How A Generation of Stunt Pilots Thrilled America
In the 1920s, Charles Lindbergh, Bessie Coleman, and other barnstormers took off in the Curtiss JN-4 and captivated the public with daredevil displays.
In April 1923, a 21-year-old college dropout named Charles Lindbergh traveled to a U.S. Army airfield in Americus, Georgia, to buy his first airplane. It was a Curtiss JN-4D, or “Jenny.” During World War I, the government had purchased thousands of the open-cockpit biplanes for use as military trainers. Now it couldn’t get rid of them fast enough.
For Lindbergh, as for so many pilots of his generation, the Jenny was the right plane at the right time—simple, relatively easy to fly, and, above all, cheap. Lindbergh had taken flying lessons but had never piloted a plane solo, a detail he neglected to share with the seller. He handed over $500 and camped at the field for two weeks while his Jenny was assembled. After a week of practice flights around the field, he bundled a few spare parts in a blanket and embarked on the career that would make him the most celebrated aviator of the 20th century.
Though Lindbergh would later become famous for flying across the Atlantic, he started as a barnstormer, joining the ragtag band of itinerant fliers—overwhelmingly male, but including a few pioneering women—who embraced the Jenny as a ticket to freedom and adventure, if not riches. Hopscotching from one rural town to the next, sleeping in pastures under their wings, they flew stunts over county fairs and sold joyrides to farmers and townsfolk, hoping to earn enough gas money to reach their next stop.
Lindbergh would credit his barnstorming experiences with molding him into the pilot he became. “Wind, weather, power, load—how many times have I balanced these elements in my mind, barnstorming from some farmer’s cow pasture in the Middle West,” he wrote in The Spirit of St. Louis, his 1953 account of his solo transatlantic flight. “In barnstorming, a pilot learns to judge a field so accurately that he can tell from the size of his passenger, and a tuft of grass tossed to the wind, just where his wheels will leave the ground, just how many feet will separate them from the boundary fence and trees and beyond.”
The barnstorming era was short-lived, roughly 1919 to 1926, but its effect on American aviation was profound. Enabled by the Jenny, the barnstormers transformed the airplane from a distant curiosity into a familiar, even prosaic, part of everyday life. Like Henry Ford’s Model T, the no-frills biplane popularized a revolutionary technology. It carried the first U.S. airmail and launched the careers of some of the most celebrated fliers of the century, including Lindbergh; Amelia Earhart; and Wiley Post, the one-eyed former oil field roughneck who in 1933 became the first man to fly solo around the world.
(The white-knuckle air show where landing 10,000 planes is just the start.)
A Smoke-Spewing Trainer
The Jenny’s story began in 1914 at the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company of Hammondsport in upstate New York. Glenn Curtiss, a pioneering aviator and entrepreneur, had commissioned a British designer, B. Douglas Thomas, to help develop a new biplane. Unlike Curtiss’s earlier pusher models, with the propeller mounted behind the wings, this one was a tractor model, with the propeller and engine mounted on the nose. The company’s new J model flew for the first time in May 1914.
That design was then merged with another model, the N, to become the JN—the Jenny. There were numerous variants, including a Navy version fitted with floats, but the most plentiful was the JN-4D, introduced in June 1917, two months after the United States entered the war in Europe. Built as a military trainer, the JN-4D featured dual controls, with the student seated in front of the instructor. By the time the war ended in November 1918, the Army had purchased 6,070 Jennies—JN-4Ds and other variants—from the Curtiss Company and six other American manufacturers. (Approximately another 1,200, known as "Canucks," had been built in Canada for its Royal Flying Corps.) An estimated 95 percent of World War I–era American and Canadian military pilots received some of their training in a Jenny.
Like the Model T, the Jenny was a simple machine, built for ease of manufacture and maintenance. Its fuselage, wings, and tail were framed in spruce, braced with wire, and covered in cotton or Irish linen. The fabric was coated with multiple layers of dope, a type of lacquer that stiffened the fabric and made it weatherproof. Power came from a Curtiss OX-5 engine, a 90-horsepower, water-cooled V-8. The standard rear instrument panel was rudimentary: a water temperature gauge, an altimeter, an oil pressure gauge, and a tachometer.
Pilots had a love-hate relationship with their Jennies—“a bunch of parts flying in formation,” as some liked to joke. Sitting in open cockpits behind a small windshield, they endured constant windblast and deafening engine noise as oil and smoke spewed from the OX-5’s exhaust pipes. The engine was prone to overheating, a frequent cause of emergency landings, and sometimes sprayed scalding water over the windshield. Even at its best, the underpowered Jenny topped out at around 75 miles an hour in level flight, and in crosswind it could be devilishly hard to land without ground looping, or spinning around uncontrollably.
Yet for all its quirks, the Jenny was well suited for its mission. It was sturdily built, recovered easily from stalls and spins, and landed at a sedate 40 miles an hour, which reduced the risk of serious damage from ground loops or other mishaps. “If you look now at the Jenny in the Smithsonian Institution, it seems flimsy and unimpressive, but in those days we thought it a grand ship,” Dean Smith, a World War I–era Army aviator who learned to fly in a Jenny, wrote in his 1961 memoir. “I still think that in many respects it was a fine airplane on which to learn to fly. While it was not tricky or unfair in its flight characteristics, its lack of power forced a pilot to develop a delicate feel in order to get proper performance from it.”
Entertaining the Crowds
The Jenny was nothing if not adaptable. Starting on May 15, 1918, surplus Jennies with Army pilots at the controls began flying on the country’s first scheduled airmail route linking Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. Each Jenny had been modified with a more powerful, 150-horsepower Hispano-Suiza engine and—in place of the front seat—a mail bin that could carry about 6,000 letters or 150 pounds. Still, the Jenny was handicapped by its slow speed and limited range. After less than three months, the Army handed off its airmail duties to civilian pilots hired by the U.S. Postal Service, which replaced the Jenny with more capable aircraft.
As far as the government was concerned, the Jenny had outlived its usefulness. In 1919 Jennies that had cost taxpayers as much as $6,700 apiece were declared surplus and sold to the public for as little as $300. Some were purchased by the Curtiss Company, which refurbished them and sold them at a profit. A Toronto businessman, meanwhile, bought hundreds of surplus Canucks for resale south of the Canadian border. Soon the civilian market was awash in cheap airplanes and spare OX-5 engines, which could be had for as little as $75.
The timing could not have been better. The Army had trained about 10,000 pilots, many of whom wanted to keep flying after the war. But how? Airmail was still in its infancy, and viable commercial airlines had yet to get off the ground, at least in the United States. (In Europe, where governments were more supportive of civil aviation, several new airlines began flying passengers in converted bombers within months of the 1918 armistice.) The Jenny gave veterans and civilians alike an opportunity to enter the flying business on the cheap, as touring aerial entertainers. These “gypsy fliers,” later known as barnstormers, sometimes teamed up in flying circuses and often traveled with mechanics who doubled as wing walkers and parachutists.
The barnstormers were not the first of their kind. Before the war, stunt flyers crisscrossed the country in aerial circuses, thrilling crowds with spins, dives, and—all too often—fatal accidents. So it’s no surprise that for most Americans, the airplane was regarded mostly as a form of entertainment— “a provider of sensational amusement,” as Scientific American put it in 1911. For the magazine, as for other critics, the air shows—with their frequent crashes and spectators jostling for a glimpse of pilots’ mangled bodies—were putting aviation in a bad light. They certainly did nothing to promote the airplane as safe and reliable.
Nor did the barnstormers who followed. One of the most popular aerial touring troupes of the postwar era was the Gates Flying Circus, which was named after its P.T. Barnum–like founder, Ivan Gates. One of its trademark acts was the handkerchief pickup, in which a stuntman snatched—with his teeth—a handkerchief off the ground while hanging by his knees from the undercarriage of a Jenny. Some performances drew crowds of up to 30,000.
Competition pushed rival barnstormers to ludicrous extremes. Wing walkers danced on the upper wing, transferred midair between planes, and even simulated a tennis match, holding rackets and swatting an imaginary ball. One pair of barnstorming pilots staged a demonstration of air-to-air refueling, maneuvering their planes close enough that a stuntman could climb from one to the other with a five-gallon jerry can strapped on his back, then pour its contents into the fuel tank.
Trailblazing Aviatrixes
Some of the most prominent barnstormers were women. For a Black and Indigenous woman who dreamed of flying in the 1920s, the obstacles were daunting. Yet Bessie Coleman defied the odds. After growing up poor in Waxahachie, Texas, she made her way to Chicago, where she worked as a manicurist and heard tales of female pilots in France. Barred from flight schools in the United States because of her race and gender, she traveled to France for training—in 1921 earning the first pilot’s license ever granted to a Black American woman—then returned home to join the barnstorming circuit.
Crowds flocked to watch her loops, spins, and parachute jumps, drawn in part by the woman aviator hailed in the Black press as “Queen Bess, the daredevil aviatrix.” Coleman hoped to use her earnings to open a flight school for Black pilots but never got the chance. She died in a plane crash in 1926.
Lillian Boyer was working as a waitress in Chicago in 1921 when she took her first airplane ride and was instantly hooked. On only her second time aloft, she climbed out on a wing and casually walked to the end and back. Soon afterward, she teamed up with former military flight instructor William S. “Billy” Brock, who would go on to become a famous barnstormer, training with him for five months before they took their show on the road.
The two performed in a Jenny emblazoned with Boyer’s name on the fuselage. Billed as “the girl of nerve” and “the empress of the air,” she thrilled crowds with creative and dangerous stunts—standing on the top wing with her feet strapped in while Brock looped the plane; hanging from the aircraft by her toes, knees, ankles, even her teeth; balancing on her head; or dangling one-handed from a wingtip skid. She was the first woman to transfer to an airplane from a speeding automobile—a stunt she repeated more than a hundred times. Her most serious injuries—a broken pelvis, broken hip, and several broken ribs—were the result of a parachute mishap in 1925—but she continued wing walking until 1928, when federal regulations curtailed the riskiest stunts.
Another woman who piloted a JN aircraft, Anita “Neta” Snook, also made a name for herself in aviation, in part because of her influence on the most famous female aviator who ever lived. Born in 1896, Snook grew up in the Midwest with a mechanical bent and applied to the Curtiss Flying School while in college. (She was initially rejected because the school was not open to women but was eventually accepted.)
After the war she turned her hand to rebuilding a wrecked Canuck in her parents’ backyard in Ames, Iowa. She spent the summer of 1920 barnstorming the Midwest, giving 15-minute rides for $15 until the weather turned cold, then shipped her Canuck to Los Angeles. One day a slender young woman, accompanied by her father, approached her on the airfield where she had set up shop as a flight instructor. “I want to fly,” the woman declared. “Will you teach me?”
The young woman was Amelia Earhart. Snook gave her nearly five hours of instruction in the Canuck, and the two became friends. After Earhart bought her own plane, a canary yellow Kinner Airster, Snook taught her how to handle the lighter aircraft for another 15 hours free of charge. Decades later Snook wrote an autobiography titled I Taught Amelia to Fly.
Expanding Access
By virtue of its low cost and availability, the Jenny had a democratizing effect on aviation. Just as it opened doors for a handful of talented and gutsy women, it also created opportunities for adventure-seeking men outside the usual pipeline of ex-Army fliers.
One of them was Charles W. “Charley” Mayse. Part Cherokee, he had dropped out of school in Oklahoma at the age of 12, supporting himself as a cowboy, sawmill worker, and farmhand. He tried to join the Army in 1914 but was turned down because of a lung condition and instead joined Gen. John J. Pershing’s expedition to Mexico in 1916, in search of the revolutionary Pancho Villa. After working as a truck mechanic and opening a Studebaker dealership with his uncle, Mayse was introduced to flying by a friend who had flown with the U.S. Army Air Service—precursor to the Air Force—during the war.
Mayse never looked back. After four hours of flying lessons, he cashed out his share of the Studebaker dealership, bought a Jenny, and hit the barnstorming circuit, navigating between air shows with a Rand McNally road map. In May 1922, while landing at a ranch near Safford, Arizona, he rolled into an irrigation ditch and damaged his landing gear. Over the 28 days that it took him to repair his airplane, he met, courted, and fell in love with Lola Carter, whose family owned the ranch. When the plane was flyable again he flew her to El Paso, Texas, where he asked her to marry him. The next morning, she did.
For Mayse, as for so many barnstormers, the Jenny launched him on a successful career in aviation—in his case, as the operator of a flying school and charter service in Arizona. (He even used his Jenny to help the Tucson police catch the kidnappers of a banking executive.) In that sense, the Jenny served as a bridge between the unregulated barnstorming era and the more regimented future of commercial airlines, air traffic controllers, and civil aviation rules. Perhaps no one better illustrates that transition than Lindbergh, the lanky, taciturn Midwesterner whose nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927 fueled a surge of public and private investment in aviation, with Lindbergh as its most prominent evangelist.
Lindbergh the Barnstormer
Even before he traveled to Georgia to buy his Jenny, Lindbergh had sampled the barnstorming life. As a flight student in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the spring of 1922, he had befriended a pilot named E.G. Bahl, who was planning a barnstorming trip through the southeastern part of the state. Lindbergh offered to accompany him, at his own expense, as a mechanic and helper. Operating from pastures and stubble fields, Bahl would buzz the rooftops of the nearest town while Lindbergh stood on the wingtip to attract customers. Later that summer, Lindbergh teamed up with another barnstormer, H.J. “Cupid” Lynch, who hired him as a parachute jumper.
In 1923 Lindbergh became a solo act. Leaving Georgia with his bundle of spare parts in the front cockpit, he had no fixed itinerary, only a vague plan to work his way through the South to Texas, after which he would fly north to his home state of Minnesota to help with his father’s campaign for Senate.
He meandered across Alabama and Mississippi, landing in farm fields and tying his Jenny to fence posts in case the wind came up. To the crowd that inevitably gathered, he offered 15-minute rides for $5, or sometimes in exchange for a meal or a place to sleep. His first paying passenger, in Meridian, Mississippi, was a man so heavy that the Jenny struggled just to stay in the air. “I found myself heading up a thickly wooded slope, which was sloping upward at least as fast as I was climbing,” he wrote in We, the autobiography he published shortly after his solo transatlantic flight in 1927. “For three minutes my Jenny and the slope fought it out over the fifteen feet of air between them.”
Lindbergh had his first crack-up near Maben, Mississippi, when he taxied into an irrigation ditch and splintered his propeller. But the delay worked to his advantage. Lindbergh wrote that after checking in to a hotel and ordering a new propeller from the airfield at Americus, he “extracted promises from half a dozen citizens” to take rides when it arrived. Over the next two weeks he carried more than 60 passengers. “People flocked in from all the surrounding country, some traveling for fifteen miles in oxcarts just to see the plane fly.”
Lindbergh eventually made it back to Minnesota, where he was forced to land in a swamp after his engine malfunctioned. Locals helped him right the overturned plane and haul it to solid ground. He had a new propeller shipped express from Americus and was soon on his way. After the election campaign was over and lost, Lindbergh spent the rest of the summer barnstorming in the Midwest.
Even then, however, there were signs that the days of the barnstormer—and the Jenny— were numbered. Some weeks Lindbergh barely covered his expenses, and he was dismayed to learn that some competitors in Wisconsin had begun cutting their prices in half, to just $2.50 a ride. “I had always conformed to the rule in use among most pilots at that time, of giving a good ride for five dollars but not carrying anyone for less.”
The airplane was losing its novelty appeal, and pressure was building for government oversight of aviation, which until then had been almost entirely unregulated. Newspaper editorials railed against reckless pilots, like the one who buzzed the dedication ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial on Memorial Day 1922, as President Warren G. Harding was attempting to deliver a speech. “Time is at hand to bring some order out of the chaos of laissez faire in the air,” the Buffalo Courier editorialized in 1924.
In 1925 the U.S. Postal Service began awarding airmail contracts to private carriers, some of which soon added passengers to their payloads—the foundation of today’s airline industry (American and United Airlines, among others, both got their start as contract mail carriers in the 1920s). The following year, the Air Commerce Act established the first regulatory framework for aviation, introducing aircraft safety standards and licensing requirements for pilots and mechanics. There was a crackdown on the most reckless stunts, such as wing walking without parachutes or flying loops at low altitudes over populated areas.
There was little room left in this new era for the barnstormer or, for that matter, the Jenny, which was fast becoming obsolete. For Lindbergh, as for many others, the pokey biplane with the big cloth-covered wings had served its purpose. Aviation was becoming respectable, even mainstream; new opportunities beckoned. Drawn by the chance to fly newer and more powerful aircraft, Lindbergh sold his Jenny in 1923 and joined the Army Air Service. In 1925 he became an airmail carrier, plying the route between St. Louis and Chicago. Other pilots also began flying mail, passengers, or both. The age of the barnstormer was over. The airplane was growing up.
Half a century later, Lindbergh’s Jenny, or what remained of it, was discovered in an Iowa barn. Following a crash, the airplane had been cannibalized for parts, and cows had eaten most of its fabric. It was identified by Lindbergh’s initials, C.A.L., which he had scratched on the rib of a lower wing. The Jenny was restored and is now displayed at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island.
