[music playing] Transportation has always
been a very important issue in Colorado. We're located in the
middle of the continent and also at the base
of the Rocky Mountains. Maybe it's because of 300
days of sunshine here. But we've had more than our
share of aviation pioneers. Aviation is huge in Colorado. For aviators, flying across
Colorado to get from the East to the West has been one of
the great technical challenges of the 20th century. Today, Colorado boasts the
United States' second largest aerospace economy. But the state's aviation
history had humble beginnings, since 1909, when some
teenagers began assembling a homemade monoplane. Since then, Colorado
and Coloradans have soared into history. Fasten your seat belts
as "Colorado Experience" takes flight. [music playing] This program was generously
made possible by the History Colorado State Historical Fund. --supporting projects
throughout the state to preserve, protect,
and interpret Colorado's architectural and
archaeological treasures. History Colorado State
Historical Fund-- create the future. Honor the past. With support from the
Denver Public Library, History Colorado, and
the Colorado Office of Film, Television, and
Media, with additional support from these fine organizations
and viewers like you. Thank you. [music playing] The contrails of aviation
touch all of our lives-- farmers in need of a forecast,
ski hills in need of tourists, mail, merchandise, meals,
and of course, visits to mom. The imagination of
many can-do Coloradans has transformed flights of fancy
into airborne accomplishments. But Colorado was an unlikely
place for an aviation mecca. The Rockies were in the way. Without aviation, we're
stuck in a backwater. Aviation makes the
world a smaller place and, particularly, when you
live in a place like Colorado, where we are in the
center of the continent, but kind of distant from
the other big economic and social centers
of the United States. People were skeptical
that airplanes would ever succeed in Colorado. People felt that our altitude
and our thin atmosphere simply wouldn't provide the
lift the early aircraft needed in order to get over
the Rocky Mountains. In the early days of aviation,
around the time of the Wright brothers, lots and lots and
lots of inventors and tinkerers were experimenting
with flying machines. Nobody knew what would work, and
nobody knew what wouldn't work. It got so bad that, in
1909, the "Denver Post" offered a $10,000 reward
for the first designer of an airplane that would
fly over the Rocky Mountains. And they weren't
able to give it away. But the friendly
skies of Colorado would eventually
host manned flight. The first airplane
flight in Colorado wasn't made by a
Coloradan at all. There was a Frenchman
Louis Paulhan-- and this was in February of
1910-- this huge crowd there. All day long, they
tinkered with the engine, trying to get the maximum
amount of power out of it. He was not ignorant of
the effects of altitude, and he knew that it
would be difficult to fly at Denver's mile-high altitude. And finally, late in the
afternoon, they got it going, and he took off, and flew a few
hundred feet straight ahead, and touched down again. And the crowd went what? Is that all? Quite a few of them left. But for those that
remained, he flew again. And that was a much
more magnificent flight. He circled the
speedway several times. He went and circled
the state capitol. He circled the
metropolitan area. And the crowd went
absolutely wild. And they broke down
the barricades, and they flooded the infield
of the speedway, which was his landing area. And he's waving
them out of the way. Get out of the way. I need to land. And they waved and cheered. They thought it was wonderful. And finally, he had to
land in a farm field adjacent to the speedway. In 1911, about a year
after the first flight in Colorado, Jules,
John, and Frank Vandersarl were three teenage
boys growing up in Denver. Their house was not far from
where Coors Field is now. And they decided they were
going to build an airplane. And they went about
it the right way. They didn't just
string some bedsheets over some wooden slats
and jump off a barn roof. They wrote to France and ordered
the plans for a Bl riot XI. Now, a Bl riot XI, in 1910,
was about the most advanced airplane on the planet. There's multiple pronunciations. The French pronunciation
is "Blario." Americans frequently
read it phonetically as "Blariot,"
"bleerio," "balerio." You'll hear it many ways. The plans arrive. They were all in
French, of course. They didn't speak French,
so they got some help with translation. And even at that,
they were guessing at the meaning of
a lot of the terms because it was technical French. They built their airframe. They were meticulous in
their construction methods. It came time to put
an engine in it, and the cost of
an airplane engine was about the same cost as a
house in Denver at that time. They could, no way, afford
to buy an airplane engine. So they did what good
Colorado boys would do. They designed and build
their own aircraft engine. This isn't like building
a lawnmower engine. It's very difficult to build
something light enough to power an airplane, but powerful
enough to drag it into the air. They succeeded, and
then they proceeded to teach themselves to fly. [music playing] Johnny and Frankie
Vandersarl used to come over to our house a lot. They talked about how,
when they were young, they'd fly their Jenny over
to Colorado Women's College, and they'd land there, and
they'd pick up students, and fly the girls around. They'd have a wing walking just
like the great Waldo Pepper. It was amazing to
hear their stories. A single airplane
can draw huge crowds. So entrepreneurial pilots
became barnstormers. Aviation was so new, people
would come out to the field where they landed. It wasn't even an airport. And generally, it was
just a farmer's field. And they would offer rides for
a couple of dollars and just enough to make enough money
to buy gasoline and go to the next field and travel
the country giving people rides. By the 1920s, businesses
were recognizing the benefits of flight, but the
country was already running out of surplus
World War I aircraft. A couple of filmmaking
entrepreneurs, the Alexander brothers, wanted more planes
than were available to buy. It was in this historic
moment that innovations in flight and film collided. The Alexander Aircraft
Company began, really, as the Alexander Film Company,
an early silent film production company before
Hollywood consolidated. It was a silent
film company that wanted to come up with a system
for distributing their films. The owners of the
Alexander Film Company decided that airplane
travel was the fastest way to take their films
from location to location. Owners of the company sent away
to an airplane manufacturer asking for an order
of 50 airplanes. And the manufacturer
thought they were crazy. Nobody ever ordered more than
one or two airplanes at a time. And so the Alexander
brothers, instead, decided to just start
building their own airplanes. They opened an airplane
production facility in Englewood, at the site
of the old Cinderella City and began producing their
own Eaglerock airplane. And Alexander
Aircraft very quickly became one of the major
manufacturers of airplanes in the United States. And by 1929, I
understand that they were making more
airplanes in Colorado than any other
state in the union. The Alexander Eaglerock
was their main offering. And because it had been
designed to perform well at Denver's high altitudes, when
you took it to lower altitudes, it performed even better. The early Air Mail pilots loved
it, and barnstormers loved it. If you want to see
a great example, come down to the Wings
Over the Rockies Museum, and just look over my shoulder. And you'll see one of
their Alexander Eaglerock-- a homegrown Colorado airplane. Another great story that
goes with the Alexander brothers and the Alexander
Aircraft Company-- there was this kid going to
South High School who was really interested in aviation. When the young aviation
enthusiasm asked his guidance counselor where he could learn
to design safe airplanes, he advised there
is no such thing. But he started hanging out
down at the Alexander factory. On one occasion, they had
pulled a brand new airplane out to the Englewood Airport. And he was watching them as they
put the wings on and set it up. And he pointed out
to the test pilot that the rigging was wrong. It was put on wrong, and
it would cause a crash if the pilot tried to fly it. The pilot looked at it,
and he said, you're right. So he was hired by
Alexander, initially, to sweep up shavings
in the shop. And they discovered that he
was a really good draftsman. And within a couple of years,
he was their chief engineer. And he designed the
successful version of the Alexander Eaglerock. His last name was Mooney. And pilots in your audience
will recognize that name. Al Mooney would
earn a reputation as a designer of safe planes. But aircraft were
anything but reliable when World War I
broke out in 1914. It took some seriously
brave pilots-- some from Colorado-- to climb
into these wood and fabric machines to face the enemy. Colorado's aviation
history is amazing. We trace our roots back to the
very beginning of aviation. In World War I, in particular,
the first ace ever-- or first pilot ever to have five
victories, and become an ace-- came from Sterling, Colorado. And that's Frederick Libby. Frederick Libby was flying
with the Royal Flying Corps, the British Air Service. This is prior to the US
getting into the war. He had volunteered when
he was up in Canada looking to make money
in a gold rush that was going on up there. And the war broke out
in August of 1914. He saw it as an
opportunity to go overseas for a couple of weeks and get to
see Paris before the war ended. Of course, it didn't
work out that way. It was a very long
four-year war. And he was there, pretty much,
for the whole part of it. Libby was a true
Colorado cowboy turned flight jockey and war hero. He shot down an enemy
plane on his first day in battle, which
also happened to be the first time he ever flew in
a plane or fired a machine gun. By 1917, he reportedly had
22 enemy kills to his credit. Another Colorado
aviation hero would emerge between world wars. But his contribution
to flight would not be with a plane or even a gun. Elrey Jeppesen would,
quite literally, chart the course for
all future aviation. Captain Jepp, even as a young
boy, would look at the birds. He said one of his
first memories, about three years
old, he remembers looking up at the
birds and really being fascinated by flight. As a young boy,
he would jump off the barn into a haystack
with pretend wings on, thinking that
maybe he could fly. Always, growing up, he had
flight in the back of his mind. He barely finished high
school and wasn't sure what he wanted to do. But he ended up going out to
the airport and trading flight lessons for sweeping
and really trying to get involved with flying. He only had 2 and 1/2 hours of
flight time before he soloed. And one of the favorite
things that I found was a newspaper article
about his first solo flight. Normally, on a solo,
you go up, and you do three stop and go
landings, and then you're cleared to fly solo. But he went up, and he
did loops and rolls. At one time, he
actually came down. And they say that he thumbed
his nose at his instructor. But he, in fact, said
that he was actually just trying to get a piece
of dirt out of his eye. So when I found that, I
brought the article up to him, and I said, did you really thumb
your nose at your instructor? And he just had this
boy-like twinkle in his eye, and he said, now, do I look
like the kind of guy that would thumb my nose at my instructor? Jefferson began working
in and around airplanes, and actually spent some time
working with barnstormers as a wing walker-- one of
these daredevil acrobats who would go climb up onto
the wing over a biplane and, as it was flying around,
do different kinds of stunts, climb up and down
ladders, balance on the tips of the wings. It was an early form
of daredeviltry. And then, by the 1930s, he began
working as a pilot on an Air Mail route. Jeppeson was working at a time
when aerial charts and maps were very limited. Air Mail flying was
deadly in those days. 1 in 6 Air Mail pilots
died on the job. Their rules of employment
were such that they had to fly any airplane that
the postal service provided for them, whether it was
airworthy in their opinion or not. They had to fly in all weather. And if they refused to fly,
that was the end of their job. And this was the 1930s,
the Great Depression. So jobs were hard to
come by, especially jobs flying airplanes. And Elrey Jeppeson,
in his career, said to save my own skin,
I'm going to make a notebook and make notes on these
fields that I fly into. There wasn't a lot
other than word of mouth of the
topography, the weather patterns, the elevations
of the different air routes that pilots were flying
in the 1920s and '30s. Back then, there were no charts. There was no guidance. They were in open
cockpit airplanes in the wintertime flying
over the mountain. It was really, literally
uncharted territory, and they were doing it-- the sense of adventure. Most pilots, in fact, in order
to navigate successfully, would literally take highway
road maps, very often produced by gas stations, and follow
railroad lines or roads or other landmarks. The pilots were flying
over mountain passes. And there was one winter, out
of 18 pilots, 4 were killed. And Jefferson realized
that there was a real need for up-to-date,
state-of-the-art, geographic information
for pilots. And So purchasing
a $0.10 notebook, Jefferson began keeping
his own very detailed notes of the various airplane routes. --and started making
notes on the airfields that he flew into. Things like whether
there were power lines along the edge of the
field that you might not see if it was foggy, which
way the field drained, so you'd know which side of
the field was going to be dry and which one was
going to be muddy, things like whether
there was fuel nearby, or a telephone where you
could call and get the mail transferred to a train if
you couldn't take off again. Jefferson literally
kept his notes and, what he called his
little black book-- just a cheap notebook
where he wrote down extremely detailed
information about the routes that he was flying. And his little black book
was so valuable to him that other pilots began
asking for copies. Initially, he made
them for free. He was helping save his
fellow pilots' lives. It got to be such a demand-- he had to all the
notes by hand-- that he said I'm going
to charge for them. So he started
charging $10 a pop. And $10 was a lot of money
in the Great Depression. That was the foundation of
the commercial aeronautical charting industry. Producing these maps,
and charts, and notes became so important
to other pilots that Jefferson, in
time, moved away from flying to produce new
maps and charts full time. He was really an extraordinary
information gatherer. He would literally climb to
the top of hills and mountains so that he could measure
their elevations. All of this, in the service
of making airline routes safer and more reliable for the
pilots and their passenger and, of course, their cargo. [music playing] In World War II, Captain Jepp
did not fly for his country. He drew. He was commissioned, but he
didn't really go anywhere. What happened was, when
World War II came around, there were only eight
locations that were charted. So he was better used,
still, continuing to chart the Aleutian Islands,
for example, for the Navy. And his company still
exists today as Jeppeson They're the world's
leading supplier of navigation information for
airlines, corporate pilots, private pilots-- virtually everything that flies. Jeppeson, today, makes
charts for a global market. It is still considered the last
word in up-to-date, accurate, flight information for pilots. Jefferson is commemorated
today in the Jefferson terminal of the Denver
International Airport. If you go there today, there's a
large statue of Elrey Jeppeson. Take a moment to go by and
say thanks because he's keeping you safe in the skies. He didn't get the
sort of ballyhoo that a Lindbergh
got, probably wasn't as famous as Admiral Byrd. But within his own
community of aviators, people like Elrey
Jeppeson were rock stars. Just as captain Jeff's
charts survived him, a young man from
Denver's writing survived a war
that he would not. Bert Stiles grew up in
Denver, went to South High, and wanted nothing more than
to be a really good writer. He was headed for a career
as a very successful writer when World War II came along. When America entered
World War II, he was patriotic, like
so many Americans, and joined, and became a
pilot for the Army Air Corps. He was a copilot
on B-17 bombers, flew his required
number of missions, and was eligible to come
back to the United States and sit out the rest of the
war, perhaps, as an instructor. But he had always wanted
to be a fighter pilot. So he retrained as a fighter
pilot in P-51 Mustangs. The sad end of the
story is that, on one of his first missions,
he followed a target into the ground and was killed. The silver lining to that is
that his parents discovered that he had a completed
manuscript about what it was like as a pilot on
the B-17 called "Serenade to the Big Bird." And they published
it posthumously. It became a bestseller. [music playing] During World War II,
military aviation became an increasingly
important part of Colorado's
economy in the 1940s, at that the opening of
Lowry Air Force Base. After World War II,
and particularly during the Cold War,
Colorado became a central hub for military aircraft
development and operations, including the development of
the United States Air Force Academy, and the opening of
NORAD in Colorado Springs. When the Martin
Company announced that they were going to open
an aerospace manufacturing plant in Littleton,
that was considered a very important turning
point in Colorado's economy. Up until the 1950s, Colorado
had relied on a mining economy and an agricultural economy. But the opening of this new
aerospace production facility inaugurated the beginning of
Colorado high-tech economy. [music playing] As the aviation industry was
changing, one thing was not. There were no women
in the cockpit. It did not change until 1958. --when a recent high school
graduate working at a Denver cosmetics counter
decided that she might want to be a stewardess,
as the job was then called. One of the nice ladies
at the May Company had a daughter going to school
in Gunnison, Colorado, Western State College. And she said why don't
you go see her, and see if you like flying. And I thought it
was a great idea. So I was all excited. I bought a ticket. And then on the
trip back to Denver, the pilots, as they
frequently did, invited any passengers
who wanted to, to come up in the cockpit. And she went up in the cockpit. And here, out the
front windows, is spread the magnificent
snow-capped vista of the Rocky Mountains. I just fell in love with it. And I was 18. I was just talking to the pilots
about flying and asking them lots of questions. But when we got back on the
ground in Denver, Colorado, one of the pilots
said, well, Emily, he said, if you
like flying so much, why don't you take
flying lessons? And you know I
said-- this is 1958-- I said, gee, can a girl
take flying lessons? And they said sure you can. She was using all her savings
from her job at the department store downtown. And she became a
pilot and, eventually, became a flight instructor
for Clinton Aviation in the old Stapleton. And she became a
little bit frustrated because men would come in,
train for 200, 300 hours and get a job with the airlines. And I thought, well, why
can't I be an airline pilot? So I started to apply in 1967. And I picked out three airlines. Frontier was my first choice. I kept applying, and I kept
updating my applications, and I did not get a
response until 1973. And she had 10 times,
20 times the amount of flying time that
these male pilots had, and she couldn't even
get an interview. And finally, Frontier
offered her an interview. Their point of view
was get her in here, we'll put her in the
simulator, she'll see that she can't do it,
and that will be that. I was scheduled in the
simulator at Frontier at 6 o'clock that very evening. So I didn't have a lot
of time to prepare. And as I was waiting, a
real nice thing happened. A gal came who
was a receptionist at Frontier Airlines. And she came over to me, and
she said, are you Emily Howell? And I said, yes, I am. And she said, well, we know
you're here for an airline job, and we're all rooting for you. That just did the
greatest thing for me. It just gave me a
lot of confidence and that other
people knew about me and were really rooting for me. They put her in the simulator,
and she knocked their socks off. Until Emily Howell Warner,
there were no female pilots on any scheduled
commercial airline. And it was a
significant breakthrough for women in aviation. But once one airline did
it, and they found out that all their passengers
didn't suddenly start booking other airlines
because they didn't want to fly behind a woman,
it became OK for airlines to hire female pilots. Other airlines started
hiring women pilots. And also, the Navy
and the Air Force brought women into
the flight training. And so, now you have women
pilots in all the forces and in most of the
airlines today. Way back in the 1920s,
American Airlines had hired a woman pilot. The airline union wouldn't
admit her so she couldn't fly. Women are still in,
kind of, the minority, but the doors have opened. We've had our first Commander
in space, Eileen Collins. Emily is one of the most
lovely women I know. She's strong, but not tough. She's intelligent. And I look at her,
really, even now, as the role model that I
want to be as a woman pilot. Today, being a
commercial airline pilot is much easier than it was
back in Emily's day, for sure, but it's still challenging. And the fact that we're only 5%,
we've got a lot of work to do. But I love it, and I
wouldn't do anything else. [music playing] We have one of the highest
per capita rates of people with pilot's licenses, second
only to Alaska, I believe. The aviation
industry has employed thousands and thousands
of people in Colorado-- Major? Aerospace contractors like Ball
Aerospace, Lockheed Martin. The 21st century is
revealing that we're becoming a space hub. Space travel is, today, where
air travel was in the 1920s. As technology develops,
as Colorado continues to be a leader in developing
aerospace technology, we have an excellent chance
of being the pioneers who continue to push the
boundaries and move aerospace technology into the
21st century and beyond. Colorado manufacturers
have made their gestures to manufacturing and
launching spacecraft that will orbit the earth
and, possibly, even go beyond. Martin Marietta, today, produces
components for deep space probes that go as far out as
human-made objects can go. The University of
Colorado has one of the best aerospace programs
for research in the nation. Their aerospace
engineering program is one of the top engineering
programs in the nation. All of these things have
attracted more and more aviation to Colorado. And aviation, I believe, is
the second largest employer in Colorado and is the
second largest contributor to Colorado's economy
after agriculture. Forget about the ski areas. They're tourism. Space travel is just
making that transition now to where, instead of it all
being experimental and proving that it can be done, it's
transitioning into space commerce and viable businesses. The space tourism business is
about to take off, literally, as passenger spacecraft are
going to be coming online within the next few years. Denver is in line to
become a space port. NASA recently announced
its next class of 12 astronaut
candidates selected from over 18,000 applicants. 4 of the 12 have true
ties to Colorado, including University of
Denver graduate, Rob Cullen. The SpaceX launch chief
engineer hopes to, one day, fly a craft of his own design. We're pioneers in Colorado. Whether it's in the 1920s,
or the 1940s, or the 1950s, or the 20-teens, we're
still pushing the frontiers of what's possible. Colorado brings this
spirit of adventure, this feeling of
what else can we do, the feeling that
they can do anything. And so they do. There's a quote from Lindbergh
that kind of sums it up for me. "Science, beauty, adventure,
what more can you ask of life?" [music playing]
