Flight Club

I’m sixty-five years old. For about sixty of them, I’ve been an airplane geek. I’m not as hard-core as some, but I’m geek enough to know the difference between a turbojet and a turbofan, a Beaver and an Otter. But recently I heard a story I’d never heard before.

It took place on a late winter day in 1908, when a rickety flying machine lifted off a frozen lake near Hammondsport, New York, and a cluster of curiosity seekers looked on. At the controls was a twenty-five-year-old named Frederick Walker Baldwin — nicknamed Casey, after a popular baseball song. The machine flew for ninety-seven metres before a tail strut buckled, abruptly forcing it down onto the ice. Baldwin was unhurt.

Ring a bell? Probably not. Yet, by rights, that ninety-seven-metre stretch ranks as one of the most significant in the history of aviation. Baldwin’s short turn over Keuka Lake was the first public flight of a powered heavier-than-air machine in the United States. Even at less...