Ralph Lang Charles

Foil: 24 Panel: 4 Column: 2 Line: 24

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Sponsor

Honored by:
Capt. Donald W. Peters

By November 6, 1899, Otto Lilienthal had died in a glider crash in Germany and Percy Pilcher had died in a similar crash in Scotland. Octave Chanute was experimenting with gliders in this country, but he was in his sixties and got other pilots to test his machines. Orville and Wilbur Wright would not build their first glider until the following year.
On November 6, 1899, Ralph Lang Charles was born in Middletown, Ohio. It didn’t appear at the time that there was be much future for aviation, but Ralph Charles is still here to tell us that’s not true. A recent story in the Columbus Dispatch tells us that since the day of his birth, Ralph Charles has made “seven airplanes, two speedboats, a pipe organ, and history.” And he’s not done yet!
Charles recently passed his flight physical and has arranged to have a hangar built on the property where he lives near Somerset in Southern Ohio. He is going to buy a Cessna 150 and take to the air again.
“There’s a flying bug and I’ve still got it. You never get over it,” Charles says. He made the remark when Don Peters, a retired Trans World Airlines Boeing 747 pilot, arranged for Charles to take his foist ride in a jet – a Hawker operated by Executive Jet Aviation in Columbus, where Peters’ son works.
Peters and Charles have something in common. They both wore the uniform of TWA.
In 1929 Transcontinental Air Transport offered “train-plane” service across the country – coast to coast in 48 hours. Passengers rode a Pullman all night from New York City and arrived the next morning in Columbus, Ohio, where they walked across Fifth Avenue and boarded a Ford Tri-Motor headed west. They hopped across the country all day, boarded a train that night, and the following morning got on another Tri-Motor to go to Los Angeles.
This was also the time of the stock market crash and the beginning of the great depression. Ralph Charles was operating an aviation business and flying passengers and building airplanes and motors near Zanesville. His business went broke and he came to TAT looking for work.
He wanted to be a pilot, but there were plenty of those at the time and Charles was needed more as a mechanic. He went to work in the shop at Port Columbus.