Wright Flyer Crashes: First Aviation Fatality

Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge became the first person to die in a powered airplane crash on September 17, 1908, when the Wright Flyer piloted by Orville Wright plummeted seventy-five feet into the parade ground at Fort Myer, Virginia. Selfridge, a twenty-six-year-old Army Signal Corps officer who was among the military’s most enthusiastic advocates of aviation, died of a fractured skull hours after the crash. Wright survived with a broken leg and cracked ribs, and the accident grounded the brothers’ military demonstration flights for nearly a year. The Wright brothers had come to Fort Myer to demonstrate their airplane to the U.S. Army, which had issued a specification for a heavier-than-air flying machine capable of carrying two people at forty miles per hour. Orville had been conducting increasingly ambitious flights over the preceding days, circling the parade ground for over an hour on September 12 and impressing the military observers with the machine’s stability and endurance. Selfridge, who had worked with Alexander Graham Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association and had designed his own aircraft, asked to fly as a passenger. On the fourth circuit of the field at an altitude of approximately 150 feet, a crack split the air. One of the wooden propeller blades had fractured, striking a wire brace that controlled the rear rudder. The rudder jammed, and the Flyer went into a nose-down spiral from which Wright could not recover. The aircraft hit the ground with tremendous force, collapsing around both occupants. Soldiers and spectators rushed to the wreckage to pull the men free. Selfridge’s death cast a shadow over the birth of military aviation, but it did not derail it. The Army renewed the Wright brothers’ contract, and Orville returned to Fort Myer the following summer to complete the demonstration trials successfully. Selfridge was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. The crash led to engineering improvements in propeller design and structural bracing, and it established the sobering precedent that aviation, for all its promise, would exact a human cost. Fort Myer’s airfield was later named Selfridge Field in his honor.