By David C. Henley
Special to the Nevada Appeal
The date was June 23, 1910, the location was Eagle Valley northwest of Carson City, and pilot William Ivy Baldwin was about to make Nevada aviation history.
Gassing up a rickety Paulham biplane he and two assistants had trucked in from Colorado, the former Spanish-American War U.S. Army balloonist jumped into the craft's open cockpit, fired up its 48-horsepower engine, took off from a specially constructed dirt airstrip and flew over an astonished crowd of holidaymakers attending Carson City's annual Sagebrush Carnival at the nearby Raycraft Ranch.
Later, Baldwin continued his aerial exploits, performing takeoffs, flyovers and landings from Carson's old horse racing track.
Baldwin's Eagle Valley feat, which took place seven and a half years after Orville Wright made the world's first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., was the first airplane flight to occur in Nevada.
"Baldwin was this state's aviation pioneer. And because he made his flight 100 years ago, the 2010 Nevada Day Committee voted to name our Oct. 30 Carson City parade theme "100 Years of Aviation in Nevada," said Karen Wiley, a committee member.
Legendary aviators
The parade this year has named as its Grand Marshal Dick Rutan, 72, the legendary aviator who flew 325 combat missions in Vietnam and set a still-unchallenged international distance record when he and co-pilot Jeana Yeager flew the Voyager aircraft in the first-ever non-stop, unrefueled flight around the world 14 years ago, said Wiley.
In the years that followed Baldwin's Carson City flight, aviation continued to develop in Nevada when the Army built airstrips and fueling stations at Elko and Reno in 1920 to serve its fleet of Curtis biplanes that delivered the transcontinental air mail.
Famous aviators such as Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart also flew into Nevada airports in the 1920s. Lindbergh took off and landed at a rudimentary Reno field in 1927 and then flew to Carson City, Yosemite National Park and Death Valley. Earhart made several trips to Nevada by airplane and autogiro, the forerunner of the helicopter, landing at Ely, Lovelock and Reno.
By the late 1920s, the cross-country air mail route was taken over by private aviation companies, and in 1928 the Boeing Aircraft Corp. built a permanent airfield on a 120-acre site in south Reno that had been a cattle pasture owned by the Walts and Kietzke ranches.
Named Hubbard Field in honor of Boeing executive Eddie Hubbard, it later had its named changed to Cannon International Airport in honor of Nevada U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon. Today, the field is called Reno-Tahoe International Airport.
Commercial aviation
By the mid-1930s, commercial aviation came into its own in Northern Nevada following the 1936 debut of Douglas Aircraft Corporation's two-engine, 28-passenger DC-3 airplane. United Airlines soon began DC-3 service to Reno and in following years American Airlines initiated DC-3 service to both Reno and Las Vegas.
Commercial airline service also came to Carson City in the 1950s when Bonanza Airlines inaugurated a route between Carson, Tonopah and Las Vegas. For a brief period, there was even commercial DC-3 service between Hawthorne and Long Beach, Calif., operated by Hawthorne Nevada Airlines.
By the 1940s, civilian airfields had been constructed at Fallon, Carson City, Minden and Lake Tahoe and military fields were built at Fallon, Stead and Tonopah to train Army pilots, navigators and ground crews.
In 1952, the Fallon Army Airfield was turned over to the Navy to train Korean War pilots, and today the greatly-expanded Fallon Naval Air Station includes the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center and its elite "Top Gun" pilot training school.
As Nevadans make plans to attend the upcoming Nevada Day parade, they will be commemorating the contributions to the state's early-day aviation history by pioneer Ivy Baldwin, Army air mail pilots, famed fliers Lindbergh and Earhart and the beginning of commercial airline service to Nevada made possible by the advent of the DC-3 nearly 75 years ago.