When the Red Wing Came Down on Keuka Lake

The Red Wing had already left the ice of Lake Keuka once. In testimony given years later, Alexander Graham Bell recalled a successful flight on March 12, 1908, near Hammondsport, with F. W. Baldwin as aviator. The machine—officially Drome No. 1, Selfridge's Red Wing—used sledge runners because the frozen lake served as its runway.

A letter Glenn Curtiss wrote to Mabel Hubbard Bell a week later captures what happened during another attempt. It reads less like a polished aviation legend than a field report: a tug, broken ice, birds along the edge, worsening weather, a coin toss, a short flight, and a wreck.

Curtiss said the group left Hammondsport after a morning train arrived and traveled about eight miles down the lake aboard the tug Springstead. They were searching for a portion of ice solid enough to use. Around the broken ice, he noticed gulls, wild ducks, and wild geese.

Then snow turned to rain. Curtiss estimated that water soaking the Red Wing's cloth covering added roughly fifty pounds. He believed much of that weight collected behind the center of gravity and may have contributed to what followed. That was his near-contemporaneous engineering interpretation, not an instrument-certified finding.

The human details were just as improvised. Curtiss wrote that a person he called “Casey” took the aviator's seat after a coin toss with Thomas Selfridge. The letter never explains the nickname, so it should not be used by itself to identify the pilot. Bell's later testimony identified F. W. Baldwin as the aviator during the destructive flight.

Curtiss estimated the wind at about twelve miles per hour. He wrote that the Red Wing left the ice before traveling fifty feet, went about 125 feet, and rose to roughly twenty feet. Wind then tilted the machine. It descended sideways and struck at an angle, demolishing its left half. The aviator was not hurt.

The two records leave a small but important chronological tension. Curtiss's letter is dated March 19 and calls the attempt “yesterday.” Bell's 1915 deposition dates the destruction March 17. Rather than silently choosing one date, the surviving statements should remain visible together.

They agree more clearly on the experiment's consequence. Curtiss wrote that the destruction had nevertheless taught the group a great deal. Bell later said the accident showed that the Aerial Experiment Association had overrated the machine's assumed automatic stability and pushed the members to focus on active lateral control.

That is what makes the letter so valuable. It preserves early flight not as a smooth parade of triumphs, but as transportation across a winter lake, judgment under changing weather, approximate measurement, damaged machinery, documentary disagreement, and learning extracted from failure.

Source note

Curtiss's journey, weather, weight estimate, coin toss, flight estimates, damage account, and immediate lesson appear on page 1 of the Library of Congress Letter from Glenn H. Curtiss to Mabel Hubbard Bell, March 19, 1908. The March 12 flight, Lake Keuka setting, Red Wing description, March 17 accident date, identification of F. W. Baldwin, and lateral-stability interpretation appear on transcript pages 203-206 (PDF pages 7-8) of Bell's Library of Congress Deposition, January 15, 1915. This account preserves the differing date statements and reproduces no manuscript image, exhibit, photograph, handwriting, or extended passage.