Eugene Ely and the First Ship Landing, January 18, 1911

The first landing on a ship began at an airfield, with a civilian pilot and an airplane that left almost everything exposed to the weather.

At 10:48 a.m. on 18 January 1911, Eugene Ely left Selfridge Field at Tanforan in an open-frame Curtiss Model D pusher biplane. Its forward elevator stood out on bamboo outriggers, and its Curtiss V-8 turned a propeller behind the wings. Tricycle landing gear carried the machine on land; twin wooden flotation cylinders underneath offered a precaution if the bay became its landing place. There was no enclosed cockpit to separate Ely from the work.

USS Pennsylvania (ACR-4), a four-funnel armored cruiser, lay anchored in San Francisco Bay. Over her stern, workers had built a sloping wooden platform 120 feet long and 32 feet wide. Ely approached at about 40 miles an hour and touched down at 11:01 a.m. The available deck was shorter than an ordinary landing run, so the demonstration depended on what happened beneath his axle.

Three hooks caught ropes stretched across the platform, each rope weighted at both ends with 50-pound sandbags. Hugh Robinson, a circus performer as well as an aviator, devised the arresting arrangement. As the hooks drew the ropes forward, the sandbags resisted and brought the airplane to rest in about 30 feet. The system made a small piece of deck behave like a much longer airfield.

At 11:58 a.m., Ely took off from the same platform and returned to Selfridge Field. He had already flown from USS Birmingham in November 1910; this January demonstration added the missing return journey. The photographs preserve a modest wooden structure on an existing warship, and the mechanics that made landing aboard possible.