02-10-19 Website

LE ROY PENNYSAVER & NEWS - FEBRUARY 10, 2019 by Lynne Belluscio What do you do when there’s a travel ban in Gene- see County? Well at my house you start searching random his- torical stuff. So I thought I’d check up on the progress at the Air and Space Museum on the 1912 Olmstead Pusher that was brought out of storage and is being restored. It seems that there is an article about it in the FebruaryAir& Space Magazine written by Rebecca Maksel. It’s a great article about Karl Heinzel who retired from the Air & Space Museum in 2008. He worked in the shop for 34 years. But he came out of re- tirement to restore this amazing plane. As he said: “ Olmstead was way ahead of everybody. His method of construction, the incredible engineered machin- ery, the complete weirdness of his aircraft. For 1912, this guy was off the charts.” The article goes on to tell the story of Charles Olm- stead. I’ve written about him and the plane many times. He designed and built his own glider when he was 13. In 1908 he had his Phd. in astrophysics and was working at the Wilson Solar Observatory. Olmstead designed some pretty amazing propellers. Glen Curtiss used Olmstead propellers on one of his Jennys. In 1910, Olmstead was working for the Buffa- lo-Pitts Agricultural Company in Buffalo. With the new in- terest in flying, they wanted to get in on the ground floor and manufacture airplanes. They hired Olmstead to design a fly- ing machine. First, he built a wind tunnel, to test his designs. His plane design was a mono- coque fuselage with the ability to change the curvature of the wing. He also designed retract- able landing gear, which was a huge wheel. As the article goes on to say, “Compared to (Ol- mstead’s plane) everyone else was flying a box kite.) In 1912, The Buffalo-Pitts Company went bankrupt and was out of business. Olmstead tried to hold on but two years later he abandoned his project. The tail section was never built. The plane sat in storage in Buffalo for 20 years. It had to be moved, so Charles Olmstead took a hacksaw and cut off the wings. And the magazine article up to this point is true, but then I al- most jumped off the chair when I read: “The aircraft spent another 13 years in storage at the LaPaz Museum in Buf- falo, New York before it was donated to the Smithsonian in 1955.” WHAT??? Where did you get that information? No, it was shipped to LeRoy and it was stored in the old LeRoy Academic Institute building be- hind LeRoy House. (Which had been owned by the Olmstead family, before they gave it to the Historical Society.) I have the photographs of the plane in the Academic Building. (In fact the article includes one of our photos, and says it was taken in the LaPaze Museum in Buffalo. ) In 1955, the Historical So- ciety had decided that the old wooden building was a fire haz- ard, and the building had to be razed. They contacted the Ol- mstead family and asked what should be done with the air- plane. They made contact with the Smithsonian (before there was an Air & Space Museum) and it was shipped to Washing- ton, where it sat in storage. A few years back, a mem- ber of the Olmstead family contacted us after he wrote an article about the plane for an early aviation publication. He had tried several times to en- courage the Smithsonian to “do something” with the plane. He also wrote about the wind tun- nel trials at Purdue University. And contrary to Maksel’s ar- ticle which said that the plane was shipped to Purdue, he said that a 1/3 size model was constructed with a tail section made according to Olmstead’s plans, and it was the model that was flown in the wind tunnel. I’m not too sure who to contact about the misinforma- tion in the article. I do want to make sure that Air & Space has the facts. And I really want to go to Washington to see the Olmstead pusher. If you can imagine, it sits under the wings of the supersonic Concorde. As the article states “They made an odd couple, but the placement is appropriate. Both aircraft represent some of the most ad- vanced aeronautical concepts of their eras.” Heinzel says, “ I didn’t come out of retirement just for this aircraft, but it is one that I have always had a fasci- nation with. The whole thing is a work of art.” Fact Checking the Air and Space Museum