Foil: 9 Panel: 4 Column: 2 Line: 100

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Ms. Betty L. Coats

From Clayton News-Star, Tuesday, 20 May 1997, page 1B (continuation on page 2B not available). Ellington Air Force Base, Texas, is named for Lt Ellington.

The story of Eric Lamar Ellington of Clayton is a tale of how our government was finally induced to begin taking aviation seriously after years of inexcusable underfunding and neglect that cost him his life.

His story helps to explain how the United States could enter World War I without a combat airplane of its own and end the war the same way, at dire cost to our fighting men.

Ellington was seventh in his Annapolis class of 309, the first Naval officer transferred to the Army by executive order, among the Army's first flying instructors, first Tar Heel killed in a plane crash, first American given a funeral with full military honors at a site other than Arlington National Cemetery, and the pride and sorrow of his hometown —Clayton.

Eric Ellington was born in Clayton on May 15, 1889, son of Johnston County Sheriff and Mrs Jesse T. Ellington. Sheriff Ellington had been an officer in the Confederate Army. Eric, one of seven children, was educated in Clayton's schools and won appointment to the Naval Academy in Annapolis at 16. A brilliant student, he ranked seventh in the 1909 Naval Academy class of 309.

Commissioned an Ensign, he had seen extensive service, including a "shakedown" cruise to South America, when in 1912 he sought transfer to the Army, apparently owing to chronic seasickness. His transfer required the signature of President Taft and is said to have been the first such transfer ever made by executive order.

Within months of joining the Third Cavalry, Ellington, now a lieutenant, asked to be attached to the Signal Corps' aviation branch, genesis of the modern Air Force.

Trained at College Park, Md., and elsewhere, he won his wings in February 1913, just in time to become a member of the Army's First Aero Squadron, formed at Texas City, Texas, in March with eight other pilots and seven planes.
In June he was sent to North Island training field near San Diego, and in two months was named chief instructor there, the "ace" of his unit.

When he took a brief furlough home in 1913, Eric's sister, Lucille Ellington Hocutt, tried to persuade him to give up flying. His response was that aviation was "the greatest thing of the present day" and that some lives must be lost to insure its progress.

Even if he knew he would be one of those to die, he said, "I'd still keep doing it."

The air service was so poorly funded by Congress that North Island airmen, according to stunt-flyer Lincoln Beachey, patched their stick-and-rag machines with whatever scrap material they could find lying about the field.

The Army's planes were essentially the same type it had first bought from the Wright brothers in 1909, though many aeronautical advances since then were available on competing planes.

On the morning of Nov 23, 1913, Lt Ellington seated himself in his Wright C biplane beside a young trainee, Lt. Hugh M. Kelly. The Wright C, pusher-type with propellers behind its motor rather than in front, had a well-deserved reputation as a doom machine.

Of six the Army had purchased, three had already crashed, killing four airmen, the latest just nine days before.

At 7:25 a.m. Ellington took off and gradually climbed upward into the gleaming southern California morning. As he reached 300 feet witnesses heard the plane's engine begin to miss, whereupon Ellington cut his motor, circled, and began a "dead-stick" glide back toward the airfield.

The plane had been airborne for only about eight minutes when, at 120 feet, Ellington restarted the engine, evidently to avoid landing short of the field. No clear official explanation was offered for what happened next. The plane's tail suddenly shot upward, and the machine began to plunge directly toward the ground.

The machine smashed into the ground in a vertical dive, its motor tumbling forward on top of the aviators, crushing both. The impact of the crash was so great that it buried Lt. Kelly's body in the ground up to his hips. Both men died instantly.

The next issue of the San Diego Union bristled with criticism of the government for conditions at North Island. Beachey, there for an exhibition, bluntly accused the government in a front-page article of nothing short of "absolute slaughter" of the two young flyers. Facilities at the North Island field, he charged, were "a disgrace to the most prosperous nation in the world."

Beachey alleged that there were but three good planes at the North Island field. When the Wrights went to Europe in 1908, he alleged, they sold a hundred planes while the U.S. government was buying only three.

Japan's annual expenditure for aviation was 10 times that of the United States. The same page carried Beachey's telegram to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and to the Secretary of War with his offer to come to Washington and expound on the errors of government policy.

San Diego was in shock at the loss of the two airmen. As a memorial service was held and the bodies readied for shipment home, the chagrined secretaries summoned Beachey immediately to Washington to hear his complaints.

Worse still for the military, a number of its aviation officers staged an "insurrection," angrily sending a list of demands for change over the head of their base commander to the chief of the aviation service.

During the Washington hearings, the nation could reflect that the tiny military flying service had lost seven men during 1913. Those killed in the crashes of the Wright Cs were all victims of the same design flaw.

When its engine was restarted in flight, a blast of air struck the weak tail section and forced it upward, virtually insuring a deadly crash. Sending Ellington and Kelly aloft in the machine was little short of a military execution. The Curtiss pushers were no better.

In consequence of the disgust of military and professional pilots, numerous changes were made to improve the safety and morale of Army and Navy aviators. For example, no more pusher-type planes were to be used, no more married men assigned to the aviation services.

Nearly all the demands of the Army pilots were granted. Even though larger numbers of new planes were soon ordered, the Army suffered but three air fatalities in the next two years. Air Service performance and morale improved.

But the new funds provided by Congress were still far short of what would be needed if the United States were drawn into the war already raging in Europe. As a result, American pilots in World War I had to learn to fly English and French planes, their own government having none that could withstand combat conditions.

In Clayton, a town of 1,441 residents, Eric Ellington's grieving relatives and friends buried his body on Dec 2, 1913, beside the grave of his father, who had died in October. A chastened Army sent 10 riflemen from Fort Caswell, to offer a 21-gun salute and a mournful "Taps" over the remains.

It was reportedly the first time the Army had granted full military honors for a private burial. In 1917, an Army airfield near Houston was named in honor of the fine young warrior (now Ellington Air Force Base, TX).

An older brother, L Kenneth Raynor Ellington, after earning his law degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 912, fulfilled Eric's promise by proxy as a naval aviator in World War I.