Chasing Icarus by Gavin Mortimer

respectable businessman. But President Figueroa was never far from his thoughts, particularly as Guatemala bordered Salvador. Then in early 1909 Moisant read an article in a newspaper about the airplane, and an idea began to take shape in his head. He wrote to one of his sisters in San Francisco and told her he was off to Europe to learn how to fly. She wasn’t surprised, her John had “always had an inventive turn of mind.” What Moisant didn’t disclose in his letter was that when he had learned how to fly, he would return to Salvador and finish his revolution by air.
    The San Francisco Chronicle knew nothing of Moisant’s belligerent ambition; the paper just glowed with pride that a man they claimed as one of their own had “in six months mastered the fine points of this new game [flying] as he mastered the arts of business, diplomacy and warfare in the little explosive republic to the south.” The rest of the United States was equally in awe of John Moisant following his return home, and it began to dawn on people that they might, just might, have found an aviator every bit as glamorous as Claude Grahame-White and Count Jacques de Lesseps. Of course, Moisant wasn’t as handsome as the Englishman, but while Grahame-White had been selling motor cars in Mayfair, Moisant had been waging war in Salvador. Suddenly Moisant was elevated from unknown to number one, America’s best hope for retaining the International Aviation Cup. His opinion was sought on all things aviation, and Moisant was happy to talk—just so long as the reporters didn’t poke around in his past. On October 13 he used an interview in the New York Evening Sun to mock those who doubted the military potential of the airplane, saying, “People talk of shooting at flying machines from the ground and warding off an attack in that way. We can travel seventy miles an hour, more than that soon, and can go up five thousand feet or more. Can they hit us under those conditions?” Asked by the New York Globe if his dream of building a metal airplane was nothing more than a flight of fancy, Moisant wagged his finger at the correspondent and said, “That’s one of the greatest troubles with airplanes today, and the reason they are not safer and a greater commercial possibility. Their construction is too frail and there are too many wires and the wings are too flimsy. Would you expect an automobile to be safe if it had a canvas body and a lot of little wires to work it by?”
    On October 12 Moisant had visited Belmont Park for the first time in a dark suit and derby and found the course to be “very satisfactory.” He forecast it would be the greatest air show ever seen and caused gales of laughter among the reporters with another prediction, that “the next generation will use airplanes as we use automobiles.” Are you serious? they asked, and Moisant’s dark eyes narrowed. “There is no great mystery or great difficulty about operating an airplane,” he growled. “Learning to guide an airplane is about as easy as learning to ride a bicycle.” He cited his own experience in flying across the Channel. “Latham, Le Blanc, and Blériot said I was crazy . . . [and] when I said I was going to take a passenger, they thought I had gone stark mad . . . but I had a map and a compass in front of me and had no difficulty.” To the American newsmen Moisant’s comments were as welcome as summer rain after the drought of interesting quotes from America’s other aviators. The New York City Post commented that his public statements “since his arrival in this country have been of extraordinary interest. No one else talks with the assurance and apparent mastery of the subject displayed by the young American.”
    But Moisant’s turns of phrase didn’t go down well with his peers, most of whom had read his thoughts as they prepared to leave St. Louis for Belmont Park. In their opinion it was nothing more than a shabby publicity stunt from a loudmouthed novice.