Tag Archive for 'balloon'

Hiding in Plane Sight

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on October 28, 2009 in Aviation, History and Stories.
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At this time of year when apparitions and fanciful creatures stroll sidewalks in search of treats, it’s a good time to remember that not all aircraft are what they seem.

In World War One, observation balloons were the bane of the battlefield.  Under their prying eyes, it was hard to surprise someone on the other side of the trenches with your plans when they saw your troops massing before an attack.  So balloons were a prime target for fighter aircraft.  But balloons were heavily guarded by anti-aircraft defenses.  In some cases the balloons themselves were a trap, the basket where observers would stand were filled instead with explosives and dummies, and wired to explode with such intensity that the attacking aircraft would be brought down, or at least to think twice before pressing home an attack on another balloon.

A Curtiss P-40 Warhawk decoy under construction at a base somewhere in China Burma India theater. This detailed decoy has been constructed of wood; two men can be seen working on the left side of the fuselage. SI 90-13683, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives.

During World War Two, dummy aircraft were created to mislead the enemy.  For the Flying Tigers in China, their small numbers stretched thin by the distances they needed to cover, deceiving the Japanese as to their strength and operating locations was an important consideration.  Crews working at an airfield using the materials they found handy, built dummy wood-framed Curtiss P-40s.  These faux fighters could not move, much less fly, but in size and shape, covered in fabric and painted the right colors, would appear to be more of the shark-mouthed marauders parked about an airstrip waiting to respond to a Japanese attack.

Messerschmitt Bf 109 decoy sitting on the ground. SI A-50270, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives.

The airfields of Europe also resorted to military mimicry; German operated forward airstrips used dummy Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Junkers Ju 87 Stukas to inflate their apparent numbers during the build up to the Battle of Britain.  But if any scouts, spies or reconnaissance aircraft happened to catch sight of the fakes while under construction, the false flyers were revealed as phonies.  An apocryphal story is told of an airfield of wooden Messerschmitts being bombed by the Royal Air Force, using wooden bombs.  But then such a mission would still be dangerous in the face of anti-aircraft fire, and it would also tip the hand that the ruse had been spoilt.

Several German airmen quickly work at assembling a Junkers Ju 87 Stuka decoy from pre-finished components. NASM 00058957, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives.

Dummies today are more difficult to pull off, many sensors are no longer just optical, but can detect heat from engines, or dissimilar materials and paints.  So the fakes must incorporate more, to the point that in some cases it is no longer economically viable to do such a ruse.

Brian Nicklas is a museum specialist, aeronautics in the National Air and Space Museum’s Archives Division.

Runaway Balloons

Published by Tom Crouch on October 21, 2009 in Aviation, History and Stories.
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The afternoon of October 15, 2009 was one of those rare moments when Americans from coast-to-coast were riveted to their television sets by a news story unfolding in real time.  Six year old Falcon Heene was reported to be trapped aboard a helium balloon floating across the Colorado landscape at 7000 feet. The image on the screen was surreal, a strange craft looking like a cross between a Mylar grocery store balloon and a flying saucer, with a small circular structure on the bottom that appeared to be just large enough to house a small child. When the balloon came naturally to earth after a fifty mile flight, however, the boy was not aboard. Had he fallen to his death somewhere along the way? What appeared to be a tragedy in the making came to a happy ending when young Falcon was found hiding in a box where he had hidden to avoid the consequences of having accidently released his father’s experimental balloon. Ultimately, however, matters grew even more complex when local authorities launched an investigation to determine if the entire thing had been a hoax staged by the family.

I was one of very few television viewers who knew that runaway balloons, even runaway balloons with children on board, were big news a century and a half ago. Balloonist Timothy Winchester disappeared in 1855 during an attempt to fly across Lake Erie. Ira Thurston met his end over the same body of water on the afternoon of August 16, 1858 when he was accidently carried aloft by a balloon he was trying to deflate. Even the most experienced aeronauts occasionally fell victim to runaway balloons. Washington Donaldson vanished while attempting to fly across Lake Michigan in 1875. Four years later, seventy-one year old John Wise, who had completed 463 ascents since he first took to the air in 1835, disappeared while attempting the same feat.

Few of those tragedies captured public interest like the accidental aerial voyage of eight year old Martha Ann Harvey and her three year old brother David. The story begins with balloonist Samuel Wilson, who ascended from Centralia, Illinois on the morning of October 23, 1858 and flew twenty miles to a landing in the top of a tree owned by farmer Benjamin Harvey. The farmer and his neighbors assisted Wilson in extricating his balloon, after which Harvey climbed into the basket, hoping to make a tethered ascent.  When he proved too heavy, he placed his three children in the car. The father instructed his oldest daughter to climb out when the balloon still refused to rise, leaving the two youngest children in the basket alone.

Startled to find the balloon rising at last, the inexperienced ground crew lost their grip on the tether line. A dangling grappling hook tore through a rail fence as the craft climbed out of the farmyard. The distraught parents stood helplessly by as Martha’s cries of “Pull me down father!” grew ever fainter. Horsemen immediately set out to alert the countryside, while a party of men and boys tried unsuccessfully to follow the drifting balloon.

The news created a sensation in Centralia. The aeronaut assured everyone who would listen that the balloon would return to earth of its own accord within an hour or two, probably within thirty miles of the take off point. His words were of little comfort, however, as night fell with the children still somewhere aloft.

At 3 o’clock the following morning, Mr. Ignatio Atchison stepped out on his porch to observe Donati’s Comet.  Instead, he saw “an immense spectre rising from the top of a tree twenty yards away.” Approaching closer, he heard a faint voice: “Come here and let us down. We are almost frozen.” The lost had been found.

News of the rescue was announced in area churches that Sunday to “ecstasies of joy.”   The children returned home the next day to be greeted by the discharge of cannon “and a general jubilee.” William Matthews, the local daguerreotype artist, captured an image of the young hero and heroine in their Sunday best. An engraved copy of the photo appeared in the illustrated newspapers of the era, spreading the story of the balloon adventure of the Harvey children across the nation. As in the case of Falcon Heene, all’s well that ends well.

Tom Crouch is Senior Curator for Aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum.

On This Spot …

Published by Tom Crouch on March 30, 2009 in Aviation, Hidden Treasures and History.
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The millions of visitors who pass through the doors of the National Air and Space Museum each year come to see the real thing, the actual air and space craft that shaped history – from the world’s first airplane to the back-up hardware for the latest robot spacecraft on its way to explore another world. Few if any of our visitors, however, realize that aerospace history was made on the site of the National Air and Space Museum one hundred and forty eight years ago.

On June 16, 1861, the Civil War had been underway for just two months. The first major battle of the war, which would take place near a quiet stream called Bull Run, 30 miles southwest of Washington, was still a little over a month away. At the time, the Columbia Armory stood where the National Air and Space Museum is now located, east of 7th street, at the extreme southeastern tip of the 52 acre plot then known as the Smithsonian Grounds.

The neighborhood was far from being the tourist friendly area of today. The odiferous City Canal carried Washington’s sewage and waste water along the northern edge of the Mall and into the Potomac. Visitors were warned to beware of thieves while out for an evening stroll along the trails that wound through the trees and shrubs covering the marshy Smithsonian Grounds. For over two decades Mary Ann Hall had operated one of Washington’s best known houses of prostitution just one block to the east. Until the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia in 1850, Robey’s notorious slave pen stood one block west of the Armory site, at the corner of 8th and B Street (now Independence Avenue).

Built in 1856, the Columbia Armory housed the District of Columbia’s store of small arms and other military equipment. The Washington Gas Light Company generating plant was immediately east of the Armory, along with a large domed gasometer, or storage tank for the coal gas produced by the plant. It was the combination of the available work space at the Armory and city gas next door that led Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry to instruct Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe to inflate his balloon on this site.

Thaddeus Lowe

Thaddeus Lowe

A New Hampshire man, Lowe (1832-1913), had emerged as one of the nation’s best-known aerial showmen since his first flight in 1857. He made headlines with a giant balloon exhibited in both New York and Philadelphia, with which he hoped to fly the Atlantic. When that plan fell through, and on the advice of Joseph Henry, his scientific advisor, Lowe made a long flight from Cincinnati to Unionville, SC aboard the balloon Enterprise, on April 19, 1861.  Landing only a week after the firing on Fort Sumter, the aeronaut was taken into custody by newly minted Confederates, and was released only after locals recognized his face from accounts of his transatlantic plans published in the illustrated national newspapers of the day. 

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