“When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash.”
By Randy Malamud
The first fatal airplane crash was piloted by Orville Wright (of all people!) in his eponymous Wright Model A. The cofounder of aviation survived but his passenger, Signal Corps Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, did not.
Demonstrating a military prototype of the Model A, Wright’s flight on September 17, 1908, carried a heavier load than ever before: the men’s combined weight was 320 pounds. Four minutes into the flight, as they circled Fort Myer, Virginia—adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, where Selfridge would be interred a few days later—one of the wooden propellers broke off. A new elongated design, it had never before been tested.
The propeller dislodged a wire bracing the rear vertical rudder, sending the plane into a dive from its altitude of 100 feet. It crashed nose-first into the ground, throwing both men forward into the tangle of wires connecting the biplane’s top and bottom wings. Biographer Fred Howard describes the original debris field:
The skids [undercarriage] collapsed, the wings turned up, the motor tore loose and struck the ground with a thud like a small earthquake. For a second or two the Flyer and its occupants were entirely concealed in a boiling cloud of dust. … Gradually the extent of the damage became visible. The Flyer’s wings were knocked out of shape, its skids smashed to kindling. The left propeller was intact but both ends of the right propeller were broken off. One of the broken pieces dangled by a shred of its fabric covering. Orville and Selfridge were pinned beneath the upper wing, their faces buried in the dust.
Wright was hospitalized for weeks: a fractured leg, broken ribs, and damaged hip caused him pain for the rest of his life. Although he continued flying after the crash, it was always physically uncomfortable.
Selfridge—like the Wright brothers, an airplane designer—hit one of the framework’s wooden uprights, fracturing his skull. He underwent surgery but died without regaining consciousness. He was not wearing protective headgear; had he been, he might have survived. It’s common protocol to identify and rectify safety lapses after a crash, to ensure the same problem doesn’t recur, a practice aviators adopted from the start. When the US Army began flying planes in 1909, soon after Selfridge’s death—the accident happened on a flight trial during the Wrights’ bid for the contract—pilots and passengers wore heavy head protectors resembling football helmets. The Wrights also modified the defective propeller after the crash: “The blades were redesigned and made heavier at that point and canvas was added down their concave sides,” writes Richard Stimson. “The tubes supporting the propeller axles were braced so that any vibration would not cause the propellers to reach the wires bracing the vertical rudder in the tail.”
But if such trial-and-error safety fixes were on point in the wake of that crash, one aspect was well below par: the victim’s final words. According to Wright, Selfridge’s last utterance was “Uh-oh”—an extremely understated ejaculation, perhaps reflecting the absence of a tradition in this trope. Today, final words have become a florid and fetishized feature of plane crashes, but Selfridge could not have known that he was supposed to expire on a more dramatic note, something along the lines of “That’s it, I’m dead.” (the pilot’s last words on Surinam Airways Flight 764, which ran out of gas, hit a tree and crashed during a foggy third landing attempt in 1989, killing 176 out of the 187 people aboard), or “United 173, Mayday! The engines are flaming out—We’re going down!” (the aircraft ran out of fuel while the crew was distracted with landing gear problems in 1978, causing 10 fatalities out of the 189 on board), or “Brace yourself. Ma, I love you!” (Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 collided in midair with a small Cessna in 1978, killing all 135 on that flight as well as both people in the other plane and seven more on the ground). Then again, as the Model A had only 100 feet to fall, perhaps there just wasn’t enough time for a grandiloquent farewell.
Media coverage of that ur-crash anticipated what would become the template for reporting on such disasters. The lead story in the next day’s New York Times began by describing the moments before the tragedy:
Selfridge Enjoyed It Keenly
As the aeroplane dashed off the rising track Lieut. Selfridge waved his hand gayly to a group of army officers and newspaper men and threw back some laughing remarks that were drowned in the whir of the propellers. As he swept around Selfridge evidently was enjoying himself thoroughly. When the machine sailed above the heads of the crowd at the head of the field it could be seen plainly that he and Wright were holding an animated conversation. Selfridge interrupted this for a moment to wave a greeting to his friends.
Irony, which is frequently the central premise of plane-crash journalism, flourishes in the genre’s inaugural example. Selfridge was having a “gayly” animated time up in the air—until he wasn’t.
Selfridge’s expertise with the precise mechanism that failed—another poignant irony—was an angle that current crash stories, too, would undoubtedly highlight:
It is a singular thing that Selfridge designed the propeller of the Baldwin airship [a dirigible produced that same year], which was considered a marvel for efficiency, and yet met his death by the breaking of a propeller.
“And yet”: the ironic reversal, the last thing in the world we would’ve expected. On some level (ground level!), every plane-crash narrative is written in the key of “and yet.” How interesting—but also, how inevitable—that the first news story about the first fatal plane crash presented all the tropes and tones, bits and bobs, that would comprise so many other crash narratives to come. It was breaking news: it’s not as if the writers and editors could have met to strategize about the genre’s rhetorical components.
Mary Winter, who was there “when that horrible accident occurred to Mr. Wright’s aeroplane & poor Mr. Selfridge was killed,” wrote to her friend Eleanor Bliss: “I saw it & I can’t get the picture of it & the horror of it out of my mind. The machine moved with the freedom & ease of a bird & I had seen it so often that I had gotten no feeling that there was any danger in it—so much so that I was really crazy to go up in it myself.” The letter captures her dramatic astonishment, and empathy, and shock, and the persisting trauma of witnessing the crash—alongside, strikingly interwoven, the flight’s beauty, its aura of natural grace. Winter conveys her sense of the miracle these aviators experienced in their newfangled mobility, and her dismay at how in an instant, before her eyes, their transcendent performance failed. Her churning emotions eloquently set the stage for the angst that would be written, spoken, filmed, sung, painted, tweeted over the coming generations, as aviation got better and better, more expansive, serving ever greater numbers of travelers with ever greater convenience, while airplanes continued to crash again and again.
Some believe President Theodore Roosevelt was supposed to be on this flight instead of Selfridge, though the evidence is historically skimpy: it may be true, or it may be merely truthy, one of those close-shave anecdotes that crashes regularly precipitate. Roosevelt purportedly expressed a desire to accompany Orville on a test flight; Wright supposedly said he thought it too risky for the president to take such a chance. Roosevelt did finally fly, without incident, in 1910, becoming the first US president (though out of office by then) to take to the air. His pilot, Archibald Hoxsey, crashed two months after that flight, plummeting from 7,000 feet while attempting a new altitude record. The Wrights paid for his funeral.
“When you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash,” writes cultural theorist Paul Virilio. Theoretically this is a logical, if unsettling, assumption. But just because things are theoretical doesn’t mean they won’t actually happen, as Orville Wright and Thomas Selfridge demonstrated all too literally. Uh-oh.
Randy Malamud C’83 is the author of CRASH! Aviation Disasters and the Cultural Debris Fields, from which this essay has been adapted with permission from Bloomsbury Academic.
