Early days of aviation were risky ventures
By Terri Jo Ryan Special to the Tribune-Herald
Rich Field, Waco’s World War I U.S. Army air base, had a stellar safety record during the nearly two years it operated in northwest Waco.
According to the officer in charge of flying, First Lt. Maurice A. Sharp, 399 cadets passed their tests between 1917 and 1919 to become Army aviators, with eight fatal accidents in the course of training.
“Rich Field has averaged only one fatality for each 4,000 hours of flying and 240,000 miles traveled,” the camp’s public relations team chirped in the final issue of The Rich Field Flyer, the base newsletter.
Of the 681 men who died while flying for the U.S. Air Service (as the Army’s air corps was known in 1917), only one-quarter lost their lives during combat. The rest were accidents, mostly in flight school. For every four men who arrived in France to fly for Uncle Sam, one of their colleagues had not survived his schooling.
Compare this to the record of the Italians, who reported only one survivor of flight school for every five trainees who started.
According to British airmen, their losses were so common that they stopped bothering to look up when they heard a Sopwith Camel go into a spin — just taking it for granted that they’d lost another classmate.
The dangerous nature of then-primitive flight led the U.S. Congress to decree in 1914 that U.S. Army aviators had to be unmarried lieutenants under the age of 30. Daredevil antics were for the young, hale and unattached.
Sources: The Texas Collection at Baylor University; The First Air War by Lee Kennett (1999); Researching World War I, by Robin D. S. Higham, Dennis E. Showalter (2003).
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