1914’s mysterious aeroplane

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/11/2014 (4162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It had been less than a dozen years since brother Orville and Wilbur Wright had made the first powered flight, and it had taken years more for the Ohio bicycle manufacturers to establish their legitimacy and to perfect their machines.

So in 1914, although biplanes and monoplanes were beginning to make some stir in military circles, especially for forward observation, most airships were still of the unpowered variety — mainly the hydrogen-filled blimps that were, even generically, then called Zeppelins.

But there were powered planes in the air. And Brandon Daily Sun readers would have read of the first attempts of anti-aircraft attacks on powered planes in early fall of 1914.

A couple of years earlier, in 1912, demonstrations of the first-ever powered airplane flight in Westman had thrilled visitors to the Interprovincial Fair with twice-daily flights. And within a couple of years, pretty much everyone would know of the exploits of Dauphin flying ace Billy Barker.

But at the time, a plane was buzzing around Brandon, and no one seemed to know anything about it. It was front-page news several times, over the course of more than six weeks. Reports regularly quoted eyewitnesses and gave detailed itineraries of the “aeroplane” as it veered back and forth around the city — and at least as far afield as Kemnay.

From his verandah, Dr. A. McFadden, then superintendent of the Hospital for the Insane on the North Hill, told of a bright light with a distinct engine noise approaching from the south along First Street.

When it reached the CPR bridge over the Assiniboine River, the Daily Sun reported, “the doctor heard a shot fired from that vicinity and noticed the machine take an upward sweep.”

Another doctor, living in the east end, corroborated McFadden’s story, and said he was so close he could see a man’s figure guiding the machine.

Readers poured into the paper with similar stories.

At 5 a.m. a few mornings later, people living near the corner of Sixth Street and College Avenue said that an aeroplane had made a “very low” pass over the city.

“One man named Taylor is reported to have got his gun to fire at the machine but it passed out of range too quickly,” the paper reported.

The pilot seems to have been fond of either early-morning lights or late evening ones. Often, the plane was reported to be carrying a light and moving quickly. Sometimes, it disappeared quickly, leaving only perplexed Brandonites behind.

The first apparent report of the flying machine was Aug. 18, 1914, when an early-rising baker spotted the ship around 3:30 a.m.

Some speculated that it was the work of an advertiser, but if so it was not a very effective one, since by mid-November that year, the “mysterious airship” was a semi-regular feature of the Brandon Daily Sun — but readers were no closer to learning where it was from, where it was going, or who was piloting it.

After that, news reports began to peter out.

A man living at Patmore’s nurseries on 18th Street North saw it in mid-January 1915, and his tale was backed up by other witnesses.

There seemed to be no reports the rest of the year, except perhaps an unrelated one, in November 1915.

» ghamilton@brandonsun.com

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