Even at the early hour, nearly a hundred groggy spectators had
assembled at the edge of the field. With virtually no fanfare,
Curtiss took the pilot’s seat in the airplane-one of a handful
of airplanes that he had designed and built. A fabric-covered
pusher biplane, it had a large wooden propeller that sat behind
a dual set of wings. Because Curtiss would make the entire
flight over the Hudson River, he had fitted an airtight metal
pontoon beneath each wing and, from cloth used for hot-air
balloons, had sewn five small air bags and roped them, inflated,
onto the undercarriage of the airplane’s frame. The Hudson Flyer
was thus the world’s first “amphibian plane.” It could not take
off from water (Curtiss would brilliantly solve that problem the
following year), but as he and his friend and assistant Henry
Kleckler proved in earlier tests, it could handily accomplish a
water landing.From his perch on the makeshift runway, Curtiss
noted the direction of the smoke from factory stacks to judge
wind direction as he