By Kathy N. Ross
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In 1911, organizers of the Haywood County Fair announced they would host an airplane demonstration. According to a 1935 recollection in the Waynesville Mountaineer, “One of the incidents of the fair … is of worthy mention on account of the flagrant failure of the attempt. It was an attempted airplane flight … the aviator brought out his plane on the race track, which was given over entirely to the show. He made several attempts to get his machine to take the air, but it never did. The hundreds and thousands of spectators who had come for miles to see the flight were disappointed at the failure.”
The news account at the time stated the pilot could not reach an altitude of more than 10 feet in unfavorable winds.
Haywood County’s newspapers paid close attention to aviation news. They reprinted a number of stories when Orville Wright’s flights reached record duration and distance. It also reported the 1908 crash when “Orville Wright’s experiment with the airship came to a sudden end last Friday by the breaking of a rudder and the consequent tumbling of the machine to earth with fatal results.” (Orville was badly injured, his flight companion killed). However, the news item added, “the aeroplane is constructed on a safe and sound principle and it is bound to succeed ultimately.”
In 1909, when Orville set another record for length and duration of flight, the Waynesville Courier reported that he “established beyond dispute the practicability of an aeroplane in times of peace and in time of war.”
Men were not the only ones fascinated with planes.
“Mrs. Roberta Mehaffey, who has been in South Carolina about nine months, writes that she and her sister, Miss Lettie Bell of Hazelwood, went up in a big airplane at Greenville, S.C., recently and enjoyed the experience very much, staying in the air twenty-five minutes,” according to a report in the Carolina Mountaineer and Waynesville Courier on June 9, 1921.
The big dive
In 1921, Lake Junaluska was the site of a spectacular airplane stunt, no less spectacular when it did not go as planned. A front-page story declared that “Ranser and Turner, aviators who were here Christmas, will fly again at Lake Junaluska on Saturday, Aug. 13, all day, carrying passengers.
“They will do their famous death-trap dive. ‘Fearless Scotty’ will dive headlong into the water while the plane flies over at one hundred miles per hour. There will be camera men from Atlanta to make movies of the exhibition.”
“Will he land safely?” a Hendersonville newspaper asked of pilot Roscoe Turner. “After flirting with death and blowing kisses at an unknown fate, Lieutenant Turner will alight from the cockpit of his plane while ‘Fearless Scotty’ is coming ashore from the water of the lake, clasp hands and say ‘All is well until next time.’”
In fact, all was not well. Turner was flying too high when Ranser took the dive. Ranser landed on the water flat on his back and was pulled from the lake badly bruised and semiconscious. Newspaper editors were apparently disappointed with the outcome. The follow-up report of the stunt made only a small paragraph on Page 5 of the next edition (Aug. 18) of the Carolina Mountaineer and Waynesville Courier.
Surprise visit
Ten years later, Lake Junaluska was the site of another airplane surprise, this one unscheduled. Joe Baylor, a pilot in the U.S. Army Aviation Corps, landed his hydroplane in the lake while visiting his parents, Joseph A. and Nannie Baylor.
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To read the rest of this story by Kathy N. Ross, printed in The Mountaineer newspaper, March 8, 2021, go to High in the mountain skies: Haywood pilots sacrificed all for love of flight | Haywood History | themountaineer.com.
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