Eugene Ely, the USS Birmingham, and the Wooden Platform That Launched the Age of Carrier Aviation

On November 14, 1910, a 24-year-old exhibition pilot named Eugene Ely flew a Curtiss pusher biplane off an 83-foot wooden ramp bolted to the bow of the USS Birmingham in Hampton Roads, Virginia - the first successful aircraft launch from a ship in history. Two months later, he became the first to land on one. Together, those two flights proved the concept of the aircraft carrier at a time when the Navy wasn’t sure it needed one.

The State of Aviation in 1910

The Wright Brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903 - seven years before Ely’s flight. By 1910, aviation had moved from theoretical curiosity to commercial spectacle. Exhibition pilots worked county fair circuits, and Glenn Curtiss, building aircraft out of Hammondsport, New York, was locked in the most significant technological rivalry in America: a direct competition with the Wrights for speed prizes, altitude records, and military contracts.

The U.S. Army had already taken its first step. Lieutenant Benjamin Foulois had been issued a Wright military flyer and told to teach himself to fly it by correspondence. The Navy was more skeptical.

The Navy Officer Who Saw What Others Missed

Captain Washington Irving Chambers was tasked in 1910 with tracking aviation developments and reporting whether any of it was worth the Navy’s attention. His colleagues considered it a consolation assignment. The Navy had dreadnoughts with 12-inch guns and four inches of belt armor. What would it do with a linen-covered biplane that topped out at 50 mph?

Chambers had an answer: reconnaissance. An airplane could range far ahead of a fleet and report enemy positions before any ship came within gun range. The problem was obvious - if the fleet was at sea, where did the airplane land? You couldn’t land on the ocean, and a warship’s deck was a tangle of guns, turrets, and funnel smoke. But what if you built a clear space? What if you put a platform on the bow?

Chambers brought this idea to Curtiss in the fall of 1910. Curtiss agreed immediately, and he offered his best exhibition pilot.

Who Was Eugene Ely?

Ely is one of aviation history’s most underappreciated figures. Where Lindbergh, Earhart, and Yeager became myths, Ely flew into history, died young, and got largely forgotten.

He was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1886. His early adult life was ordinary - automobile sales, mostly. Somewhere in his mid-twenties he started watching air meets and fell into flying with a speed that unsettled the people teaching him. He began lessons in 1910 and was already one of the better stick-and-rudder men Curtiss had encountered after only a few months in the air.

Exhibition flying in 1910 was not a cautious profession. You flew low and slow over crowds with an engine that could quit at any moment, control surfaces held together by wire, and very little altitude if anything went wrong. Ely excelled. He had the quality that separates pilots who last from those who don’t: the ability to stay clear-headed when the margin for error reaches zero.

When Chambers and Curtiss explained what they had in mind, Ely agreed without drama.

The First Ship Launch: November 14, 1910

The Navy assigned the USS Birmingham, a scout cruiser, for the experiment. Workers bolted an 83-foot wooden ramp to her forward deck, sloping downward at roughly five degrees toward the bow so gravity could assist acceleration over that short distance. At the top of the ramp sat the Curtiss pusher - spruce, bamboo, and piano wire, with a four-cylinder engine mounted behind the pilot and a pusher propeller at the rear. The whole aircraft weighed about 600 pounds.

Ely sat out front on a bicycle seat with nothing between him and the open air. No cockpit, no canopy - just thin leather gloves, glass-and-leather goggles, the smell of castor oil and river water, and 83 feet of inclined planking between him and Hampton Roads.

November 14 was not a good day for flying. The harbor was overcast and gray, with a low chop on the water. The original plan called for waiting until the Birmingham was making 20 knots, adding apparent headwind to the aircraft’s own airspeed. But conditions were deteriorating, and Ely was not a patient man. He decided to go with the ship nearly at anchor.

He opened the throttle. The Curtiss pusher rolled down the ramp, cleared the bow - and dropped. Witnesses said the aircraft disappeared below the level of the deck. The pusher propeller struck the surface of Hampton Roads. Water sprayed over the nose and hit Ely directly in the face, soaking his goggles. For a fraction of a second, it appeared the experiment was over in the worst way.

But the engine was still running. The wings were still producing lift. Ely - with salt water on his goggles, bent propeller tips, and almost no altitude - flew the airplane. He climbed away from the harbor and flew two and a half miles across the water to a field at Willoughby Spit, Virginia, where he put it down. The propeller tips were bent from their brief contact with the harbor surface. The pilot was in one piece.

For the first time in the history of powered flight, an aircraft had launched from the deck of a ship.

The Harder Problem: Landing on a Ship

If you can take off from a ship, the next question asks itself. Taking off, you have gravity, a ramp, and the whole sky ahead of you. Landing means taking all that speed and energy and stopping it in a very short distance on a moving platform. The engineering challenge is different in kind, not just degree.

Chambers and Curtiss solved it with a purpose-built platform at the stern of the USS Pennsylvania, an armored cruiser, anchored in San Francisco Bay. The platform was 130 feet long - 50 feet more than the Birmingham ramp. Stretched across it at regular intervals were 22 lines, each weighted on both ends with sandbags and raised a few inches off the deck. Hooks were mounted to the bottom of Ely’s landing gear. When the aircraft touched down, the hooks would catch the lines, the sandbags would drag, and the aircraft would stop before running out of platform.

Crude and improvised, weighted with sandbags rather than hydraulics - but the concept is identical to the system a Navy pilot uses today when catching the three-wire on a carrier.

The First Carrier Landing: January 18, 1911

On January 18, 1911, Ely flew from a nearby field, came in over the stern of the Pennsylvania, and touched down. The hooks caught 11 of the 22 lines. The sandbags dragged. The aircraft rolled approximately 60 feet and stopped, well short of the end of the platform.

He climbed out, shook hands, and had lunch with the ship’s captain. Then he walked back to the aircraft, launched off the bow, and flew back to shore.

In those two flights - separated by two months - Ely had answered both fundamental questions. Aircraft could take off from ships. Aircraft could land on ships. The aircraft carrier, as a concept, had been proven.

From 83 Feet to Four and a Half Acres

Chambers pushed hard for a dedicated aviation vessel almost immediately after the Pennsylvania landing. The Navy moved at the pace of institutions - deliberately, then in concentrated bursts when war made patience impossible.

The USS Langley, America’s first aircraft carrier, was commissioned in 1922 - 11 years after Ely’s proof-of-concept landing on the Pennsylvania. The fleet carriers that defined the Pacific campaign - the Enterprise, the Yorktown, the Hornet - came a decade after Langley. The Gerald R. Ford class carriers sailing today carry electromagnetic catapult systems, air wings of over 60 aircraft, and four and a half acres of flight deck.

Every one of them traces an unbroken line back to that 83-foot wooden ramp in Hampton Roads.

Why This Matters

Ely did not live to see any of it. On October 19, 1911 - nine months after the Pennsylvania landing - he was flying an exhibition pass at an air show in Macon, Georgia, when his Curtiss pusher stalled at low altitude. He was 24 or 25 years old, depending on the source. His widow, Mabel, was there.

The Navy awarded Ely the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1933 - 22 years after his death. Congress passed a special act because he had been a civilian. It was the right call. It was a long time coming.

What Ely did on November 14, 1910 wasn’t just technically significant. He flew that morning without the one thing that makes any leap easier: the knowledge that it can be done. Nobody had done it before. Nobody knew whether the aircraft could generate enough lift off 83 feet of downhill planking to fly before it hit the water.

Every carrier pilot who has ever caught a three-wire, every aircraft that has ever taken a catapult shot off a flattop, every air wing that has ever projected power from the sea - it all traces back to Willoughby Spit Beach, Virginia, and a 24-year-old from Iowa wiping salt water off his goggles.

Key Takeaways

November 14, 1910: Eugene Ely made the first aircraft launch from a ship, flying a Curtiss pusher off an 83-foot wooden ramp on the USS Birmingham in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
January 18, 1911: Ely made the first arrested landing on a ship, touching down on the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay using hooks and sandbag-weighted lines - the direct conceptual ancestor of modern carrier arresting gear.
Captain Washington Irving Chambers and Glenn Curtiss drove the engineering and naval backing behind both experiments; without Chambers, no platform gets built; without Curtiss, no airplane gets offered.
The first American aircraft carrier, the USS Langley, wasn’t commissioned until 1922 - 11 years after Ely’s proof-of-concept landing on the Pennsylvania.
Ely died in an exhibition accident in October 1911, nine months after his landmark Pennsylvania landing, and received the Distinguished Flying Cross posthumously in 1933, 22 years after his death.