and test his gear. He did not want to worry as he had in Norfolk.
Gene and Mabel Ely registered at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on the evening of 4 January 1911. The Pennsylvania had moved up to Mare Island that morning. Her skipper, Captain Charles F. (“Frog”) Pond, a classmate and friend of Chambers, was a square-faced little man with a shaggy gray mustache and laughing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Naval Constructor Gatewood, from the Navy Yard, supervised the building of a platform above the quarter-deck. It was 37 feet longer and 7 feet wider than the Birmingham’s platform, and it had a 14-foot apron drooping over the ship’s stern. Forward of this overhang, the planking sloped gently up over the after gun turret to the bridge deck at the base of the mainmast. There were two low canvas barriers just aft of a two-inch timber backstop. Said Gatewood:
“We’ll hang a canvas screen from that searchlight platform to catch you if the sudden stop throws you.”
Ely announced stiffly that he intended not to crash, but to land. However, the thick steel mast, just forward of the platform, flanked by two tall boat cranes, looked terribly solid. He did a lot of thinking on the ferry ride back to the city. He needed something on that platform to prevent a possible overshoot. The arrangement that he devised was essentially that used on the carriers of a much later day. Controversy still exists as to the source of the idea.
3, 4, 5, 6. White lines, with 50-pound sandbags secured at each end, Were stretched at 3-foot intervals to prevent the plane from crashing into the mainmast at the end of the platform. Hooks were secured underneath the plane to catch on the lines, which were raised several inches above the platform by two longitudinal wooden rails. Tarpaulins placed on either side were to catch Ely if the craft skidded off the runway. His plane passed over ten of the arresting lines before it eased down and landed lightly on the platform, and the hooks began engaging the ropes. After a 30-foot run, the drag of the sandbags stopped the 1,000-pound aeroplane within 50 feet of the end of the platform.
Curtiss, in his Aviation Book, noted that he went to Mare Island with Ely and told the Navy Yard people “just what would be required . . . across the runway we stretched ropes every few feet with a sandbag at each end.”
Some years later, Hugh Robinson, a Curtiss man who had been present at the San Francisco meet, related how he had once worked in a circus where a pretty girl rode a car down a steep track, looped the loop, then stopped herself by plowing into sawdust heaped on the track. Robinson hated to see her covered with sawdust at every show. So he rigged hooks on the car to pick up weighted lines which would stop the car clean. Robinson claimed that at San Francisco he had suggested the same system to Eugene Ely.
In an interview more than 40 years later, Rear Admiral R. F. Zogbaum, Jr., who had been a young officer aboard the Pennsylvania in 1911, remembered that he had proposed the lines and 50-pound sandbags. Ely had told him that a blacksmith at the field could make him a hook.
But Mabel Ely claimed that they were all wrong. Gene had used this system to stop his racing cars long before he ever saw an aeroplane.
These claims could all have substance. Quite probably a lot of people took part in discussions regarding arresting gear while Ely was trying out ideas on the aviation field at Tanforan. He tied a weight to each end of a rope, stretched it across two-by-fours and taxied over it. A blacksmith’s hook usually skipped over the rope and, if it caught, the plane swerved alarmingly. By trial and error he found that, if he caught the rope dead center, carefully matched weights would slow him in a straight line.
After looking at the Pennsylvania’s mast, Ely knew he had to be right the first time. On the ship he could not go round again if the hook failed to catch. That worried him until he got three pairs of spring-loaded, racing-car hooks from a San Francisco friend and lined them up in tandem on a slat under his landing gear. With that arrangement he picked up the line on every run.
Glenn Curtiss did not like the plan. Ely was confident. For months he had been making short takeoffs and precision landings. He was certain of his skill. He had a new and heavier plane which let him land slower than with the old one. When he put aluminum floats under the wings he felt ready for anything, even if the engine should quit over the water.
So Ely went back to Mare Island and told of his field tests. He wanted 50-pound bags at 3-foot intervals. Gatewood had spent the Navy’s $500 on timber, so Captain Pond and Ely used their own money for sandbags, the necessary line, and guard rails. Gene told how the lines sometimes slewed the plane out of control and Pond promised to rig heavy awnings beside the platform where it was narrower than the ship. “If you skid too far,” he said, “they’ll keep you from being skewered on one of those stanchions.”
Chambers had proposed that during the landing the ship should steam into the wind. Pond did not think the deep water area of the bay big enough. Ely thought the open sea, outside the Golden Gate, too far from Tanforan. He was more afraid of the ocean than of any landing. He was sure he could land aboard with the ship standing still. So it was agreed that the ship would be anchored. They all hoped it would swing into the wind at the right time.
The next morning the ship left the Navy Yard in a fog so thick she rammed a channel buoy before anchoring with the Fleet off the Ferry Building. That night the weather turned bad and for a week the ship logged rain in almost every watch. So they had to wait for better weather.
Curtiss, Ellyson, and Ely visited the ship one stormy day. As they left, reporters asked Glenn Curtiss for his opinion. “This is the first time an aviator has attempted to land on a battleship,” he answered. “Ely will alight on the Pennsylvania. I’m willing to guarantee that much. The only question is, can he do it without damaging his machine?”
No one had yet been killed in a Curtiss machine. Glenn wanted to keep it that way. Until he left town, he kept on urging Ely to give up the stunt. Bad weather automatically extended San Francisco’s air meet because its promoters had signed the pilots for ten flying days. Curtiss was bored. Even though exhibition flying was almost his only source of income, he did not like it. Since he did not drink and gamble like his daredevils, this waiting for exhibition weather was even duller. He wanted to work on his hydro down in San Diego. Furthermore, he knew he could not stop Ely, and he did not want to be there if he failed. So he left town.
On the seventeenth, the weather improved and Ely announced that he would land on the Pennsylvania at 1100 the following morning. Eleven o’clock had been picked so as to give any morning fog time to burn off and because the flood tide would then head the ship into the usual light west wind from the Golden Gate.
This forecast was only partially accurate. The next morning, the ships, anchored south of Goat Island (now known as Yerba Buena), rode to the flood tide but, by 1100, a light wind out of the east
