Edson Fessenden Gallaudet (1871-1945), Aviation Pioneer/Aircraft Manufacturer In 1898, four years before the Wright Brothers, he constructed and flew a glider, now in the Smithsonian, which embodied the principle of the warping wing. In 1911 he learned to fly at the Wright school, earning US pilot’s license #32 and a similarly low number in France. […]
Antoine Gazda was an Austrian count, a race car driver, and a World War I fighter ace (on the losing side), but he spent World War II in Providence, living in suite 1009 of the Biltmore Hotel. The work he performed here in Rhode Island was considered so crucial to the Allied war effort that […]
Domenic Giarrusso has spent his life in aviation. At 101 years old (at the time of this writing), he served as an Army Air Corps flight engineer and mechanic in North Africa and Italy during World War II. After the war, he worked as an aircraft mechanic and supervisor at the Naval Air Rework Facility […]
2/LT Walter S. Gladding (1915- 1945), a Tuskegee Airman, was born in Plainfield, CT in 1915, the son of Walter and Elsie Gladding of 17 Olney Street, Providence. He attended local public schools, and later played football and ran track at Hope High School. He was an only child. He went on to Rhode Island […]
Captain Adolphus W. Gorton, US Navy (Ret), (1897-1989), was born January 29, 1897 in Pawtuxet, a direct descendant of the Gortons who founded the City of Warwick. He graduated from Moses Brown and entered Dartmouth in 1916, but left to join the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in France. He sailed abroad on May 5, […]
William C. Harris (1906-1963) As an early transport pilot and commercial aviation executive, Harris led the American Airlines operations in Providence from inception in 1936 until he retired in 1962. He learned to fly at Harvard University in the late 1920s, and went to work for Curtiss-Wright Flying Service in Boston, piloting a Ford Trimotor to […]
Captain James R. Henderson USN (Ret) (1924 – 2010) retired from Quonset Point Naval Air Station in 1975 after a 32-year Navy career that started in 1942 and spanned three wars. He flew more than 10 different aircraft and served in torpedo and anti-submarine squadrons on 12 different aircraft carriers. He served as Landing Signal […]
Otto Hermann (c. 1870-1930): Otto Hermann was an auto stuntman who held a 1907 patent for a double loop-the-loop automobile-stunt ramp. He moved to Providence from Atlantic City, and started building his own biplane in the summer of 1909, described in a Journal article as “the first one to be tried out on testing grounds […]
2/LT William E. Hill (1923- 1943) was a Tuskegee Airman and Fighter Pilot. Narragansett native Hill, described by the Providence Journal as the first black pilot from Rhode Island in the Army Air Forces, was killed November 22, 1943 during a training mission over Lake Huron. Lieutenant Hill was serving with the 302nd Fighter Squadron of […]
Edward Albert Johnson (1885-1949) was born in Newport, RI in January of 1885. He developed an interest in aeronautics and spent May-October, 1915, at the Curtiss school in Buffalo. He first soloed in 1915 and received Pilot License No. 32. He joined the Curtiss Aeroplane Company and became its representative in England. After the US […]
Harry M. Jones (1890-1973) Described in a 1912 Providence Journal article as Rhode Island’s “1st home grown aviator”, Jones managed the very first air show ever held in Rhode Island that same year. He was also the first (and last) person ever to land a plane on the Boston Common. Jones was best known, however, […]
Raised in Providence, Harold Edminston Lemont, Jr. (1920-2003) was an aeronautical engineer and inventor who graduated from Moses Brown School, and Rhode Island State College (now URI).
LT George S. Lima (1919-2011), a Tuskegee Airman, was born April 4, 1919, son of Cape Verdean immigrant parents who settled in Fall River. His father worked in a mill, while his mother and other family members ran a boarding house and a grocery store. When the Depression hit in the early 1930s, the family […]
Providence native Ogden R. Lindsley Jr. (1922-2004) moved to North Kingstown at the age of 14 and graduated from North Kingstown High School in 1939. He entered Brown University in 1940, majoring in Engineering. In January 1942 he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He trained as a flight engineer and as a door […]