Guyana will, on March 24, observe the 100th anniversary of the coming of the aeroplane to the local skies. For historical purposes, the following article is the first of a three-part series based on information extracted from the book, ‘Fifty Years of Flying’, written by H.S. Burrowes, and published in 1963.

NOWADAYS, the aeroplane is taken so much for granted, that even the Whoosh! of Pan Am’s giant jet over Georgetown  on a Sunday morning hardly merits a glance.
But it must have been a very different state of affairs just over 50 years ago, when George Schmitt, a German-American merely 20 years old, took off from Bel Air Park in something looking like a box-kite with a motorcycle engine.
This memorable event took place in March 1913, and it was the first ever flight in British Guiana in a “heavier-than-air” machine. It was just over nine years after Orville Wright’s epoch-making flight in Kitty Hawk in North Carolina.
Schmitt’s machine was shipped to Guyana and assembled. Sponsorship was provided by Sprostons, and the Booker Group of Companies, which in turn charged the public an entrance fee to the event.
The late Godfrey Chin, popular historian, wrote in his memoirs that  at 07:00 hrs on March 24, 1913 (an Easter Monday) the first aeroplane flight in Guyana occurred. The Demerara Railroad arranged special trains, and Sprostons arranged a special river excursion in celebration of that historic event.
The first attempt, on Saturday, March 22, had to be aborted when one of the eight cylinders in the engine failed. However, just after 07:00 hrs on the following day, the sound of the aircraft was heard above by the residents of Georgetown. This was followed by the official flight at 09:00 hrs, in the presence of the then Governor, Sir Walter Edgerton, and a host of invited guests and the general public.
Taking off from the Bel Air Park Racecourse, in the presence of a large crowd, young Schmitt flew over Georgetown and dropped bits of paper. The intrepid George Schmitt did another flight on the following day.  He subsequently returned to America, where he died in a plane crash in the same aircraft a little over a year later.
By the first half-century since Schmitt’s dramatic inaugural flight, flying in British Guiana had come a long way. Apart from international airlines which passed through the then Atkinson Field airport, there were a number of privately-owned aircraft in operation here, and the aeroplane had come to play a great part in interior development.
Soon after Schmitt’s dramatic Bel Air Park takeoff, World War I intervened, and there was no further flying activity over the Georgetown skies until 1921, when Major C.R. Cochran-Patrick, representing the Bermuda and West Atlantic Company, came to B.G. with a proposal to make an aerial survey of the country.
Cochran-Patrick flew to Kurupukari, on the Upper Essequibo River, in the Company’s seaplane, the ‘Chaguaramas’, making in two-and-three-quarter hours a journey that would normally take several days by trail, and sometimes weeks by boat.
This was the first flight into the interior of British Guiana, and though it was marred by a ‘mishap’ when the ‘Chaguaramas’ struck a submerged rock during takeoff on the return journey, it gave an indication of the big role aircraft would eventually play in opening up the hinterland. Following the ‘Chaguaramas’ accident, surveys of channels and obstructions were made in the Mazaruni and Essequibo Rivers.
In 1925, Real Daylight Balata Estates brought the first privately-owned plane to British Guiana. Christened the ‘FaireyNicholl’, this Fairey III D seaplane, Registration# G-EBKE, was equipped with a Rolls Royce Eagle 6  engine and radio equipment, and was used mainly for carrying the company’s employees from Georgetown to its balata deposits in the interior.
In 1927 the ‘FaireyNicholl’ carried the first official mail to the mining area. In September of the same year, the first search for Paul Redfern, the American pilot who was several days overdue on a flight from Puerto Rico to Rio de Janeiro, was made in the ‘FaireyNicholl’ over the coastal belt.
The ‘FaireyNicholl’  made about 50 flights to the interior between 1925 and 1928,  including a number of mercy flights. On one occasion in 1927, the Warden-Magistrate of the Mazaruni District, the acclaimed anthropologist Mr. Vincent Roth, who was suffering from black-water fever at the time, was ferried to Georgetown.
An attempt was later made to form an Air Transport company, but due to poor public response, the idea had to be abandoned, and the ‘FaireyNicholl’ was dismantled  and shipped to the UK in 1928.
Although the great future for flying in the colony was realised at the time, it was felt that an air transport service to the interior was not a feasible project. Then on September 22, 1929, Colonel Charles Lindberg, hero of the first transatlantic solo flight, landed in the Demerara River in a Sikorsky flying boat, accompanied by his wife. But in terms of the future of air transport in British Guiana, even the visit of the world-renowned Lindberg was overshadowed by the arrival of another trailblazer five years later.
On August 25, 1934, Arthur James Williams, United States pilot and mechanic, made an unheralded entry on the scene, when he touched down in his five-seater Wasp Ireland seaplane on the Demerara River.
The pioneering spirit and flying skill of Art Williams dominated the development of Air Transport in British Guiana. After a few advertising and experimental flights, Art Williams was granted permission to fly within the limits of the country under his United States Commercial licence.
Soon, the name Art Williams was to become synonymous with the idea of “busting British Guiana wide open,” to use his own words. Art’s plane was housed at the same ramp that had been erected for ‘FaireyNicholl’.
Coincidentally, Art’s first ‘mercy trip’ to the interior was to the Potaro Mining District to fetch Vincent Roth, who, again, as seven years before, was stricken by black-water fever.
In 1935, Herman Edgar Wendt, another American pilot-mechanic, joined Art Williams, and their teamwork contributed in no small measure to the opening up of the interior.
To be continued…