The Thirteen Black Cats, the Stunt Pilots of Burdett Field, and the Price List That Turned Barnstorming Into a Business

The Thirteen Black Cats were a group of thirteen stunt pilots who organized at Burdett Field near Los Angeles in 1925 and, for the first time in aviation, set fixed prices for dangerous aerial stunts performed for Hollywood films. By refusing to underbid one another, they transformed barnstorming from a starving, seat-of-the-pants hustle into a legitimate profession with a rate card. Their price list is why professional stunt flying - and the respect that comes with it - exists today.

Who Were the Thirteen Black Cats?

They were thirteen aviators working out of the dirt airfields south of Los Angeles in the mid-1920s, and they chose their name to mock every superstition a pilot was supposed to carry. Thirteen members, on purpose. A black cat logo, on purpose. They painted the cat and the number 13 right on the fuselages of their airplanes.

Their attitude was simple: luck is for people who don’t know what they’re doing. They knew exactly what they were doing. Everything they did in the air was calculated to the second - the dynamite charges, the wind, the quick-release rigs, the hidden parachutes, the breakaway wings.

Why Did Barnstorming Need Fixing?

To understand why the Black Cats mattered, you have to understand how broke barnstorming was. After World War I ended, the government sold off thousands of surplus Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” trainers for almost nothing - a few hundred dollars for one still in the crate, and some pilots picked them up for as little as $50.

The war also left behind young men who knew how to fly. So they went town to town, circling farm communities until people came running, then landing in a hayfield to sell rides for about $5 a head, a little more for a loop. They slept under the wing and ate what the farmer’s wife fed them.

It was a glorious life. It was also starving them to death.

How Did Hollywood Change the Game?

At the same time, Hollywood was booming, and the studios discovered that nothing packs a theater like an airplane doing something it absolutely should not do - a midair collision, a wing walker catching himself by one hand, a burning ship spinning toward the earth.

So the barnstormers came west. Why fly over a Kansas cornfield for five dollars a head when the studios would pay you to crash? Every hungry, fearless stick-and-rudder man in America drifted toward Los Angeles and set up at scrappy dirt strips like Rogers Field, Chaplin Field, and Burdett.

That’s exactly where the trouble started.

What Was the Problem With Stunt Pay?

There were simply too many pilots. When a studio needed someone to spin a Jenny into the ground, twenty men would show up wanting the job - and being broke and proud, they underbid each other.

One pilot would offer to crash the airplane for $200. The next, hungrier, would say $150. The next $100. The next $75. Understand what they were bidding on: how cheaply they would risk their own lives. The studios sat back and let them race to the bottom, made a fortune off the footage, and left the pilot with barely enough to patch his airplane and buy fuel.

Men were dying at Burdett Field, and the ones who lived were going broke.

What Was on the Black Cats’ Price List?

In 1925, thirteen of the smarter pilots did something that had never been done in the flying business: they organized and fixed their prices. Every stunt carried a set fee, and every Black Cat agreed to honor it. No more underbidding.

The rate card read like a menu of controlled catastrophe:

$50 - a loop with a man standing on the top wing
$100 - changing from one airplane to another in flight
$1,200 - flying a ship straight into a stand of trees
$1,500 - blowing up an airplane in midair and stepping out under a parachute while it burned

That top figure is staggering in context. In 1925, $1,500 was a fortune - the price of a nice house, and more than most working men earned in a year - paid for roughly 90 seconds of the most dangerous thing a human being could do.

For the first time, a stunt pilot could name his price and make it stick, because the man standing next to him at Burdett had signed the same list. Thirteen desperate, competing daredevils became one outfit speaking with one voice, and the studios suddenly had to pay what the courage was actually worth.

Who Were the Most Famous Black Cats?

Art Goebel flew with the Black Cats and, a couple of years later, climbed into a Travel Air monoplane called the Woolaroc and won the Dole Air Race in 1927, flying from California across the open Pacific to Hawaii - 2,400 miles of empty ocean, in an era when half the airplanes that attempted the crossing simply vanished.

Al Wilson was one of the finest and most respected stunt fliers in the entire crowd, a man other pilots watched to learn the craft.

And moving through that same world of Burdett and Hollywood was Frank Clarke, perhaps the most famous movie pilot who ever lived, who flew the wild sequences in the great aviation pictures of the silent era. If you’ve ever seen an old silent film with an airplane doing the impossible, you were very likely watching the work of men from this exact tribe.

Why Did the Black Cats Matter?

The real legacy is bigger than thirteen men and a cat logo. What the Black Cats invented was the idea that flying skill has a fair price.

Before them, a pilot was a vagabond - a gypsy who would risk anything for whatever coins landed in a passed hat. After them, a pilot was a tradesman with a rate card, an outfit behind him, and the nerve to say no. That’s the difference between a stunt and a stunt industry.

Why Did the Era End?

The organized outfit barely lasted a few years. The world was changing right under their wings. In 1926, the Air Commerce Act brought Washington into aviation, licensing pilots, certifying airplanes, and writing rules about what you could do over a crowd. The wide-open sky was getting fences.

Then the movies themselves changed. Sound came in, and the great silent flying spectacles gave way to talking pictures. When the Depression hit in 1929, the easy money dried up. One by one the cats scattered - some kept flying stunts, some joined the newborn airlines and traded the leather helmet for a captain’s cap, and some, as you’d fear, did not grow old at all.

But what they left behind endures. Back when avgas was cheap and airspace was free, thirteen men looked at a business that was eating its own, stood together, put a value on their own courage, and made the world respect it. Every stunt pilot, every aerial cinematographer, and every airshow performer flying a warbird for a proper fee under a proper waiver today stands on the shoulders of the Thirteen Black Cats and that little printed price list on the wall at Burdett Field.

Key Takeaways

The Thirteen Black Cats were 13 stunt pilots who organized at Burdett Field near Los Angeles in 1925, adopting the number 13 and a black cat logo to defy aviation superstition.
Surplus WWI Curtiss “Jenny” trainers - sometimes as cheap as $50 - put airplanes in the hands of a generation of pilots who turned to barnstorming and, later, Hollywood stunt work.
Their fixed price list ended destructive underbidding: $50 for a wing-walking loop, $100 for a mid-air plane change, $1,200 to fly into trees, and $1,500 to blow up a burning airplane and parachute out.
Notable members included Art Goebel, who won the 1927 Dole Air Race across 2,400 miles of Pacific in the Woolaroc, and respected flier Al Wilson.
The 1926 Air Commerce Act, the arrival of sound in film, and the 1929 Depression ended the era - but the Black Cats established the enduring principle that a pilot’s skill and nerve command a fair, professional price.