Cheating death was Jack Boettner’s job.
In the early, frightening years of airship travel, the gallant pilot stubbornly refused to become a casualty of his high-risk profession.
Boettner was calm and courageous, building Goodyear’s blimp program from the ground up while traveling 80,000 miles, logging 10,000 hours and charting a course for modern pilots to follow.
Known as “The Iron Man of the Airships,” Boettner served as the first captain of the Akron company’s fleet and remained a steady presence for 35 years.
John Alexander Boettner was born June 24, 1892, near Woodsfield in Monroe County, and moved to Portage County as a boy. He was a star fullback at Ravenna High School, where he graduated in 1912, and an All-American tackle at Washington & Jefferson College, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in 1916.
At age 24, he joined Goodyear as a factory worker, but quickly shifted gears after noticing a bulletin board recruiting 10 men to become lighter-than-air pilots. The company had landed a contract to manufacture blimps for the U.S. Navy and needed aviators to fly the ships at Wingfoot Lake.
Boettner was a quick study under Goodyear instructors Ralph Upson and Herman Kraft, and made his first solo flight in 1917. He secured airship pilot license No. 13 from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the world aviation authority, and held airship transport license No. 1 from the U.S. Commerce Department.
During World War I, Boettner trained 200 Navy officers to fly balloons and blimps at Wingfoot Lake.
An unblemished record went up in flames on July 21, 1919, while Boettner piloted the newly built Wingfoot Air Express over downtown Chicago. His passengers were mechanic Henry Wacker, mechanic Carl “Buck” Weaver, newspaper photographer Milton G. Norton and amusement park publicity man Earl Davenport.
The hydrogen-filled airship was cruising at 1,500 feet when it burst into flames, possibly from static electricity. Realizing his ship was doomed, Boettner acted fast.
“Jump!” he shouted.
In the event of an emergency, Boettner had equipped everyone with parachutes that deployed instantly as passengers leaped from the gondola.
Horrified observers saw the fiery airship plunge earthward with four parachutes floating below. Davenport, who stayed aboard the ship, fell to his death. The Wingfoot Air Express overtook the parachutes, burning their silk and causing the men to descend rapidly toward skyscrapers.
“The worst sensation came after my chute opened,” Boettner later recounted. “I began sliding down rapidly, and looking up, I saw it was beginning to burn. In an instant, I began to spin and whirl.”
Weaver and Norton plunged to their deaths with fire-damaged parachutes, but Boettner and Wacker landed on buildings, unwittingly becoming the first two members of the Caterpillar Club, a select group of people who owe their lives to parachuting from disabled aircraft.
The airship crashed through the skylight of the Illinois Trust & Savings Bank, raining fiery debris into the main lobby, killing 10 bank workers and raising the death toll to 13.
“I must have been dazed when I landed, as I didn’t know where I was until I rolled over and looked down into a street,” Boettner recalled. “I climbed down a fire escape. It seemed a long way to the bottom. …
“I was looking for the other fellows when four detectives walked up and arrested me on a charge of manslaughter.”
Chicago police grilled Boettner for hours, trying to make him admit negligence, but he eventually was cleared of all charges. Goodyear paid $250,000 ($3.6 million today) in wrongful-death claims.
After the tragedy, the company easily could have scrapped its blimp program, but it proceeded with caution. Boettner was named supervisor of the Goodyear flying field in 1920 and later promoted to manager of airship operations.
His marriage to Helen Houghton Bethel of Akron and the birth of their daughter, Harriet, did not slow his high-flying exploits.
The Goodyear blimp Pilgrim, the first to use helium instead of hydrogen, debuted in 1925 with Boettner at the controls. He later tested the Puritan, Volunteer, Mayflower, Vigilant, Defender, Reliance and Resolute. In 1928, his peak year, he made 603 flights.
Boettner’s famous passengers included Lt. Jimmy Doolittle, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, Will Rogers and Cornelius Vanderbilt III.
In 1928, Boettner famously landed the Pilgrim on the roof of the M. O’Neil Co. store in downtown Akron. In 1929, he helmed the Puritan as it snagged a 25-pound mailbag off the roof of the new post office on East Market Street.
Boettner advocated the use of airships for all sorts of whimsical duties, including deep-sea fishing, forest surveys, lifeguard rescues, search missions, coastal patrols, parade photography and mosquito spraying.
“A small dirigible provides an ideal means of quickly inspecting a large area,” he said.
In addition to flying airships, Boettner was an avid balloonist, participating in the National Balloon Races in 1923, 1926 and 1927, although that hobby also had its share of disaster. One evening while flying in a Lake Michigan lightning storm, Boettner risked his life again.
“The night passed with no letup of rain or wind,” Boettner recalled. “We thought we had been through everything nature had to offer, but the worst was yet to come.
“Suddenly out of the north we saw the waterspout. It struck with a crash. There was no time for anything but to grab the ropes and hang on. The bag was whirled into the air, then struck the water with a loud smack. Twelve-foot waves rolled in all directions.”
Miraculously, the waterspout moved off and the balloon regained altitude, landing safely near Holland, Mich.
During a 1926 international race in Belgium, Boettner and crew member Herb Maxson scrambled for their lives when their balloon iced up and dropped like a rock. Maxson frantically threw out sandbags but fell overboard when the basket lurched to a halt near the ground. The sudden loss of weight made the balloon shoot up into the sky, where it popped, forcing Boettner once again to parachute to safety.
Boettner served in Lake-hurst, N.J., as a naval reserve officer in 1931 and was in charge of Goodyear blimp bases in Chicago and New York during the World’s Fairs in 1933 and 1939.
He was a passenger on a trans-Atlantic flight of the German zeppelin Hindenburg and flew aboard the Graf Zeppelin to South America.
During World War II, Boettner served as operations officer and instructor at naval airship stations and flew blimps on anti-submarine patrols. He also established the first blimp base in Miami and commanded it until his retirement in 1952.
Jack Boettner cheated death so many times that when the end inevitably came, it was a surprise. He was a great-grandfather in Miami when he died at age 68 following a two-week illness in 1961.
“The Iron Man of the Airships,” a courageous pioneer, drifted to the clouds after steering Goodyear’s blimp program to worldwide fame.
Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or send email to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
