Aerial Experiment Association

The Aerial Experiment Association (AEA) was a Canadian-American aeronautical research group formed on 30 September 1907, under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell.

The AEA came into being when John Alexander Douglas McCurdy and his friend Frederick W. "Casey" Baldwin, two recent engineering graduates of the University of Toronto, decided to spend the summer in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.

Bell wrote to U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to have an interested young officer who had volunteered his help, U.S. Army Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, officially detailed to Baddeck.

[12] The following design, the June Bug, also of 1908 and piloted by Curtiss, won the Scientific American Trophy by making the first official one-kilometer flight in North America,[13] although the Wrights had already accomplished this in 1904.

Their fourth flying machine, the Silver Dart, also constructed in 1908, made the first controlled powered flight in Canada on 23 February 1909 when it was flown off the ice of Bras d'Or Lake near Baddeck by McCurdy, who had been one of its designers.

[14][15] On 10 March 1909, McCurdy set a record when he flew the Silver Dart on a circular course over a distance of more than 32 km (20 mi), a feat that the Wrights had already accomplished in 1905.

It was also in March that Curtiss abruptly announced a new commercial venture—in partnership with Augustus Moore Herring and backed by wealthy members of the Aero Club of America—called the Herring-Curtiss Company.