as we don’t have the space and/or facilities to properly preserve them. Thus, a pressing need to establish a
formulated plan for the future. We earnestly ask for your help.
Phase 1 – Seek suggestion from anyone willing to make them for additions, deletions or modification to
exhibits, preservation of artifacts, research facility etc. Suggestions should not be restrained by size and/or financial
considerations nor should suggestions be tempered by any speculation regarding the future of NWA.
Phase 2 – Gather a group of volunteers (be it 10, 20 or for that matter 100 interested people) to evaluate all
the suggestions and seek clarification and modification as maybe needed.
Phase 3 – Put the pencil to the paper and formulate a plan to implement the ideas but also to find some way
to finance the project.
Phase 4 – Just Do It !!!
TRY IT - YOU’LL LIKE IT
Have you ever tried or looked at our web-site. It contains a lot on Information.
Please look us up and give us your comments In the Guest Book.
www.NWAHistory.org
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MINNESOTA’S FIRST AVIATOR
The first man to fly a motor-powered airplane off a flat surface in Minnesota was a nationally-known
builder of sailboats. He was John O. Johnson, a Norwegian immigrant who, in 1896, founded Johnson Boat Works
in White Bear Lake and designed the famous inland lakes racing scow which to this day remains the fastest (and
most beautiful) mono-hulled inland lakes sailboat afloat.
Johnson piloted his plane off the ice of White Bear Lake January 25, 1910, according to the St. Paul
Dispatch. It flew bout 200 feet and reached 20 feet in altitude “when the engine started missing fire.” It landed
harshly breaking the propeller, rudder and pine runners but Johnson was unhurt. He was confident that he could
have flown further and higher but for the balky engine.
The plane reportedly looked something like a giant dragonfly. Its two high wings, each about 30 feet long
and a little more than eight feet wide, were placed one behind the other about six feet apart. Its motor was behind
and below the front wing and the pilot sat behind the motor. The front wing was fixed and the rear one tilted up and
down. Runners were an integral part of the overall structure.
Power was furnished by a Roberts two-cycle, 20-horsepower engine weighing 250 pounds. With
framework and wings weighing 350 and Johnson 155, gross weight was 755 pounds. About 500 feet of sail (wing
area) provided lift.
“I wanted an engine about 50 pounds lighter with the same horsepower,” Johnson said. “Then I know the
plane would have flown well.” Hopeful of obtaining the engine he wanted, Johnson, a bonafide design genius,
started working on a second airplane only days later, “different from the first machine but still unlike those of the
Wrights, Curtiss and the others.”
Due to various problems, including financial ones, the second engine did not materialize. So in June, 1910,
Johnson placed his second plane on a platform fastened behind a motorboat on White Bear Lake. The motorboat
folks worked one end of a long length of rope with a winch. The other end was fastened to the plane.
As the motorboat sped off the plane, with Johnson in it, left its platform and rose kite-like into the clear
azure sky. Obviously, Johnson’s second plane design was something to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, the rope
broke and Johnson and his second plane landed in the water near Manitou Island. Though his hopes to really fly
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