John Montgomery: First to Fly

In the early eighteen eighties, roughly twenty years before Kitty Hawk, a physicist and engineer named John Joseph Montgomery launched himself off a hill in Otay Mesa on a glider he had built himself. He flew six hundred feet at a height of fifteen feet. It was the first manned, controlled, heavier-than-air flight in United States history.

Montgomery had shaped his glider wings to curve like a bird's, applying what he understood about lift. He went on to patent an airplane design in nineteen oh six and spent his career teaching at Santa Clara University, building increasingly sophisticated gliders. He died in a crash in nineteen eleven, largely forgotten outside San Diego. The memorial standing near here was dedicated on May twenty-first, nineteen fifty, and its centerpiece is a ninety-three-foot stainless steel test wing panel from a Consolidated B-Thirty-Two Dominator bomber, mounted vertically, visible for miles. The Wright Brothers get the headline. Montgomery flew first.