Barnstorming
The Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss had early flying exhibition teams, with solo flyers like Lincoln Beachey and Didier Masson also popular before World War I, but barnstorming did not become a formal phenomenon until the 1920s.
The first barnstormer, taught to fly by Curtiss in 1909, was one Charles Foster Willard, who is also credited as the first to be shot down in an airplane when an annoyed farmer fired a squirrel gun and broke his propeller.
[4] During World War I, the United States manufactured a significant number of Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplanes to train its military aviators, and almost every American airman learned to fly using the plane.
Many of these were reliable and even advanced designs which suffered from the failure of the aviation market to expand as expected, and a number of these found their way into the only active markets—mail carrying, barnstorming, and smuggling.
[5] Bessie Coleman, an African-American woman, "not only thrilled audiences with her skills as a barnstormer, but she also became a role model for women and African Americans.
"[3] The sensational journalism and economic prosperity that marked the Jazz Age in the United States allowed barnstormers to publicize aviation and eventually contributed to bringing about regulation and control.
Spurred by a perceived need to protect the public and in response to political pressure by local pilots upset at barnstormers stealing their customers, the federal government enacted laws to regulate a fledgling civil aviation sector.
The laws included safety standards and specifications that were virtually impossible for barnstormers to meet,[citation needed], such as the minimum altitude at which certain tricks could be performed (making it harder for spectators to see what was happening).
Clyde Pangborn, who was the pilot of the two-man aviation team who were the first to cross the Pacific Ocean nonstop in 1931, ended his barnstorming career in 1931.
They would then land at a local farm (hence the term "barnstorming") and negotiate for the use of a field as a temporary runway from which to stage an air show and offer airplane rides.
