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Early Flights In Alberta (Part 1), The Underwood Brothers of Stettler
Just four years after the Wright
brothers made their historic flight, three brothers from central
Alberta tried their luck at aviation fame.
Elmer, George, and John Underwood lived on a farm near Stettler.
The experimental machine they designed and built was frail but
elegant.
And it delighted visitors to the Stettler Exhibition when the
Stettler Exhibition when the Underwood boys put it on display in
1907.
Pat Myers of Alberta Historic Site Services describes the
design.
It was elliptical in shape, it had strips of fir on it, it had,
it was canvas covered, they had a platform for the pilot where
they hoped to put the motor, and they used motorcycle wheels so
it could go along the ground.
The Underwood boys didn’t have a motor so they forced to test
the flying machine like a kite.
They tethered it to a post on the farm. They used bags of grain
as the weight of a polite. And got up fairly often.
And the finally one of the brothers convinced the others that he
should be able to take the place of the grain, and he went up,
but again just as a tethered kite flight.
They did try with a motorcycle engine to get it airborne. They
got it moving along the ground by the never got it in the air.
The Underwood brothers couldn’t afford a larger motor, so they
abandoned their hope of powered flight and continued
experimenting with tethered flights. But as historian Pat Myers
explains, their ingenuity couldn’t prevent the inevitable.
Not really crashed. It was destroyed in a windstorm when a gust
of wind picked up. And of course these are very fragile craft,
there’s no much to them and just shattered.. and the Underwood
brothers never went back to their aviation dream again.
Even so, the Underwood brothers still managed to carve a place
for themselves in aviation history.
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