Welcome to the deep dive. So I want you to imagine
stepping onto a modern commercial airliner today.
You turn left, you peek into the cockpit, and
you see the pilot. Right. The person you are
trusting with your life. Exactly. But it's not
someone in a crisp uniform who spent I don't
know, years running safety protocols in a highly
controlled flight simulator. No, definitely not.
Instead, it's a guy whose previous job was literally
strapping himself to the outside of a biplane
wing for carnival crowds. Just a literal daredevil.
Yeah. And in the 1920s, that wasn't a safety
violation. That was actually like the only way
airlines knew their pilots were qualified to
survive. It's kind of wild to think about. It
really is. So today, we are exploring an era
when the people building the corporate foundations
of an industry were also literal, death -defying
daredevils. It is a phenomenal contradiction,
honestly. You have this brief chaotic period
in history where the reckless adrenaline junkie
and the stuffy corporate tycoon were often the
exact same person. Right. And our mission for
this deep dive is to unpack how one specific
individual completely embodied that contradiction.
We've got this really concise but fascinating
Wikipedia article today, and we're exploring
the life of Charles W. Holman. Better known to
history as Speed Holman. Speed Holman, yes. We're
going to see how he navigated the incredible
and honestly often fatal transition between the
Wild West era of barnstorming and the birth of
modern commercial aviation. He really is the
perfect lens for this because, you know, his
life traces that exact trajectory from the carnival
atmosphere of early flight right into the boardroom
of a major airline. OK, let's unpack this because
to understand the mindset here, we have to look
at the world he was born into. Charles Willis
Holman was born in Bloomington, Minnesota, right
at the very end of the 19th century. December
27, 1898. Right, and we have to set the historical
stage for you here. Think about what the world
looked like in 1898. It's a completely different
reality. Exactly. The internal combustion engine
is still this terrifying, loud, messy novelty.
The Wright brothers haven't even flown at Kitty
Hawk yet. No, that wouldn't happen until, what,
1903. Right, 1903. So, Holman is born into a
world where the very idea of human flight is
still considered literal science fiction by most
sensible people. He grows up exactly as the world
is discovering the whole concept of mechanized
speed. And he caught the bug incredibly early.
Like, long before he ever took to the sky, he
was chasing adrenaline on the ground. Oh, absolutely.
By 1917... when he's just a teenager, he is already
racing motorcycles at the Minnesota State Fair,
and that's actually where he earned his first
nickname, which was Slim. Slim, yeah, but apparently
Slim wasn't quite punchy enough. No, not at all,
because he later upgraded it to the much cooler
moniker Speed. It's a great rebrand. And you
know, racing motorcycles on dirt tracks in 1917
was no joke. Can't even imagine. You had primitive
suspension, crude brakes, and essentially an
exploding engine strapped to a heavy bicycle
frame. You had to be fearless. Right. But what's
really crucial here is what happens the very
next year, in 1918. The obsession shifts from
two wheels on the dirt to the sky. He desperately
wants to fly. But there's a massive barrier that
almost every early aviator faced. He's totally
broke. Yeah, completely. And flying was unimaginably
expensive back then. It was. The machines were
incredibly fragile, the high octane fuel was
costly, and the knowledge of how to operate these
aircraft was guarded by a very small, elite group
of people. Right. It's not like today. Exactly.
There were no commercial flight schools you could
just, you know, take out a student loan for.
So he gets creative. And what blows my mind is
how he actually got his foot in the door. Since
he couldn't pay for lessons, he literally bartered
his sweat. Yeah. He went to a pilot named Walter
Bullock and offered to wrench on the planes as
a mechanic in exchange for stick time. Which
is brilliant, honestly, because understanding
the mechanics of an aircraft becomes the ultimate
survival tool for him later on. Right. But free
lessons still don't pay for your food or your
rent. Exactly. So to earn actual cash, he doesn't
just, like, get a normal side gig. He starts
doing parachute jumps and wing walking. Just
casually walking out onto the canvas wing of
an airplane mid -flight to pay the bills. It's
wild to think about that as a financial strategy.
It's almost like a modern extreme sports unpaid
intern doing death -defying stunts just to get
course credit. That's a great way to put it.
Right. You are personally funding your entry
into a whole new industry using this completely
reckless hustle because polite society thought
you were out of your mind. What's fascinating
here is the pure economic grit of these early
aviators. We tend to look back at barnstormers
and wing walkers and think of them purely as
thrill seekers. Yeah, just adrenaline junkies
showing off at county fairs. Exactly. But it
was a very necessary economic hustle. You had
to monetize your bravery. Wow. The only way you
could afford to put fuel in the tank and master
the incredibly complex mechanics of flight was
to convince people on the ground to pay to watch
you cheat death. It was a very blunt transaction.
You know, you give me a few dollars, I'll show
you something that might kill me. Precisely.
And for Holman, that hustle worked. He gets his
flight time. He masters the machines inside and
out. And as the 1920s progress, we see a massive
pivot in his career. Yeah, he transitions. He
does. The barnstorming hustle evolves into laying
the actual infrastructure for commercial aviation.
Because he proves he has serious skill. Like
by 1924, he takes second place in a competitive
flying event called the Onto Dayton Race. A huge
achievement. Right. And that competitive edge
lands him one of the most grueling jobs you could
possibly imagine in 1926. He becomes an airmail
pilot. This is a critical stepping stone. He's
flying the Cam 9 route alongside another famous
aviation pioneer, Matty Laird. And the Cham 9
route went from Minneapolis to Chicago. Let's
really think about the mechanics of what that
means for a second. It's brutal. Yeah, flying
from Minneapolis to Chicago in 1926 means flying
open cockpit biplanes through Midwestern winters.
It is punishing work. We aren't talking about
sitting in a heated cabin with autopilot. These
pilots were completely exposed to the elements.
They would cover their faces in thick grease
just to prevent frostbite. Good grief. And the
engines were incredibly temperamental in the
cold blake. Oil would literally freeze in the
lines, plus there was no radar. Right, so how
did they even know where they were going? They
navigated using what they called the iron compass,
which meant flying dangerously low just to visually
follow train tracks through snowstorms. Surviving
that requires a level of physical and mental
endurance that is just hard to even fathom today.
Yeah. But that CM9 airmail route is the seed
of something much bigger. Right. Because this
is where the money men step in. Right. A man
named William Bushnell Stout, along with several
financiers, look at this airmail route and decide
to reorganize it into a commercial passenger
business. OK. They form Northwest Airlines and
they hire Speed Holman as their very first pilot.
He eventually becomes their first operations
manager and then their chief pilot. OK, wait.
I have to stop you there because this makes zero
business sense to me. Well, if you're William
Bushnell Stout. or one of these wealthy financiers
in the 1920s, your biggest hurdle is convincing
a highly skeptical public that flying is safe.
Yeah. That they won't die if they buy a ticket.
Right. Safety is the ultimate product. Exactly.
So why on earth do you hire the guy whose resume
highlights include wing walker and parachutist
as your chief pilot? Doesn't that just screen
danger to your potential customers? I mean, it
sounds like a terrible PR move today. You wouldn't
hire a Hollywood stunt driver to be the safety
director of a public transit system. But you
have to look at the reality of the labor pool
in 1926. The broader context is that the only
people on Earth with enough flight hours to actually
run an airline were the daredevils. Because no
one else had survived that much time in the air.
Exactly. There were no corporate flight schools
cranking out trained professionals. The machines
were incredibly unpredictable. Engines failed
constantly. So you need someone who won't panic.
Precisely. The financiers knew that when things
went catastrophically wrong in the air, they
needed someone in the cockpit who had already
navigated a hundred mid -air crises. Someone
who used to fix engines while standing on the
wing mid -flight. Wow. The daredevils were the
only ones qualified to make aviation boring and
safe for the rest of us. That makes perfect sense
when you explain the sheer mechanics of survival
back then. And Holman wasn't just an employee
taking a paycheck either. What blows my mind
is that he became a major investor in Northwest
Airlines. He really bought in. Yeah, he actually
bought $2 ,000 worth of stock in the company.
Which is a massive amount of capital in the late
1920s. It shows he wasn't just in it for the
weekend thrills. He saw the structural business
potential. He was literally financially invested
in building the future of commercial aviation.
But, and this is the wild duality of the man.
Despite becoming a successful corporate executive
and a major investor, he just couldn't leave
his daredevil roots behind. No, he couldn't.
It's like his professional corporate success
merely funded bigger, faster, more insane physical
thrills. He was living a complete double life.
Executive by day, pushing the absolute limits
of aerodynamics by the weekend. And the timeline
of how he pushes those limits is just staggering.
Once you realize he mastered survival in the
open cockpit winters of the airmail rounds, it
makes perfect sense why he felt comfortable pushing
the absolute limits of g -force and speed in
the late 20s. Right, he was already forged in
the fire. Exactly. So in 1927, he wins the New
York to Spokane cross -country air derby in a
layered commercial biplane. That same year, he
gets his first official pilot's license and the
signature on that license. Orville Wright himself.
That detail alone shows you how incredibly compressed
this technological history is. It's crazy. The
man who invented the airplane is physically signing
the commercial license for the man who was building
one of the first major passenger airlines. The
dawn of flight and the dawn of the corporate
airline industry overlap perfectly right there
on that piece of paper. It's an amazing historical
collision, but Holman doesn't stop. By 1928,
cross -country endurance isn't enough. He decides
to set a looping record over the St. Paul Airport.
And this is a record of pure, punishing physical
endurance as much as it is of piloting skill.
Here's where it gets really interesting, because
there's actually a funny historical discrepancy
we uncovered in the source text for this. Oh
yeah, the numbers. Right. On one hand, the Wikipedia
article states he did 1 ,433 consecutive loops
in five hours. But right next to that... A photo
caption claims it was 1 ,093 loops in four hours
and 27 minutes. A bit of historical fuzziness,
which is, you know, common for early aviation
records. Yeah, but honestly, either way you slice
the math, the man spent roughly half a day doing
nonstop somersaults in the sky. If it was the
1 ,433 loops in five hours, that's nearly five
loops every single minute. That is just nauseating
to think about. Can you imagine the inner ear
damage, the sheer centrifugal force draining
the blood from your head over and over again?
It's a relentless physical punishing of his own
body. It is. And he escalated the danger even
further the very next year. In 1929, while serving
as a leading executive pilot for Northwest, he
becomes the fourth person in the entire world
to perform an outside loop. Wow. And the very
first person to ever do it in a commercial aircraft.
Okay, we need to explain the physics of an outside
loop because it is terrifying. Normally, when
you loop a plane, you pull the nose up and go
over backwards. The positive g -forces push you
safely down into your seat. Right, like a roller
coaster. Exactly. But in an outside loop, you
push the nose down and loop under. Which entirely
reverses the aerodynamic stress on the airplane.
Right. In 1929, an outside loop was considered
an absolute death sentence for the airframe.
The wings of commercial biplanes were braced
with wires meant to handle air pressure pushing
from the bottom up. So pushing down? Pushing
the nose down into an outside loop reverses that
stress, threatening to literally rip the wooden
wings right off the q -slot. Not to mention,
the negative G -forces are trying to violently
eject the pilot out of the open cockpit. And
he's held in by nothing but a primitive lap belt.
It's just a lap belt, while rushing all the blood
directly into his brain, what pilots call a red
-out. Doing that in a passenger plane speaks
to his absolute mastery of the machine. He knew
exactly where the structural breaking point of
the aircraft was, and he loved to dance right
on that invisible line. He really did. Which
leads us to what is perhaps his most famous racing
moment, the 1930 Thompson Trophy. Oh, this story
is incredible. So Maddie Laird, the guy Holman
used to fly the grueling airmail routes with,
was commissioned to build a racing plane for
the Thompson Trophy race. It was called the Laird
Solution. OK. And it was built for a pilot named
Lee Schoenherr who flew for B .F. Goodrich. Right.
A very prominent pilot with a major corporate
sponsor. Yeah. But Schoenherr looks at the calendar.
looks at the plane being built and backs out.
He refuses to fly it because the aircraft hasn't
been properly tested. He essentially thinks it's
a death trap. Which, let's be clear, is a perfectly
reasonable, logical, self -preserving corporate
decision. A racing plane is built for pure speed.
It's got stubby wings, a massive engine. It is
inherently unstable. Exactly. But where a sensible
pilot backs away, Speed Holman steps in. He enters
this untested plane. And how exactly do you test
an airplane in 1930? You don't put it in a wind
tunnel. No, you physically take it up. Right.
Holman flew this plane in the actual race only
a few minutes after he flew it on its maiden
flight. Think about the mechanics of what he's
doing in those few minutes. He takes off, and
he has to instantly feel the vibration in the
stick. If the ailerons start fluttering, the
wing is about to fail. He has to listen to the
pitch of the engine, feel the rudder authority.
He is processing all of this raw tactile engineering
data at 200 miles an hour. He basically takes
it around the block once to make sure the wings
don't snap off, and then lines up against the
best racers in the world. and he wins. It's unbelievable.
He wins the Thompson Trophy at an average speed
of nearly 202 miles per hour. That moment in
1930 perfectly encapsulates his personality,
jumping into an untested machine because the
original pilot was too scared. It wasn't a blind
death wish though, it was a calculated risk.
He trusted his own mechanical knowledge, from
his days bartering mechanic work for flight lessons,
more than he feared the unknown variables of
the new plane. But when you constantly escalate
that level of risk, you know, when you make a
habit of operating at the absolute edge of physics
and structural engineering, there's a brutal
math to it. There is. And sadly, the hosts of
that math eventually come to collect. It brings
us to the inevitable tragedy. The conclusion
of Holman's story is solemn, but given everything
we've just discussed about the aerodynamic limits
he was pushing, perhaps not surprising. On May
17, 1931, Charles Speed Holman died. He was only
32 years old. 32. It's staggering to think about
how much infrastructural history he crammed into
barely three decades of life. The details of
the crash are heartbreaking. He was at the opening
of an airport in Omaha, Nebraska. He was doing
what he always did, pushing the limits, entertaining
the crowd. Yeah. He was flying his aircraft upside
down and he crashed. Right in front of 20 ,000
spectators. Just imagine being one of those 20
,000 spectators. You show up to celebrate the
miracle of flight. only to witness the brutal
reality of its dangers. It must have been horrific.
And we have to talk about the macro effect of
that crash. When Holman crashes in front of 20
,000 people, it isn't just a localized tragedy.
Right. It is a massive industry -wide PR crisis.
Exactly. Northwest Airlines and these other commercial
companies are trying to sell the illusion of
safety to the general public. Yeah. And their
chief pilot, the guy supposed to represent ultimate
control, just died a very public, very violent
death. It shatters that illusion instantly. It
was a deeply traumatic reminder that while aviation
was rapidly becoming a standardized business,
the sky was still an incredibly unforgiving environment
that frankly did not care about corporate charters.
The outpouring of grief was massive. His funeral
was one of the largest ever held in St. Paul,
Minnesota. The community lost a hero, but they
made sure his legacy was permanently cemented
in the region's infrastructure. His name is still
woven all throughout Minnesota aviation today.
Yeah, the list of honors from the source is extensive.
The St. Paul downtown airport was named Holman
Field in his honor. The Holman Field administration
building is actually listed on the National Register
of Historic Places. Oh, wow. There is a Holman
Street in St. Paul. There is even a restaurant
located right at the airport called Holman's
Table. And of course, he was inducted into the
Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame. They made sure
his name would outlast his incredibly short life.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, it's
about... what those 32 years actually represented.
Right. He lived fast enough to see aviation transition
from a dangerous novelty to a foundational global
industry. From Orville Wright physically signing
a sporting license to navigating the freezing
airmail routes to the establishment of Northwest
Airlines. He saw it all. He was the vital bridge.
And he literally sacrificed his life to push
those engineering limits forward so that the
rest of us could eventually buy a ticket and
safely complain about the leg room. So what does
this all mean? When we distill this deep dive
down, the real takeaway for you listening is
about recognizing the incredible duality of a
figure like Speed Holman. He wasn't just a reckless
adrenaline junkie chasing the next high, and
he wasn't just a stuffy corporate pioneer crunching
numbers in a hanger. He was both. Exactly both.
His story reminds us that sometimes profound
technological progress requires individuals who
are willing to operate at the absolute dangerous
edge of safety. The comfortable board rooms and
the strict safety regulations only arrive after
people like Holman have mapped out where the
fatal edges actually are. This raises an important
question though and it's something I think we
should all reflect on. We look back at early
aviation and we can clearly see that it required
these daredevils to build the foundation of a
safe industry. But look at the emerging industries
of today. It makes you wonder if the pioneers
of today's tech industries like commercial space
play or artificial intelligence or biotechnology.
were forced to physically ride inside the machines
they are building, the way Speed Holman did,
would they push the limits just as fast? Oh,
that's a great point. Would the whole move fast
and break things ethos look completely different
if it was their own lives on the line? Are we
prepared for the crashes that inevitably happen
before those industries become safe? That is
exactly the right question to leave on. The frontier
always demands a price and it changes everything
when you're the one paying it. I want to thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
today. Keep questioning the world around you,
stay curious, and keep seeking out these incredible
complex stories that are hiding right in plain
sight.