They sat in awe-stricken silence until the announcer gave out the words through the megaphone:
Then from every part of the great stand came sobbing of women, who but a short time before had clapped their hands to the daring aviator as he arose from the field for his fatal flight.
“Of course the success of this attempt is contingent upon the kind of weather I find up there,” said Hoxsey just before he left the ground. “Some of the temperatures one encounters in the higher altitudes are simply beyond human endurance. But, if I can stand it and my motor works as well as it has been working, I’ll come down with a record of 12,000 feet or more.”
Even at that moment the wind attained a velocity that kept more cautious aviators on the ground. After he had ascended it gained rapidly in violence. Moreover, it created a “Swiss cheese” atmosphere, the most treacherous meteorological condition that man-birds have to contend with.
There is nothing by which it may be known why Hoxsey did not go higher than 7,742 feet, which his barograph showed he had attained, but he had apparently encountered at that altitude the same conflicting air currents that finally overcame him. Notwithstanding this, and with the same reckless daring he had displayed during the last week, he descended by a series of spiral glides, and was performing one of his thrilling rolling dips, when his biplane suddenly capsized and shot to earth.
Over and over the aëroplane turned as it fell, with a speed so swift that of all the thousands who saw the tragedy not one could tell what effort the aviator made to save himself. When the wreckage had been cleared sufficiently so that his body could be reached, he was found planted firmly in his seat, his arms around the levers. The fall telescoped the biplane.
The steel sprocket which drove the propellers lay across Hoxsey’s face, the motor resting upon the right side of his body. Every one of the ribs on that side was shattered into fragments. An iron upright, broken by the force of the crash, held the aviator’s body impaled upon its jagged point.
The stop watches of the judges in the stand registered the exact second of 2:12 o’clock when Hoxsey’s machine turned over and plunged in its fatal fall. The news of the tragedy was telegraphed over wires leading out of the press stand before the machine struck the ground.