IFew visitors touching down at Albany International Airport realise they’re on hallowed ground for aviation history – and innovation.
In 1910, Glenn Curtiss, a motorcycle daredevil-turned-pilot, completed America’s first long-distance intercity flight, between Albany and New York City, to great fanfare, while at the helm of his Albany Flyer biplane.
“It was one of the first planes ever built. Glenn Curtiss developed it right after the Wright brothers flew in 1903,” said Kevin Millington, head of education and outreach at Empire State Aerosciences Museum (ESAM).
We were standing in the museum, underneath a biplane made of wood and canvas; it was big enough to dwarf us but seemed small and fragile in comparison to the planes that take off daily from Albany International Airport, about 24km away. As he pointed excitedly at the aircraft above us, Millington explained that it is an original 1910 Curtiss Pusher model, an identical twin to the Albany Flyer (which is now at the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in New York’s Finger Lakes region). It is ESAM’s pièce de résistance.
“[The flight] was 150 miles and it might not seem like a big deal now, but it certainly was then,” he said. “It attracted a huge amount of publicity.”
A lifelong local, Millington has worked at the museum for 20 years (formerly as its president) and he told me his “obsession” with planes was stoked as a boy by his uncle, one of the first people to get a commercial pilot’s license in New York State, back in the 1920s. After spending the past couple of days exploring Albany and what’s known as the broader Capital Region (which also includes Schenectady, Troy and Saratoga), I could see why aviation is part of the DNA here.
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In 1910, Glenn Curtiss, a motorcycle daredevil-turned-pilot, completed America’s first long-distance intercity flight, between Albany and New York City (Credit: John Garay)
Perched on New York’s Hudson River, on the doorstep to the surrounding Adirondack and Catskill mountains, the city of Albany has a key location that helped it become the state capital in 1797. “It’s on the Hudson River between Boston, New York, Buffalo, Montreal. It really is kind of a crossroads,” Millington said. Throughout the city’s history, that location has made it ripe for transportation innovation – not just on water (it’s the east end of the Erie Canal, opened in 1825) and land (it was the site of the country’s first successful steam-operated passenger train trip in 1831), but in the air too.
Few visitors touching down at Albany International Airport realise they’re zeroing in on hallowed ground for aviation history. Dating to 1908, Albany International Airport considers itself America’s first and oldest municipal airport, and once attracted pioneering, headline-making American aviators like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart.
A lot of famous aviators were literally barnstorming around
“A lot of famous aviators were literally barnstorming around,” said Millington, referring to the popular traveling flying exhibitions of the past. “It was a period in the ’20s when aviation was growing and thus the demand for airports was growing,” he said, adding that the new breed of pilots were drawn in by the concentrated cluster of airports in the area.
Today, Albany and the Capital Region are building on that legacy as an area still pushing aviation into the future, via companies like GE Research (part of General Electric) and the arrival of buzzy tech start-up Wright Electric, an electric-aviation company that relocated its headquarters to Albany last year. Its lofty goal is to make short-haul commercial flights of an hour or less zero-emissions by 2026.
The Capital Region’s pioneering past is on display at the ESAM, where the wide-ranging aviation exhibits include more than 20 meticulously restored historic aircraft. These were sprawled across an outdoor lot, displayed in a building where they’re suspended overhead as if in mid-flight and parked in an old hanger where kids are invited to crawl into them. The museum is located on the grounds of the Schenectady County Airport (about a 30-minute drive from Albany), yet another area airport (established in 1927) that once welcomed Lindbergh, aboard his Spirit of St. Louis. It was also the site of the nation’s first jet-plane airmail delivery, in 1946. (Airmail had previously been delivered via propeller planes, according to Millington, and Curtiss himself claimed to have made the very first airmail delivery of all by bringing a note from Albany’s mayor to the mayor of New York City back in 1910.)
Notably, the ESAM unfolds in buildings from the former General Electric Flight Test Center, which operated here from 1946 to 1964. Millington attributed much of the region’s aviation tradition to General Electric’s advances in jet propulsion, avionics and missile control and guidance systems during its time there. Founded by renowned inventor Thomas Edison and headquartered in the Capital Region city of Schenectady in the late 19th Century, General Electric still maintains its research arm locally today, with a focus on aerospace. And at the historic Test Center, Millington noted, “You had a mix of scientists, engineers, military personnel, all coming together there.”
The exhibits at the Empire State Aerosciences Museum include more than 20 meticulously restored historic aircraft (Credit: John Garay)
Albany’s list of bright engineering minds goes way back and includes innovators like Albany Academy professor Joseph Henry, whose unpatented experiments with electromagnetism in the 1830s were used by Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as Curtiss, who pioneered the design of what he called “flying boats” and who ran the world’s largest aviation company in this region in the early 1900s. Today, that group is fuelled by numerous tech-oriented institutions for higher learning (like the State University of New York at Albany and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, America’s oldest technological research university) and by the companies drawn here by the Capital Region’s reputation as the centre of Tech Valley, New York State’s counterpart to California’s Silicon Valley.
Wright Electric founder and CEO Jeff Engler, explained that the area was a natural fit for the eight-year-old electric-plane company, which was formerly based in California and Boston. “We picked Albany because it has tremendous talent nearby because of GE Research, numerous top-tier universities, and centres of excellence in silicon carbide [which is used for the microchips in electric vehicles],” he said, adding, “When we learned about all of aviation history, it felt like a nice piece of serendipity.”
With partnerships in place with EasyJet in Europe and VivaAerobus in Mexico, as well as contracts from US government agencies including NASA and the United States Air Force, the company is positioned to be a major player in the commercial aviation world’s current shift toward green energy.
Wright Electric founder and CEO Jeff Engler shows a model of a motor for an electric plane (Credit: John Garay)
Small electric commercial planes are readying to debut in the next few years on major airlines (United announced it was buying a slew of 19-seaters), and Denmark and Sweden have instated bans on fossil-fuel-reliant domestic flights as soon as 2030. But Wright Electric is developing bigger electric airplanes that will carry more than 100 passengers each. If they succeed, their craft will be among the world’s largest electric planes.
As I pulled into the Wright Electric headquarters in the forested, 280-acre Saratoga Technology + Energy Park, it felt like I was entering a nature preserve, and I spotted cyclists taking advantage of the trails between the towering pines. Set on the site of what was once the Malta Test Station – a post-WWII, government-run rocket testing and research facility – the technology park is now owned and operated by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and marketed toward Tech Valley clean-energy companies.
Indeed, the greater Albany region’s fostering of clean- and green-energy initiatives like those at Wright Electric are taking shape all over. There’s a new fleet of zero-emissions electric public buses, and not far from where Glenn Curtiss took flight, the Port of Albany will be the site of the nation’s first offshore wind tower manufacturing facility, as well as a new hydrogen fuel plant.
Empire State Plaza includes the French chateau-styled state capitol building, the New York State Museum and the performing-arts venue The Egg (Credit: John Garay)
On the recreational side of things, Albany offers a thriving craft beverage scene and plenty of leafy urban parks. And then there’s the monumental Empire State Plaza, with its expansive reflecting pool, big-name modern art installations (from the likes of American sculptor Alexander Calder) and bordering attractions: visitors can pop into the French chateau-styled, 19th-Century state capitol building; explore New York State history at the architecturally striking New York State Museum; take in sweeping views from atop the 42-story-high Corning Tower observation deck; or catch a show at the elliptically shaped performing arts venue The Egg.
Engler imagines that in the next five years, visitors might fly into Albany to experience all of that via Wright Electric planes. “The Albany airport is a major regional hub, and it connects to all over the country. So, we would love to make that be one of our hubs,” he said.
Jill Delaney, president and CEO of Discover Albany, who is also a member of the airport’s Master Planning Committee, thinks that could be possible. “Albany has been an innovation leader for centuries, including but not limited to being the site of the first long-distance flight, and being home to the first municipal airport, today known as Albany International Airport,” she said, and added that the airport is a testing ground for GE airport technologies and that it’s in the process of hiring a sustainability consultant. As for electric planes like Wright Electric’s flying there one day, she said, “Assuming they meet all the current FAA regulations, that would be wonderful!”
