Early History
During the first world air meet, at Rheims, France, in August of 1909, Eugène Lefebvre entertained the crowd with what was probably the first aerobatic performance. It was made up entirely of dives and steep banked turns, but at a time when seeing a machine in flight was a great novelty, Lefebvre's show was undoubtedly quite a spectacle. (In September, Lefebvre became the first pilot to die in a crash.)
While similar demonstrations took place at air meets during the next several years, stunt flying didn't really develop any further until 1913, when Adolphe Pégoud was hired by French aviator-designer Louis Blériot to test and display the maneuverability of the Blériot XI design. On Sept. 1, Pégoud made the first inverted flight, which had been considered impossible by many. Three weeks later, he added several more tricks to his repertoire, including a vertical Figure S, tail slides, flick turns, and a full 360-degree loop.
At the time, it was thought that Pégoud was the first pilot to loop the loop, but it transpired that a Russian Army lieutenant, Petr Nikolaevich Nesterov, had done it on Sept. 9 over Kiev. Nesterov was first arrested for placing Army property at risk, but was soon declared a hero and promoted to captain.
Pégoud went to England in late September to give a series of demonstrations over Brooklands Race Course and British pilots were soon performing loops and other stunts. One of them, B. C. Hucks, teamed with Gustave Hamel of France to give a stunt display at an airshow on March 13, 1914. Hucks performed eight consecutive loops and Hamel did something described as "a pirouette on the tip of a wing," most likely a stall turn.
Back in France, Pierre Chanteloup had advanced the art even farther, performing side slips, inverted dives, outside loops, and a spectacular effect he called a "tourbillon dive" in which his plane spun around its axis during a headlong dive from which he pulled out at the last possible moment.
America's first stunt flyer was Lincoln Beachey, who began his aerial career flying balloons and dirigibles. In 1911, he was hired by Glenn Curtiss in 1911 as an exhibition pilot. Beachey won headlines for himself and the Curtiss Model D Headless biplane when he flew into Niagara Falls Gorge, dove to within 20 feet of the water, passed under a suspension bridge, and brought the plane safely up and out of the gorge.
Beachey often raced above a track against a car driven by Barney Oldfield, finishing the race with a series of loops. He was killed on March 14, 1915, when the wings came off his Beachey-Eaton Monoplane while he was performing stunts for a crowd of 50,000 people at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. His death put a temporary halt to stunt flying in the United States.
World War I had begun in 1914 in Europe, where stunt pilots were using their skills to in aerial dogfights. Among them was Adolphe Pégoud. France's first fighter ace, who was shot down and killed in 1915.
Even before the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, American pilots were flying with the famed Lafayette Escadrille and other French units. Hundreds more were trained in 1917 and 1918. When the war ended in November of 1918, many of the young flyers wanted to keep flying when they returned home. Fortunately for them, there were hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to watch airplanes.
Air shows became enormously popular during the 1920s. Stunt flying, parachute jumping, and air races were staples of such shows. The stunts were often performed by professional test pilots hired by major aircraft companies who wanted to showcase their latest planes, but the U. S. military was also involved. Jimmy Doolittle of the U. S. Army Air Corps was famous as an aerobatic pilot and air racer long before he led the first bombing raid on Tokyo during World War II, and Al Williams was the top aerobatic performer and air racer for the U. S. Navy.
While stunt flying was a pastime in North America, it was transformed into the competitive sport of aerobatics in Europe. Mathematical methods of judging were developed independently in France and Germany about 1928. Both systems described specific maneuvers in detail and assigned each a degree of difficulty, as in competitive diving.
The French Aero Club conducted the first world championship at Vincennes in Paris on June 9 and 10, 1934. More than 150,000 spectators watched the nine competitors, who represented six countries: Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Portugal. Competitors performed an eight-minute compulsory program on the first day and a ten-minute free program on the second day. Two of the flyers were killed and a third survived a serious crash, but the remaining pilots insisted on going on with the competition. Gerhard Fieseler of Germany won the first prize of 100,000 francs.
Women didn't compete in the world championship, but they had already had their own competition, the Coupe Feminine, also staged by the French Aero Club. That event was won by Liesel Bach of Germany.
Another major international competition was held in connection with the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Again the winner was a German pilot, Otto von Hagenburg. Vera von Bissel, also of Germany and a student of Liesel Bach, won the women's event.
Since World War II
The tensions leading up to World War II and the war itself ended international competition in aerobatics and in most other sports after the Olympics. The Lockheed Trophy, established in 1955, began a revival of the sport, leading to the first modern World Aerobatic Championships, held in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in 1960.
Supervised by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the world championships have been held biennially ever since, with two exceptions: the 1974 event was canceled because of the international fuel crisis and the 1992 championship was called off because of bad weather conditions shortly after it had begun. Since 2001, the world championship has been held in odd-numbered years.
International competition, of course, required international agreement on a method of judging, which in turn required a system of describing aerobatic maneuvers. A French pilot, François d'Huc Dressler, had published the beginnings of a notation system in 1955, but he died in 1957 before it was complete. Nevertheless, Dressler's system was used in 1960.
The following year, Colonel Jose Luis de Aresti Aguirre of Spain published his own system and the Spanish Aero Club recommended that it be adopted internationally. The Dressler system was used again at the 1962 World Championships, but in 1963 the FAI decided to switch to the Aresti system for the 1964 event, which was hosted by Spain. The system uses symbols to describe about 15,000 aerobatic maneuvers and assigns a degree of difficulty to each.
Also at the 1964 world championship, an "unknown compulsory" program was added to the competition. Each team selected one maneuver for the program, and the judges then combined them into a sequence, adding figures where necessary. The sequence had to be flown without practice. The unknown compulsory sequence remains a stable of major aerobatics events, along with the known compulsory and the free program.
Since 1964, the world champion has been awarded the Aresti Cup. A separate women's championship was established in 1966. The winner receives the The Royal Aero Club Trophy.
The world championship stimulated growing U.S. interest in aerobatics. In 1965, the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, established a Precision Flying Division to develop national rules for the sport. The division was replaced by the Aerobatic Club of America in 1968.
Internal squabbles led to the formation of the U.S.-based International Aerobatic Club (IAC) in 1970. The IAC held the first true national championships that year in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
The struggle between the two organizations ended in 1981, when the National Aeronautics Administration selected the IAC as the official national governing body for aerobatics. Charlie Hillard became the first U.S. pilot to win the world title in 1972. The world championships came to the U.S. for the first time in 1980, when they were held at Oshkosh, home of the EAA. The 1988 championships took place in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, the 1996 event was held in Oklahoma City, and the 2003 championships were in Lakeland, Florida. National championships have been conducted annually since 1970.