Page 16 - August2017

about 10 inches behind the wing leading edge.and then
the June Bug which had its stabilizer and rudder

The Silver Dart Revisited and Replicated

CAHS speaker was Doug Jermyn, president of AEA 2005, the
at the rear of the aircraft. Said Jermyn: “It flew very
name of which is a tribute to the original AEA or Aerial
Experiment Association. Doug took us back to the reason well, but when they went to the Silver Dart they moved
for the centennial celebration: the flight in February 1909 the combination elevator and stabilizer up front.
of the Aerial Experiment Association’s Silver Dart biplane —
and the construction over five years of a flying replica of
this historic aircraft.
As he explained, the idea of building a replica originated in
December 2003. A small group of Canadian aviation
enthusiasts who’d journeyed to the U.S. for the centennial
of the historic first flight by the Wright brothers stopped on
their return at a Tim Hortons in Fort Erie, talked and
resolved to build a replica of the first powered aircraft to fly That actually had a slight destabilizing effect on the
in their country. airplane, although it still flew very well.”
Historically, the Silver Dart was the result of a series of ever- Each aircraft incorporated the engineering lessons, and
more sophisticated design and engineering work done by sometimes even the parts, of the preceding craft.
the Aerial Experiment Association, which consisted of its
patron, legendary inventor Alexander Graham Bell; engine Planning for the replica started in the spring and summer
of 2004 and Jermyn (a 36-year employee of Pratt &
designer and manufacturer Glenn Curtiss, engineers J. A.
Douglas McCurdy, and Casey Baldwin plus, U.S. Army Whitney Canada as a flight test engineer and then engine
development project engineer) was elected as the
observer Thomas Selfridge and, as Jermyn noted, a small
army of workmen. group’s president the next year. A budget of about
$56,000 was set and fund-raising began.
The AEA’s first project was an aircraft called the Red Wing
Research was done through a wide variety of sources,
including Cape Breton University and the Canada Aviation
Museum, where director of operations Marc Ducharme
found a set of plans that had been donated by “Doug”
McCurdy in 1961. “That answered a lot of questions, but
there was a lot of engineering that had to be done, like
the brakes and the engine and the pilot’s seat,” Jermyn
said.
which took its name from the red fabric covering its wings The first component to be finished was the rudder, which
and, significantly, lacked ailerons. It was followed by the was covered in Ceconite, a non-shrinkable fabric, and had
White Wing, modern carbon fibre pushrods from radio-control aircraft
as internal braces. Some purists were aghast by this, but
Jermyn reported that Bell’s great-grandson Hugh Muller
instead chuckled at this innovative use of modern
materials and said “Alexander would be so proud of you!”
Hand-plaining the wing struts took six months all were
made from Sitka spruce, while the ailerons were made
from Douglas fir. The fabric covering the elevator, aileron
and rudder was applied by Wayne Cole of Vienna, Ont. –

whose fabric shop was later to become important in
another way.