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Show First Marine Corps Flyer Met Many Obstacles Aviation, now considered such a vital weapon in our present day system of national defense, was looked upon as a fad by military authorities not so many years ago and was not believed to be oi any special value as a war machine. It was nearly a decade after the first successful experiments made by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N. C. in 1903, that American fighting units took any definite steps to include airmen and airships among their armed forces. During the period following follow-ing the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in 1914, airplanes promptly prompt-ly demonstrated their worth in warfare. The first U. S. Marine to become be-come interested in aviation was an air-minded young lieutenant named Alfred A. Cunningham, who brought a plane he had rented rent-ed into the Pniladelphia Navy Yard in 1811, according to the story told by Captain Con D. Sil-ard, Sil-ard, USMC, Officer in Charge of the Marine Corps Recruiting office at the Federal Building, Salt Lake City, Utah. Lieutenant Cunningham begged begg-ed permission of the Commandant Command-ant of the Yard to experiment with the contraption and was given a reluctant consent alter being warned of the risks involved involv-ed in flying it. The warning was unnecessary, however, as the plane never made a real flight, Even after the young flier built a runway with a bump at the bottom he occasionally managed to get the plane only from twenty to fifty feet into the air. Sometimes its four-cylindered engine refused to start after an hour or more of back-breaking cranking and then the sputtering motor raised such a din that the pilot finally dubbed the plane "Noisy Nan." Undiscouraged by this early setback, Lieutanant Cunningham persisted until he eventually was assigned to duty at the U. S. Naval Nav-al Aviation Camp at Annapolis, Maryland, thereby becoming the pioneer flyer of the Marine Corps, which organization today is one of the most efficient and the most colorful of our country's coun-try's air corps. |