I recently received an email in response to a blog I posted back in February about a fatal airplane crash at an Army Air Forces Fair on Wright Field in 1945. The sender was Violet McIntyre, cousin of Army Air Forces Capt. William Glasgow, the pilot and decorated war veteran who died in the tragic crash.

Violet herself wrote about the crash in a guest column for the Niagara Gazette of Niagara Falls, NY, on Veterans Day in 2004. Here is an excerpt from her column:

"... Bill joined the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942 and was sent overseas in 1943.

"As a member of the 85th Fighter Squadron of the Western Desert air Force, he served during many years of bitter fighting in the Mediterranean area. When he was just 27 years old, he was already a veteran of 80 combat missions over Germany. In 1943, an anti-aircraft shell hit his plane and he was forced to bail out.

“Taken to a German military hospital, he was unsuccessful in his first attempt to escape, but on a second effort, he evaded guards and despite great suffering and pain from his wounds, made his way back to Allied lines. It took him 12 days to find his unit, traveling over unfamiliar and difficult terrain.

"Bill returned to the U.S. as one of our city’s most decorated heroes, holding the Distinguished Flying Cross, Silver Star and Presidential Citation, as well as other awards. Our joy in his safe return and in his accomplishments ended at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, just three days before Memorial Day in 1945 when an experimental plane (a Curtiss XP-55 Ascender) Bill was piloting in a War Bond Aviation Show crashed to the ground after passing a grandstand containing 70,000 people.

"Bill’s fellow pilots in the same air show said they believed he tried very hard to land the plane on Airport Road away from the crowd. We were overwhelmed with sadness when we learned later that a car had just been turning around on that road, so when the plane crashed in a nearby ditch, flames spewed from the plane, killing the father and injuring several others in the family. Three others died from their injuries a few days later.

"This tragedy was further compounded when a letter came just this week, 60 years after the crash, from Sandy Begg, a cousin of ours in Britain. Formerly a pilot himself, he had recently bought the book, “Fighters, An Illustrated Anatomy of the World’s Fighters,” by Mike Spick. It stated that back in 1939, Curtiss Aircraft Company, in an attempt to meet a USAAC specification for a new fighter, developed an experimental plane (the XP-55 Curtiss Ascender.) Unfortunately, stall characteristics were poor and the first prototype was lost on Nov. 15, 1943, when it pitched downwards through 180 degrees, causing fuel starvation for the engine, which cut out.

"Trials continued until 1945 but it was evident that any advantages of the unconventional layout were not enough to justify further development. Main faults were an excessively long take-off run and poor stalling characteristics. Then he quoted this: 'The project was abandoned after the third prototype crashed at a military air show on May 27, 1945.' ”

She went on to add that memorial services were held for Glasgow simultaneously at his church in Niagara Falls and at Wright Field. His pallbearers included Maj. Richard "Dick" Bong and Capt. Dominic "Don" Gentile, decorated aces themselves. They were following him in their own planes for a series of flybys when he crashed.

Tags: Wright Field, Curtiss XP-55, air shows, Dayton Air Show Book, Dayton

If you want a humbling experience, try giving a talk about aviation history at the Engineers Club of Dayton. You'll find a polite, friendly crowd of people who made or witnessed a good deal of what you're trying to lecture them on. The fact that one of the club's co-founders was Orville Wright should give you a clue.

So it was on Tuesday when I agreed to fill in for a luncheon speaker who cancelled. I shamelessly plugged the air show book by using material from the introductory chapter for a speech about the history of air shows in Dayton.

I traced the tradition of air shows all the way back to Huffman Prairie in 1904, where the Wright brothers continued their powered-flight experiments after Kitty Hawk and later established a flying school, where Orville trained most of the Wright Company's exhibition team in 1910. I explained how World War I prompted the development of military airfields around Dayton, including what became Wright and Patterson Fields, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

With the military fields came air carnivals or circuses, later dubbed fairs or open houses. The biggest of all was an Army Air Forces Fair on Wright Field in October 1945, where the Army unveiled its newest technology as well as German and Japanese warplanes that had been captured during the war and spirited to Wright Field for analysis. More than a million people from around the world swarmed Wright Field for a week to gawk at all the formerly secret hardware.

Leave it to an Engineers Club member to have firsthand knowledge about those open houses. Jack Darst not only knew about them, he had worked as a teenager in a concession stand at a Wright Field open house in 1945. Jack recalled that a plane had crashed, killing several people. All he remembered about the airplane was that it had a canard. The only canard-equipped plane I knew of from that era was one called the Ascender. Jack went home, Googled it, and almost instantly found a reference to the crash.

The airplane was the Curtiss XP-55 Ascender, a radical design with swept wings, a canard, and a pusher-type engine — the reason for its tongue-in-cheek nickname. Indeed, an XP-55 crashed at a Wright Field open house in 1945 — but one on May 27, not the October event. I wanted to know more, but an intensive Internet search turned up few details. Most references parroted the few remarks in Wikipedia's entry about the Ascender. You can find history books about Wright-Patterson online, but those histories are selective — you won't find much about crashes, crimes, or the like.

But the Dayton Metro Library has a good newspaper collection on microfilm, and I quickly found stories about the crash from the front pages of the Dayton Daily News, the Journal and the Herald. Since there's so little information about this crash on the Internet, I thought I'd report what I found.

The event was a day-long open house and War Loan rally. According to newspaper reports, 100,000 or more people attended the Sunday event. They watched a C-46 Commando snag a glider and yank it into tow, and they were the first civilians to get a peek inside the B-29 Superfortress. Heavy bombers flew overhead, including the massive, one-of-a-kind Douglas XB-19. Legendary war aces Maj. Richard "Dick" Bong and Capt. Dominic "Don" Gentile flew fighter demonstrations — Bong in a P-38 Lightning and Gentile in a P-51 Mustang. Lt. Steve Pisanos flew a P-59 Airacomet, the Army's futuristic, jet-powered fighter.

At 4 p.m., several fighter pilots lined up for a flyby. According to an eyewitness account by Capt. John Ducas, squeezed into the back of Bong's P-38, five fighters were to fly over the field in single-file formation, led by Capt. William C. Glasgow, 28, of Niagara Falls, NY. Glasgow was a combat veteran who had been shot down over Germany, taken prisoner and escaped. He held the Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and an Air Medal with six oak leaf clusters. He was flying the XP-55

"After completing the pass across the field, we were to make a slow roll and then continue the direction of flight," Ducas wrote in an account published by the papers. Glasgow made his roll, and then the plane "seemed to wobble to the right and left, almost completing a second roll." Bong began his pass, then suddenly turned away. Bong gestured toward the ground; Dugan looked down and saw "a mass of red flames and then a second later the inferno was engulfed by black smoke." According to other witnesses, Glasgow's plane "swooped close to the ground and tore off 150 feet of fence" near Airway Road. The plane "burst into flames and began falling apart."

At that moment, local resident Wesley Roehm was turning his car around on Airway to take his family and a friend to the show. The XP-55 "sideswiped" the car and splashed gasoline on it before breaking into pieces and crashing into a ditch across the road. The gasoline ignited, engulfing the car and its occupants in flames. Roehm and a friend, Kathleen Eyre, died; Roehm's wife Susan and their two children were critically burned. Whether they survived or died later, I don't know.

This XP-55 was the third of only three built, according to Wikipedia. The first crashed in 1943 when it flipped over in a stall test and went into an uncontrolled, inverted descent. The pilot was able to bail out, but the plane was destroyed. After Glasgow's crash, the Army apparently lost interest in the last remaining Ascender; it eventually became the property of the National Air and Space Museum, which displayed it for many years before loaning it to the Kalamazoo Air Zoo in Michigan, where it was restored and remains on display.

The National Museum of the United States Air Force, which sits on old Wright Field where Glasgow died, has a brief fact sheet about the Ascender on its website. It doesn't mention the crash.

Tags: Dayton Air Show Book, Curtiss XP-55, Wright Field, air shows, Dayton