Piper-Fuller field was built and dedicated in 1926 as the city’s first dedicated airport and featured three grass runways in the heart of the lower Pinellas Peninsula. Built by H. Walter Fuller as an amenity for his Jungle Club subdivision, the Piper-Fuller field saw many firsts for the city of St. Petersburg. During its dedication on Thanksgiving Day 1926, 10,000 vehicles congregated for a parade from the brand-new Million Dollar […]
Unknowing Pioneers and the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line
Just over a decade after Wright Brother’s first flight at Kittyhawk, North Carolina, aviation had yet to find practical use. Barnstormers traveled the countryside in search of passengers but the airplane and allure of the adventurous goggled pilots who flew them were still a mere novelty to the public. But as Antony H. Jannus and Abram C. Phiel boarded the flying boat Lark of Duluth on 1 January 1914, they […]
Hughes XF-11 Gearboxes and Wind Tunnel Model
The air was calm and the sun was starting to creep down towards the horizon as Howard Robard Hughes donned his signature hat and carefully stepped into the cockpit of his newly constructed reconnaissance aircraft, one of two Hughes XF-11 bearing serial number 44-70155. Designed by Hughes and his team to fly high-speed reconnaissance missions, it was to compete directly against the Republic XF-12 Rainbow, another clean-sheet design built for […]
The Bushnell Project: Chemical Warfare Amidst the Pines.
Over the course of the second world war, the number of military bases on the Floridian peninsula skyrocketed from 12 to nearly 200 as the Navy and Army Air Corps began to train pilots over the sandy beaches and thick pine forests of the Sunshine State. The military had such a great need for pilots they again outsourced training to civilian flight schools, with Arcadia, Dorr, and Carlstrom fields again […]
Another World First: Kissimmee’s Air Ordinance, 1908
The fledging City of Kissimmee in Osceola County was barely 25 years old when aviation started to spread like wildfire across the world’s imagination. Of course, only eight years had passed since the Wright’s 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina when Kissimmee City Attorney, Patrick Alexander Vans Agnew, took a trip to France. Returning home upon viewing a daredevil and his aircraft zipping and swooping overpopulated streets and buildings, […]
J.A.D. McCurdy and The World’s First Wireless Air to Ground Transmission
The world’s first wireless transmission from an aircraft occurred over West Palm Beach, Florida in February 1911 with John Alexander Douglas McCurdy at the controls. J.A.D. McCurdy was a Canadian aviation pioneer and is credited with being the first British subject in the Empire to fly an aircraft in 1909, as well as being the recipient of the very first Canadian Pilot’s License issued. His father was the secretary of […]
