Rodgers dubbed the airplane “Old Soggy No. Passing the hat, Rodgers collected enough money to rebuild the airplane, but an undiagnosed defect made the right wing sag in flight. The impact broke off the wheels and the right wing. Two hundred feet later, Rodgers suffered his first crash.
After six weeks of taxi testing, he made his maiden flight by accident when he lifted off to avoid a ditch. When the airplane-the first in Texas-was finished, Rodgers ground-looped it repeatedly. Rodgers ordered spruce from Oregon, turnbuckles from France, and a noisy but anemic two-stroke engine from St. In 1911, after studying the meager material he could find in libraries, he built a model airplane, which generated so much publicity he decided to build-and fly-a full-scale airplane. His rail-thin physique earned the sobriquet Slats. Rodgers moved to Keene, Texas, as a teenager.
“The twenty-ninth time I came down out of a tall tree and left her hanging sixty feet up.”īorn in Georgia in 1889, Floyd H. 1, the picaresque autobiography he wrote in collaboration with newspaper reporter and novelist Hart Stilwell. “The twenty-eighth time I didn’t walk away because my foot went through the floorboard and got caught,” he reported in Old Soggy No. He was also the first Texan to have his license revoked.īetween his first flight in 1912 and his death in 1956, Rodgers was a barnstormer, a stunt pilot, a parachutist, an aerial bootlegger, an instructor pilot, a pioneering cropduster, and a skyborne smuggler of everything from silk and perfume to ammunition. Slatts Rodgers was the first Texan to receive a pilot’s license.
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