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