The first fatal airplane crash was piloted by Orville Wright (of all people!) in his eponymous Wright Model A. The cofounder of aviation survived but his passenger, Signal Corps Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, did not.
Demonstrating a military prototype of the Model A, Wright’s flight on September 17, 1908, carried a heavier load than ever before: the men’s combined weight was 320 pounds. Four minutes into the flight, as they circled Fort Myer, Virginia—adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, where Selfridge would be interred a few days later—one of the wooden propellers broke off. A new elongated design, it had never before been tested.
The propeller dislodged a wire bracing the rear vertical rudder, sending the plane into a dive from its altitude of 100 feet. It crashed nose-first into the ground, throwing both men forward into the tangle of wires connecting the biplane’s top and bottom wings. Biographer Fred Howard describes the original debris field:
The skids [undercarriage] collapsed, the wings turned up, the motor tore loose and struck the ground with a thud like a small earthquake. For a second or two the Flyer and its occupants were entirely concealed in a boiling cloud of dust. … Gradually the extent of the damage became visible. The Flyer’s wings were knocked out of shape, its skids smashed to kindling. The left propeller was intact but both ends of the right propeller were broken off. One of the broken pieces dangled by a shred of its fabric covering. Orville and Selfridge were pinned beneath the upper wing, their faces buried in the dust.
Wright was hospitalized for weeks: a fractured leg, broken ribs, and damaged hip caused him pain for the rest of his life. Although he continued flying after the crash, it was always physically uncomfortable.
Selfridge—like the Wright brothers, an airplane designer—hit one of the framework’s wooden uprights, fracturing his skull. He underwent surgery but died without regaining consciousness. He was not wearing protective headgear; had he been, he might have survived. It’s common protocol to identify and rectify safety lapses after a crash, to ensure the same problem doesn’t recur, a practice aviators adopted from the start. When the US Army began flying planes in 1909, soon after Selfridge’s death—the accident happened on a flight trial during the Wrights’ bid for the contract—pilots and passengers wore heavy head protectors resembling football helmets. The Wrights also modified the defective propeller after the crash: “The blades were redesigned and made heavier at that point and canvas was added down their concave sides,” writes Richard Stimson. “The tubes supporting the propeller axles were braced so that any vibration would not cause the propellers to reach the wires bracing the vertical rudder in the tail.”