flight

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Montgomery at the Hiller

After sketching in Evergreen, I headed north up the Peninsula to San Carlos. My destination: the Hiller Aviation Museum.

I was here to see and sketch three gliders and look at a plaque. The three gliders are replicas of the Gull, Santa Clara, and Evergreen, all designed by John J. Montgomery. Two are suspended from the ceiling and the Evergreen sits in a dark corner with a dubious mannequin, representing John Montgomery, sitting at the controls.

The odd mannequin of John Montgomery really looks like he’s three sheets to the wind!

The plaque sits off to the left of the replica of the Evergreen and mannequin. I have seen a plaque like this before, last fall in Roanoke, Virginia and also at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

The plaque in Roanoke honored the engineering achievements of Norfolk and Western’s J-Class No. 611. The plaque at the Hiller, by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, designates the glider as an International Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark. The plaque reads:

Montgomery Glider

1883

This replica represents the first heavier-than-air craft to achieve controlled, piloted flight. The glider’s design was based on the pioneering aerodynamic theories and experimental procedures of John Joseph Montgomery (1858-1911), who designed, built, and flew it. This glider was way ahead of its time, incorporating a single parabolic, cambered wing, with stabilizing and control surfaces at the rear of the fuselage, with his glider’s success, Montgomery demonstrated aerodynamic principles and designs fundamental to modern aircraft.

The plaques placement is a bit unfortunate because it actually refers to the Gull, which hangs above and not the Evergreen (the curator I talked to admitted that this part of the museum has been neglected).

John Montgomery was a true Californian, born in Yuba City. He was many things in the Golden State: inventor, pilot, engineer, physicist, and a professor at Santa Clara University.

He studied the soaring flight of hawks, eagles, pelicans, turkey vultures, and gulls around San Diego Bay and further inland and then tried to design his gliders influenced by nature’s own design. He referred to birds as, “tutors in the art of flying”. Montgomery put this understanding the flight of birds with creating a heavier than air glider this way, “It has always seemed to me that the secret of aerial navigation lay in the discovery of the principle of bird’s flight.”

In 1883 the flying professor made pioneering flights near the Mexican border at Otay Mesa. His flights lasted up to 600 feet. He had not yet learned how to design a glider that could soar upwards like a turkey vulture.

Here he flew the Gull, the replica now hangs in the Hiller Aviation Museum.

So I did a loose sketch of the Gull.

I chose to sketched the Gull loosely with another mannequin of Montgomery (as a younger man) perched uncomfortably on the glider’s “saddle”. I left out all the other aircraft around it and used my artistic license to add the setting: Otay Mesa.
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First Flights Over Aptos

Down a cul-de-sac in a part of residential Aptos I have never explored before there is a monument to aviation at the edge of a green field.

This is what these hidden monuments are for, to reminds us of the anonymous people who have loved, lived, and lost who had come before us. The ones, on whose shoulders we stand, that have changed the world in ways we don’t understand or acknowledge.

The plaque on the monument reads:

One hundred years ago, in the skies above this monument, three soaring flights were made on March 16th, 17th, and 20th, by an aeroplane- glider flown by Aeronaut and parachute dare- devil, Daniel John Maloney, which had been designed and built by Professor John. J. Montgomery.

The frail craft, weighing only 42 pounds, was constructed of spruce, wire, and fortified canvas, and had tandem-wings with a 24 ft. wingspan and a four sided tail. It was taken aloft here at the then Leonard Ranch by a smoke-balloon rented by Fred Swanton and owned by Frank Hamilton, to heights of 800 ft., 1,100 ft., and 3,000 feet. The longest flight lasted over 18 minutes and covered over 2 miles…From a letter by Prof. Montgomery to his mother…

My machine flew three times, each time better than the other and descended beautifully. Going in different directions under perfect control of the aeronaut, and landing in a spot selected by him as gently as a feather.

These flights were the result of 22 years of experimentations and flight testing by Professor Montgomery, beginning with his first glider flight in 1883 at Otay Mesa in San Diego and ending with his accidental death in 1911. Called the “Father of Basic Flying”, his successes and contributions to the development of flight were heralded by the world’s press at the time, but are now largely forgotten.

The plaque was erected in 2005 by E Clampus Vitus El Viceroy Marques de Branciforte Chapter 1797, E Clampus Vitus Capitulus Redivivus Yerba Buena #1, Hiller Aviation Museum San Carlos Ca,. Aptos Chamber of Commerce and Museum Capitola/Aptos Rotary.

Now the monument serves as a perch for western bluebirds and the green field is used by a murder of crows for foraging. Off to the right is an owl box that a pair of red-shouldered hawks use as a hunting perch.

119 years ago, a frail, 42 pound glider soared above this field. Now it has been returned to the true masters of flight: the gulls, corvids, and hawks that effortlessly glide above.

But if you look further above you will see the great grand children of Montgomery’s passions: the modern passenger jet on final approach to SFO and SJO.