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For thousands of years mankind has watched in envy as creatures of the air soared effortlessly and beautifully while humans were relegated to the hard earth.
A dream smoldered, with the embers of desire to be free as a butterfly, a bird or a bat finally ignited into flame.
There were balloon flights but they were limited by the winds, man had no control in which direction they could go in such conditions.
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Powered flight became a reality on Dec. 17, 1903, when Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully piloted their "Flyer" into the air, lifted aloft by propellors on a sandy beach in North Carolina.
It was only natural that the territory of Arizona would become an area where steps in aviation would take place. An early Arizona air pioneer commented "Arizona has 97 percent perfect flying weather."
In 1908, four years before Arizona became a state and five years after the Wright brothers' success, the first airplane landed at Douglas. Not much is known about the flight except it happened.
A year later, the War Department notified officials at Fort Huachuca that it was considering establishing an "aviatory" on the post. Unfortunately no one knew what an aviatory was. The only thing that post officials were told was to assign 10 soldiers from each of the companies with the 18th Infantry for special training.
The fort became the home for 10 of the Wright brothers' biplanes as part of a weather and navigation station to be used by the Signal Corps.
The planes were supposed to arrive in 1910, but did not. No one knows why the program, which would have been the first military aviation organization in Arizona, was called off.
There were a number of events in 1910 involving aviation in Arizona, including two air shows -- one in Phoenix and the other in Tucson.
A Phoenix inventor, O.S. Emblem, designed an aircraft, built it in six weeks and flew it at the Territorial Fair with a top speed of 40 mph.
In Tucson, Charles K. "Bird-man" Hamilton flew into the city during a cross-country flight and demonstrated his ability as a pilot.
Cochise County had a short claim to fame in 1911 when an aviator from Douglas was noted in one of the Tucson's newspaper with the headline of "Soaring over Sulphur Springs Valley doing a 50 mile per hour gait."
But the big event that had an Arizona connection was the 1911 cross-country event with the purse put up by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. C.P. Rogers flying the Vin Fizz, named after a soda, flew from the East Coast to the West Coast stopped in Tucson, where he was suppose to meet a person flying west to east. The other aviator never showed up in Tucson. Hearst refused to pay Rogers claiming the 49 days it took him to complete the cross-country flight was too log.
By 1916, Gen. Jon Blackjack Perishing used some private airstrips around Tucson as bases to house his aero squadron during the troubles with Pancho Villa.
Two events in 1927 had international flavors.
One was Italian Commander Francesco Marquis de Pinedo, who was on a four-continent trip in a seaplane, landed at Roosevelt Lake near Phoenix.
The seaplane burned while at the lake, and the Italian departed Arizona by train vowing "never to come west of the Mississippi River again."
Charles Lindbergh, the first aviator to fly non-stop across the Atlantic to Europe, came to Tucson in 1927. His trip drew people from all over the state.
Lindbergh was followed by Jimmy Doolittle, who would go on to make history in World War II by leading an attack of B-25s flown off an Navy carrier in the first bombing attack on the Japanese home islands in 1942.
The first official passenger plane to arrive at the Tucson airport was a Fokker universal monoplane, described in newspaper accounts as "a big six-passenger sky pullman."
Tucson was known as a stop over for passenger planes heading west to Los Angeles. Today, a flight from Tucson to Los Angeles is about an hour, but in 1928 it was almost six hours.
The Great Depression took a toll on aviation in Arizona, but under the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt a number of public work projects lifted the nation up economically. In 1933, the president's wife, Eleanor, dedicated the Douglas International Airport.
During World War II, Arizona became an important military aviation training area. And recently, ground was broken last week for an expansion at Fort Huachuca's Army UAV Training Center, which will make it the largest training facility in the world for pilotless planes.
SOURCES: Arizona Historical Museum and "Fort Huachuca The Story of a Frontier Post" by Cornelius C. Smith Jr.
Tony P wrote on Nov 25, 2008 12:24 AM: