Greg Abbott recently honored in a proclamation naming November as Aviation Appreciation Month. Schad patented the design and sold the patent to the government in 1929.Ĭleburne’s aviation history adds to the many marks in the state’s long list of accomplishments in aviation, an industry Gov.

In addition to Rodgers, German immigrant to Cleburne Adolph Schad would design a single-engine plane that burned a combination of gasoline and castor oil. While Rodgers’ flight isn’t the only gold star pinned to aviation history’s bulletin board for Johnson County and Cleburne, it’s probably one of the most colorful because of the larger-than-life figure of Rodgers. In Rodgers’ time, the skies over North Central Texas weren’t slashed with jet contrails and newspaper reporters described planes in the skies above Cleburne as novel sights. 1 for its drooping right wing was less than successful, or rather about as successful as other pioneering aviators of his time, the bed-slat thin man made his mark in Texas aviation history for what’s arguably Texas’s first manned flight.Īs an aside, Rodgers and Orville and Wilbur Wright, might have a contender for being first in flight, according writer Clay Coppedge in his book “Hill Country Chronicles.” Almost 38 years before Kitty Hawk, a German immigrant to Texas, Jacob Brodbeck, designed and flew his steampunkish spring-powered plane sometime between 18 - accounts vary - either near Luckenbach or San Antonio. And then down it came, once he had flown about 200 feet, the crash breaking off the wheels and the right wing of the biplane that sort of looked like the aeroplane the Wright brothers got aloft almost a decade earlier on the plains of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.Īlthough Floyd “Slats” Rodgers’ maiden flight in 1912 in the plane he called Old Soggy No. He had to get the contraption up in the air to avoid a ditch, but up it went. If you had seen the first time Slats Rodgers put his aeroplane up in the air, you wouldn’t have watched for long.

Old Soggy No. 1 by Hart Stilwell