For eight days in late August 1909, the city of Reims, France played host to Le Grande Semaine d’Aviation de la Champagne one of the first and most successful air shows of the new age of flight. The Reims Air Show riveted European attention on the airplane, awakened the public to the reality of flight, and fired the imagination of artists, intellectuals, poets, and politicians. Fewer than one dozen pilots (all but two of them French) took part in the meet. Still, the air meet at Reims attracted more than 500,000 visitors and cemented the airplane’s function as both an object of inspiration and a source of public spectacle.
In the months that followed, air shows multiplied across the Continent in places like Brescia, Nice, Monte Carlo, and St. Petersburg, as local aviation enthusiasts sought to duplicate the excitement and success of the French event.
America’s first international air show commenced on 10 January 10 1910 five months after Le Grande Semaine. It was hosted by the Aero Club of California at site just outside of Los Angeles in Dominguez Hills. The Dominguez Hills air show attracted some of the world’s most famous aviators including the first man to cross the English Channel in an airplane, Louis Blériot, the winner of the first cross-country air race, Louis Paulhan, and American favorite son Glenn H. Curtiss, who had claimed the $5,000 Gordon Bennett Trophy Race held at Reims.
Attendance at the Dominguez Hills meet surpassed expectations. Over the course of the ten-day show an estimated 226,000 spectators converged on the airfield, generating more than $137,500 for the event’s sponsors and helping to launch the aviation industry on the West Coast.
The Department of Archives and Digital Collections at California State University, Dominguez Hills has available on-line an excellent assortment of photographs, postcards, slides, news clippings, and programs from the 1910 meet. To view these materials from America’s first air show, visit CSUDH’s 1910 Los Angeles International Aviation Meet Research Collection.
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August 25, 2007 - 12:22 am
[...] Despite its recent origins (the first Salon was held in 1992), MAKS is steeped in history. As President Vladimir Putin proudly noted in his welcoming address, MAKS “continues the longstanding tradition of aviation parades and air show holidays that has always existed in Russia.” His statement was no boast. Tsarist Russia opened its first “International Week of Aviation” in April 1910, just three months after Los Angeles-area aviation patrons hosted the first such meet in the United States. Dozens more events were held in Russia during the years leading up to 1917. In the Soviet period, public air shows, exhibitions, and spectacles were commonplace as Communist Party leaders exploited aviation to generate public faith in (and foreign fear of) their country’s military might. [...]