Lincoln Beachey

Lincoln Beachey (March 3, 1887 – March 14, 1915) was a pioneer American aviator and barnstormer. He became famous and wealthy from flying exhibitions, staging aerial stunts, helping invent aerobatics, and setting aviation records.

He was known as The Man Who Owns the Sky, and sometimes the Master Birdman. Beachey was acknowledged even by his competitors as "The World's Greatest Aviator". He was "known by sight to hundreds of thousands and by name to the whole world".^{[citation needed]}

On March 3, 1887, Lincoln Beachey was born in San Francisco, and in 1903, first rode in a tethered balloon. In 1905, Lincoln and his older brother Hillery signed a contract with Thomas Scott Baldwin to fly his dirigible at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. On September 10, 1906, the Beachey brothers flew their dirigible around Washington, D.C., with Lincoln landing on the White House lawn, and then on the United States Capitol steps. Lincoln then participated in the 1910 Los Angeles International Air Meet at Dominguez Field. This led Lincoln to abandon dirigibles, and start his career with aeroplanes as a mechanic for Glenn Curtiss.

At the 1911 Los Angeles airshow, Beachey made the first successful nose-diving spin recovery, and deadstick landing. No previous pilot had survived a "deadly spiral." Lincoln then won the shortest take-off event at the Tanforan Aviation Meet.

Although Wilfred Parke is credited with developing "Parke's technique" to recover from a tailspin, Beachey is also cited as having discovered the maneuver. Climbing to 5,000 feet (1,500 m), he forced his plane into the spin and then turned the rudder in the direction of the spin, allowing him to level out. He repeated the maneuver eleven more times to confirm that it worked.

In June the organizers of the U.S.-Canadian International Carnival offered $4,000 to fly through the Niagara Gorge, and another $1,000 to fly under the Honeymoon Bridge. On June 27, 1911, Beachey flew his Curtiss D biplane before an estimated 150,000 spectators. Flying through the mist of Horseshoe Falls, then descending within 6 meters (20 feet) of the surface of the Niagara River, he flew his plane under the bridge, and down the length of the gorge.

At the 1911 Chicago International Aviation Meet, after coming in second in the fast climb event, Beachey entered a steep dive, and then flew alongside a locomotive, first on one side of the passenger cars, then on the other, before placing his wheels on top, hopping from one car to the next. Winning the altitude record, he had filled his tanks with fuel, climbing skyward until the fuel ran out after an hour and forty-eight minutes. After his engine quit, he glided in spirals to the ground over the next twelve minutes. The barograph aboard the plane showed he had reached a height of 11,642 feet (3,548 m), a world record for altitude.

In 1912, Beachey, Parmelee, and aviation pioneer Glenn Martin performed the first night flights in California with acetylene burners, fuses, and small noise making bombs dropped over Los Angeles. In 1913, Beachey took off inside the Machinery Palace on the Exposition grounds at the San Francisco World's Fair. He flew the plane at 60 miles per hour (97 km/h) and landed it, all inside the confines of the hall. His stunt speciality was the "dip-of-death", where he would take his plane up to 5,000 feet (1,500 m), and dive toward the ground at full speed with his hands outstretched. At the last moment he would level the plane and zoom down the raceway, with his hands off of the controls, gripping the control stick with his knees. In a jest aimed at Blanche Stuart Scott, another member of the Curtiss exhibition team, Beachey dressed up as a woman and pretended to be out of control in a mock terror to hundreds of thousands.