Watched Days

On this date in 1908, Orville Wright's Flyer came down at Fort Myer, Virginia, with two men aboard. Halfway through its fifth circuit, at 5:14 in the afternoon, the right propeller broke.

The next morning's Times reported both men “buried in the wreckage” shortly after 5; “the young army officer died at 8:10 o'clock to-night.” That officer, Lt. Thomas Selfridge, is the first person to die in an airplane crash. He was not the pilot.

The record files him as a passenger. It also files him as a builder: first secretary of Alexander Graham Bell's Aerial Experiment Association; designer of the Red Wing, which made the first public powered flight in America that March; in May, the first U.S. military officer to fly alone.

Orville's account of the last seconds: Selfridge “turned once or twice to look into my face, evidently to see what I thought of the situation.” Wright suffered a broken left femur; he lived until 1948.

The first name the air age wrote down belonged to a passenger, riding in another man's machine. The propeller that broke sits in a museum in Dayton.

Receipts: New York Times, September 18, 1908; the broken propeller is at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.