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Revised NC-4 Exhibit Opens

Exhibits & Collections > Revised NC-4 Exhibit Opens

The placing of the spotlight on the NC-4 on an episode of the PBS series The History Detectives last year inspired museum staff members to expand the telling of the story of perhaps the most famous airplane in the museum collection. The new exhibit, constructed to resemble a wooden hangar of the type at NAS Rockaway Beach, Long Island, in which the NC-4 went through her final preparations before taking off on her epic flight in May 1919, recently opened adjacent to the mammoth flying boat. The hangar walls form a timeline of the brief, but storied career of the NC-4, which was test flown only twice before launching on its epic journey across the Atlantic, which ended in Lisbon, Portugal, when it became the only one of three NC-boats to successfully complete the journey.

Vintage photographs chart the flight and also reveal the aircraft’s post-flight recruiting tour and eventual restoration by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for display on the Washington Mall on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of her transatlantic flight in 1969. While display cases containing the host of brilliant medals and decorations bestowed upon members of the crew have been a fixture around the airplane for many years, the new exhibit for the first time provides museum visitors with a full history of the aircraft’s service.  The entrance to the new NC-4 exhibit features a banner made to look like one that might have hung during the era of its triumphant flight. The recruiting sign visible at the left is modeled after one that appears in a photograph of the historic aircraft on static display in New York City’s Central Park prior to being refurbished for a recruiting tour during the fall of 1919.

Also parts of the new exhibit are revealing portraits of the backgrounds of each member of the crew complete with life-size photographs of them. Visitors will learn, for example, that flight engineer Eugene S. Rhoads was a late addition to the flight, joining the crew the day it launch. He was only added after the original flight engineer, Edward H. Howard, inadvertently stuck his hand in the propeller of the NC-4 during an engine test and had it chopped off. Interestingly, Engineering Officer James Breese was the great-nephew of Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph and the “Father of American Photography.” Among the mementoes displayed in the exhibit is an example of a watch given to the members of the crew of the NC-4 by Glenn Curtiss, whose company teamed with the Navy to build the NC boats. Individually engraved on the obverse side, the watch’s face features an ornate logo of intertwined gold that forms “NC.”

The exhibit also highlights the trials of the two other NC boats that began the flight along with the NC-4, but were forced down over the North Atlantic between Newfoundland and the Azores Islands. The crew of one of them, the NC-3 commanded by CDR John H. Towers, sailed their aircraft into port. One of the artifacts in the museum’s collection is a piece of fabric cut from the wing of NC-3 by a sailor and used to write a letter to his mother.