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    "headline": "Eugene Ely flew a Curtiss biplane off USS Birmingham on November 14, 1910, the first takeoff from a ship",
    "description": "Eugene Ely made the first airplane takeoff from a ship on November 14, 1910, flying off a platform on USS Birmingham in Virginia.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-14T05:28:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Eugene Ely, Glenn Curtiss, US Navy, USS Birmingham",
    "articleBody": "The first airplane ever to take off from a ship nearly ended up in the sea. On November 14, 1910, civilian pilot Eugene Ely rolled a Curtiss pusher biplane down an 83-foot wooden ramp built over the bow of the light cruiser USS Birmingham at Hampton Roads, Virginia. The moment the plane cleared the edge it dropped, and its wheels touched the water before it climbed away. Water sprayed across his goggles, so Ely abandoned the plan to loop around the harbor to the Norfolk Navy Yard and came down on the nearest beach. Rough and unplanned, it was still the first launch of an aircraft from a ship. A car salesman who taught himself to fly Ely was 24 and had been flying for only a few months. Born in Williamsburg, Iowa, in 1886, he worked as a chauffeur, an auto racer and then a car salesman in Portland, Oregon. His boss bought an early Curtiss biplane but could not handle it, so Ely offered to try, sure that flying was no harder than driving. He wrecked it, paid for the remains, rebuilt it and learned on his own. By the summer of 1910 he was flying exhibitions for Curtiss. The Aero Club of America issued him pilot’s license No. 17 on October 5, 1910, just under six weeks before the Birmingham flight. Why the Navy wanted to watch That October, Ely and Curtiss sat down with Captain Washington Irving Chambers, whom the Navy secretary had tasked with judging whether aircraft had a military future at sea. Chambers set up two experiments. The platform on the Birmingham was paid for by John Barry Ryan of the U.S. Aeronautical Reserve, who put up $500 for its construction and offered another $500 as a prize for a flight from ship to shore. The second experiment came two months later. On January 18, 1911, Ely took off from a racetrack south of San Francisco and set the Curtiss down on a deck platform rigged on the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania, anchored in the bay. No pilot had landed on a ship before, and the hooks that snagged his plane were the first tailhook setup, the work of stunt flier Hugh Robinson. “It was easy enough,” Ely told a reporter. “I think the trick could be successfully turned nine times out of ten.” From a wooden ramp to the carrier age November 14, 1910: first takeoff from a ship, USS Birmingham, Hampton Roads. January 18, 1911: first landing on a ship, USS Pennsylvania, San Francisco Bay. October 19, 1911: Ely dies after an exhibition crash in Macon, Georgia, two days before his 25th birthday. February 16, 1933: Congress awards him the Distinguished Flying Cross posthumously. 1965: inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame. November 12, 2010: a Navy commander flies a homebuilt replica of Ely’s Curtiss at Naval Air Station Norfolk for the centennial. Ely’s two ship flights were just 65 days apart, and he lived only 274 more days after the landing. Both firsts were also made from stationary ships. The first takeoff from a moving ship and the first landing on one belonged to two other pilots, Charles Rumney Samson and Edwin Harris Dunning, years later. The Navy never hired him. There was no naval air arm to join yet, and Chambers only promised to “keep him in mind.” Asked about retiring, he was quoted as saying: “I guess I will be like the rest of them, keep at it until I am killed.” His Distinguished Flying Cross citation honors “extraordinary achievement as a pioneer civilian aviator.” The 83-foot ramp he used was a sliver of the decks that came later. For a sense of how dangerous carrier flying stayed, read how an F-14 Tomcat fell off USS John F. Kennedy in 1976 and set off a race with Soviet ships, or how the Tuskegee Airmen built their World War II escort record. November 14 is a busy date for American firsts; it is also the day in 1960 that Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz school in New Orleans. Today a granite marker in Newport News, Virginia, faces the water his wheels skimmed 116 years ago. Further reading Wikipedia: Eugene Burton Ely Image: US Navy (Naval History and Heritage Command photo NH 77545), Public domain via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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