Editor’s Note: Due to the lengthy nature of the article, this is the first of a four part series on the Key Brothers. The next parts will be published over the next three weeks.
The Smithsonian Aviation Museum in Washington, D.C. is now home to an airplane dubbed the Ole Miss, which not only saved an airport in Mississippi from being converted into a cotton field, it established a flight endurance record which still stands today.
While the country wallowed in the depths of the Great Depression in 1934, Mississippi was desperate for anything which would a create penny’s worth of economic growth. Cotton, for what it was worth at that time, was still king in Mississippi, and no idea for was off the table for most Mississippians. But the Key brothers, Fred and Al, were not most Mississippians. The Keys were told that the airport where they operated their flying service was about to be plowed up and planted in the white gold. They believed if they could bring enough attention to the airfield that it would be spared, and air service would continue.
Aviation was still in its infancy in 1935. Its full potential was yet to be developed. Flying enthusiast foresaw the airplane as a major means of transportation. The military was eager to further develop the airplane as the new weapon of war after seeing what it had accomplished in World War I.
Aviation pioneers of the day were aggressive and eager to promote the new marvel. In St. Louis, two pilots named Dale Jackson and Forest O’Brine circled that city for 420 hours, setting an official all-time endurance record. A year later the Hunt brothers in Chicago, stayed aloft for 554 hours, but their record was not made official due a malfunction of the onboard barograph which recorded their in-air time and other data. The Key Brothers from Meridian, Mississippi believed they could break the official endurance record set by Jackson and O”Brine, as well as the unofficial record of the Hunt Brothers, and in doing so, save the Meridian Airport from the farmer’s plow.
Al and Fred Key chose the Curtiss Robin monoplane for their mission which was owned by aerial photographer W.H. Ward from Oxford, Mississippi. The airplane was equipped with a Wright Whirlwind engine, similar to the engine in Charles Lindbergh’s famous Sprit of St. Louis. The brothers dubbed their flying machine The Ole Miss and painted the state flag of Mississippi on either side of the fuselage. The monumental challenge the Keys had given themselves would require money, the coordinated efforts of brilliant men on the ground, and a dedication which would test the endurance of man and machine beyond imagination.
The Meridian Junior Chamber of Commerce, the American Legion and private donations bankrolled the Key Brothers flight. Fund raising was an ongoing project as the Keys remained aloft.
In order to keep an airplane in the air the length of time which was required to break the old records, major modifications to the aircraft would be required. The Key brothers went to work. They recruited welder Dave Stevenson, who fashioned and attached a steel catwalk connecting the cockpit to the nose of the plane where the pilots could walk and perform the required maintenance on their flying machine. Frank Covert designed a modified and oversized fuel tank which doubled as a seat for the pilot. A mattress was installed behind the cockpit for sleeping as the brothers took turns at the controls.
The modifications added about seven hundred pounds of extra weight to the Curtiss Robin. Prophets of doom declared it would never get off the ground. But it did. Because of the extra weight the plane would be carrying, the pitch of the propeller also had to be modified in order to relieve some off the stress off engine. But perhaps the most important engineering feat of the flight was an invention by a local machinist named A.D. Hunter who worked at Soule Steam Feed Works in Meridian. Hunter probably had no idea that he was on the verge on inventing a devise which would change aviation forever.
Ralph Gordon of Union, Past President of the Mississippi Writers Guild and Recipient of the William Faulkner Literary Award
