North Idaho flight history on display at museum

The Museum of North Idaho takes to the air this season with its special lobby display, “Wings Over North Idaho,” which chronicles nearly a century of regional flight. The season opened Tuesday and continues through Oct. 28.

Today is a free day.

The history of transportation in North Idaho has been presented in previous lobby displays of railroading and travel by automobile.

“This year’s featured exhibit explores local aviation beginning with Weeks Field as the first municipally owned airport in the United States,” said museum director Dorothy Dahlgren. Weeks Field is now the site of the Kootenai County Fairgrounds.

“Weeks Field went on to play a vital role in pilot training during World War II. Coeur d’Alene Airport, which was built during the war, continued to serve transportation and freight needs as well as Forest Service activities and forest firefighting,” she said.

She adds that the exhibit will include the history of other airports and as well as the many colorful, local aviators.

The museum presents the history of regional flight by dividing the display into five sections: “Joy of Flight,” “Float Planes,” “Hangar flying,” “May Day! May Day!” and “Wings Over the Forest.”

Each section features photographs and text. The large, glass, display case in the lobby holds model planes, radios and instruments and other aeronautical items. A poster advertising flying lessons reads, “Lessons 3 dollars, Landing 70 dollars.”

On display throughout all of the exhibits are artifacts from the early days of flight.

Visitors will see kerosene lanterns used to light dark runways in a time before airports were equipped with electricity.

“This was all they had,” says Dahlgren, “unless they lined up cars and turned on their headlights.”

The Forest Service exhibit focuses on the role of flight in fighting the region’s fires. A figure dressed in full smoke-jumping gear gives note to women who became smoke-jumpers for the first time in 1984.

“May Day! May Day!” is perhaps the most unusual of the exhibits since it chronicles regional air crashes, all of which are marked on a map as part of the display. The most unusual was the crash on July 19, 1933, of a Douglas O-38 near Twin Beaches on Lake Coeur d’Alene.

According to the printed story that accompanies the display: “Sergeant Harold Hanson and Lieutenant ‘Charlie’ Holter took a detour in their scheduled mission flight path so Hanson could drop a note to several of his friends (girls) who were staying at Twin Beaches.”

The pilot flew the plane, on his second pass, from west to east, skimmed the water and made a steep bank at a point where he thought the lake shore turned north. Instead he found he had another point to go around. Flying so close to the deck the pilot could not bank to execute a still sharper turn and, instead, attempted to clear the 300 foot hill in front of them. The engine stalled, the plane spun into the lake and came to rest upside down a few feet from the shore, a twisted wreck.

The two men survived the “slight detour” but were seriously injured, held together by pins and plates the rest of their lives.

A wheel, the size of a washing machine, is part of the display as are broken propellers from other aerial mishaps.

“Wings Over North Idaho” recalls a time when flight was new and when barnstormers traveled the country, thrilling crowds with aerial acrobatics and daring do, laying the groundwork for the age of flight that was to come.