'History Detectives' visit the Curtiss
BY DERRICK EK THE LEADER

Trafford Dougherty, executive director of the Curtiss Museum, talks with Elyse Luray, host of the PBS show, History Detectives at the museum.'

HAMMONDSPORT - A television crew from the PBS series "History Detectives" spent most of the day recently filming an episode about one of the most famous planes built by aviation legend Glenn Curtiss.

Trafford Dougherty, executive director of the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum, was interviewed by one of the show's hosts, Elyse Luray, for an episode about the

NC-4, which in May 1919, became the first aircraft ever to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

The NC-4 was one of four huge "flying boats" built for the U.S. Navy by Curtiss, a Hammondsport native who is considered a pioneer of seaplane design.

The planes, built by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, were originally going to be used by the Navy to patrol the Atlantic during World War I.

After the war ended, though, the Navy decided to use three of the planes to attempt a trans- Atlantic crossing.

According to historical accounts, they took off from New York City and made stops in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Then, they embarked on the longest leg of the journey, a 15-hour overnighter from Newfoundland to the Azores, a chain of islands off Portugal.

Lost in early morning fog with rudimentary flight instruments, two of the Navy- Curtisses were forced to land in the ocean. One sank,

and the crew was rescued by a Greek freighter. The other, crippled, barely made it to the Azores by sea.

The third plane, the NC-4, flew to the Azores and later to Lisbon, Portugal, the westernmost tip of Europe, to complete the journey. When the NC-4 and its crew returned to the U.S., they were greeted with great fanfare. Curtiss hosted a huge banquet to honor the crews.

Although the NC-4's journey was splashed across the headlines for more than a month, it was overshadowed eight years later by Charles Lindbergh, who became the first pilot to complete a solo, non-stop trans-Atlantic crossing.

"That's where all the romance was, the solo nonstop flight," Dougherty said.

A hangar in the back of the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum made a great backdrop for the television crew's shoot. That's where, for months, a team of museum volunteers has been building a replica of another seaplane called the "America." It was originally built by Curtiss in 1914 - a few years before the NC-4 - for the purpose of attempting a trans- Atlantic flight.

The replica of the America, although still wingless, is scheduled to fly over Keuka Lake in early September, said museum volunteer Glenn Babcock.

Although smaller, the America's design is similar in many ways to the NC-4. Dougherty showed Luray how fabric is sealed onto a seaplane's wing with an adhesive substance called "dope."

For every segment of the walking conversation between Luray and Dougherty they shot, they did at least five or six takes. They shot from various angles, and had Luray and Dougherty repeat the same conversation over and over until it looked and sounded exactly how they wanted it.

Dougherty kept his patience during the exhausting process, and said he had done a few television shoots before, such as a short interview for the History Channel. But this was an entirely new experience for him.

"Our mission is to tell the Curtiss story, and this will be great exposure," he said.