The plunge Wednesday of an uncontrolled E/A-18G Growler into the San Diego Bay channel between Coronado and Shelter Island ended a 71-year span of no water mishaps since flights from surrounding fields began 114 years ago at North Island.
The Glenn Curtis School of Flight and San Diego Aero Club set up next to the Coronado mudflats in 1911, followed by a U.S. Army flight training school (later named Rockwell Field) in 1912, and the U.S Navy in 1918. (The Navy took full control in 1939.)
The first recorded accidents came in 1913, with four between January and December, resulting in four deaths. Investigators attributed them to the rear location of the propeller and engine in these early craft. Often the engine would be thrust forward in the case of an accident, crushing the pilot from behind. After another fatal break-up off North Island in 1914, the pusher-type planes were abandoned for those with propulsion in front.
In September 1915, a well-regarded Army pilot making a “loop-the- loop” lost control of his plane and dived into the bay, killing him. Lt. Walter Taliaferro at the time held both a distance record — flying 220 miles in under four hours — and a flight endurance record of 9 hours, 45 minutes.
In June 1923, two Army pilots from Rockwell Field achieved the first transfer of fuel between airplanes in flights lasting more than six hours. The next day, however, an attempted transfer 100 feet above the ground in fog in fog forced crash landings in the mud flats adjoining the runway where the planes nosed over into the shallow waters. The pilots came away with only minor injuries.
A fatal flight into a fog-shrouded Point Loma cliff fronting the bay took place in August 1927. Two Navy lieutenants, George Covell and R.S. Waggener, were transiting from North Island to San Francisco to participate in the Dole Derby, a competition to see who could fly the fastest non-stop to Hawaii. Both were killed. (Martin Jensen, whose plane “Aloha” was the runner-up, lived in San Diego for many decades and founded the Jensen Flying School at Dutch Flats, an early name for today’s Midway-Sports Arena district.)
Another Navy crash into the bay was in April 1929 when two biplanes, part of a larger formation returning from aerial practice near Oceanside, collided at several hundred feet while turning to land at North Island. All four crewman died.
A World War II Liberator bomber plummeted into the bay in June 1941, killing all five crew members, when it went into a stall just after takeoff from Lindbergh Field (today’s San Diego International Airport). The four-engine craft was on its way to join the British Royal Air Force and had the distinctive logo of the RAF painted on the fuselage. Consolidated Aircraft Corp., whose sprawling factory adjoined the airport along Pacific Highway, manufactured the bomber, similar to the U.S. Army bomber B-24, and shipped 140 to England.
The last mishap into San Diego Bay before Wednesday’s accident took place in November 1954 when a Convair (renamed from Consolidated Aircraft) Sea Dart jet smashed into the water before hundreds of observers gathered to watch a test flight of the experimental supersonic seaplane. Among the witnesses was Peter Kaye, then a young San Diego Union reporter and later a Union news executive, who saw it crack up from the pressroom of the San Diego City-County Administration Building on Harbor Drive. The project was abandoned in 1956.
David Smollar is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. He lives in Tierrasanta.
