The Thirteen Black Cats, the Hollywood Stunt Flyers Who Put a Price on Every Way to Nearly Die, and the Printed Menu That Sold Danger by the Item

The Thirteen Black Cats were a closed club of thirteen Hollywood stunt pilots, formed around 1924–1925 near Burbank, California, who did something no barnstormers had done before: they organized the most dangerous work in America and sold it off a printed price list. A simple loop cost a few dollars. Blowing up your own airplane in midair and parachuting out of the wreckage cost $1,500 - roughly a year’s pay for a schoolteacher, and about the price of a house at the time.

Who Were the Thirteen Black Cats?

They were a group of stunt flyers working the film studios of southern California in the mid-1920s. Rather than competing and underbidding one another for Hollywood work, they formed a closed shop of exactly thirteen members - no more.

For their emblem they chose a black cat, the unluckiest of symbols, and wore it as a dare. If the rest of the world believed a black cat crossing your path meant death was coming, these were the people who crossed that path for a living.

Their masterstroke was treating lethal risk like a trade. Every stunt was a negotiation with death, and instead of romanticizing it, they built a rate card. The riskier the trick, the higher the number.

Why Were There So Many Cheap Airplanes and Idle Pilots in the 1920s?

The answer starts with World War I. When the war ended, the U.S. government was left with thousands of surplus training airplanes it no longer needed.

The most famous was the Curtiss JN-4, universally called the “Jenny” - a big, patient, open-cockpit biplane built of wood, wire, and linen doped with a lacquer that smelled like bananas in the sun. The Army sold them off for pennies on the dollar. You could buy a crated, brand-new surplus Jenny, still in the grease, for a few hundred dollars.

At the same time, thousands of young men had learned to fly during the war and come home to a country with no use for pilots. There were no real airlines and almost no airmail. So they bought cheap Jennies and went looking for a field to fly out of.

What Was Barnstorming?

Barnstorming was the traveling airshow business of the 1920s. The name came from theater - actors who toured small towns playing one night in each, sometimes in a barn.

Pilots did the same thing. You’d circle a town low and loud until everyone came out to look up, then land in a farmer’s pasture and sell rides by evening. Five dollars to go up, sometimes a dollar, sometimes a chicken.

But crowds adapt fast. The first year, simply seeing an airplane fly was a miracle. By the second and third summer, a plain ride wasn’t enough - so pilots added loops, rolls, and eventually wing walking, and there was no going back.

How Did Hollywood Turn Stunt Flying Into a Business?

Most barnstorming was beautiful, disorganized chaos - a pilot and a wing walker drifting town to town, sleeping under the lower wing. But southern California had Hollywood, and Hollywood had discovered the airplane.

The studios wanted spectacle on film: airplanes looping over the camera, a man crossing from one ship to another, a real crash. And they paid the kind of money a county-fair barnstormer could only dream about.

That’s what pushed the Black Cats to organize. A loose scatter of daredevils underbidding each other became a single club that set its own prices - the price list was the tool that made it a business.

What Was on the Price List?

The card ran from the ordinary to the almost unimaginable:

A simple loop - a few dollars. Barely worth their time.
Changing airplanes in midair - stepping from the wing of one ship to a rope ladder trailing beneath another - $100, split between the two flyers.
A deliberate crash - flying a condemned airplane into trees or the ground for the camera - considerably more, because you might not walk away.
Blowing the airplane up in midair and parachuting out of the fireball - $1,500, earned in the length of time it takes an airplane to fall.

What Did a Midair Airplane Change Actually Involve?

It sounds like a stunt. It was a physics problem with no margin.

Two open-cockpit biplanes flew formation as tightly as anyone dared, one stepped slightly above the other. From the top ship, the crew paid out a rope ladder into the slipstream - and that ladder doesn’t hang straight down. It streams backward in a 60-to-70-mph wind, snapping and twisting.

The flyer stands up on the top wing with no belt and no line, holding on with nothing but his hands and nerve, and reaches for the ladder as it swings across.

Then comes the part crowds never understood. The instant he swings his weight off the bottom airplane, that ship suddenly weighs about 170 pounds less on one side and leaps upward, while the top airplane suddenly carries 170 pounds more hanging off a rope and wants to sag and roll. Both pilots are flying by feel, chasing a balance that shifts the moment the man commits - and if either gets ham-fisted, the ladder swings into a propeller.

The Pilot Who Flew an Airplane From the Outside

One of the Cats, Al Wilson, came up with a stunt that still strains belief: flying an airplane with no pilot inside it, from another airplane.

He rigged one ship so its controls could be worked by a man standing on the wing, riding it like the running board of a car. He’d fly formation, transfer over, and control the empty airplane from the outside for the camera.

Airplanes were never built to be flown that way, and there was no good reason to think it could be balanced from the outside in the wind. Wilson did it anyway - because the card said there was money in it.

What Ended the Barnstorming Era?

This work killed people. Not the Cats especially, but the whole tribe of barnstormers. Wing walkers fell, parachutes streamed and failed, and tired pilots in tired airplanes flew into the one tree in the field on a hot day’s third show. The price list wasn’t bravado - it was the honest cost of the thing, written down.

Two forces ended it, and they’re the same two that ended barnstorming everywhere:

The movie business itself. As pictures got bigger, studios, insurers, and eventually unions wanted control. A loose club of thirteen daredevils setting their own prices and blowing up airplanes on a handshake didn’t fit an industry growing that large and careful. Organized stunt flying got absorbed, regulated, and made far less fatal.

The federal government. In 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act, and for the first time the government licensed pilots, inspected airplanes, and forbade buzzing crowds at fifty feet in a wired-together Jenny. That authority is the great-grandfather of today’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The barnstormers hated it - it was the end of the free sky - but it’s the reason a pilot today can take off on a Saturday morning with a reasonable expectation of landing safely that afternoon.

What Did the Barnstormers Leave Behind?

More than airplanes, they left a country that had looked up. Before them, most Americans had never seen an airplane and never expected to.

By the time these flyers had crisscrossed every state and county fair, a whole generation of children had stood in a pasture and watched a human being step off a wing into the sky and live. Some of those kids grew up to build the airlines, fly the bombers, and put men on the moon. You can’t draw a straight line from a black cat painted on a Burbank fuselage to Apollo - but the line is there.

Key Takeaways

The Thirteen Black Cats were a closed club of thirteen Hollywood stunt pilots formed around 1924–1925 near Burbank, California.
They pioneered selling aerial stunts off a printed price list, from a few-dollar loop up to $1,500 to blow up an airplane and parachute out.
Cheap surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes and idle WWI-trained pilots created the barnstorming boom that made stunt flying possible.
A midair airplane change paid just $100 and hinged on a roughly 170-pound weight shift that both pilots had to fly by feel.
The Air Commerce Act of 1926 - ancestor of the FAA - and Hollywood’s growing insurance and union oversight ended the era, trading spectacle for the safety modern pilots rely on.