Plum Island Airport, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, is a privately owned, public-use airport owned by Historic New England and operated by Plum Island Aerodrome, Inc., a non-profit corporation. It has two runways, averages 54 flights per week, and has approximately 8 based aircraft.HistoryThe first flying field in New England was on the dunes and marshes of Plum Island, about a mile and a half east of the current airport, where from April to August 1910, Marblehead yacht designer W. Starling Burgess conducted a series of test flights with biplanes that he and Augustus M. Herring designed and built.On February 28, 1910, the first airplane flight in New England took place when Herring – who had first tested gliders in 1895 with the ‘Father of Aviation’, Octave Chanute, on the Lake Michigan dunes – took off from the frozen surface of Chebacco Lake in Hamilton, Massachusetts, in a pusher biplane he and Burgess built. After the single flight, Burgess sold the plane and moved the operation to the marshes at Plum Island. He built a building and a wooden “runway” near where the dunes meet the marshes, about a mile south of the current entrance to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. The test range included approximately the area bounded by the dunes, the Plum Island Turnpike, High Road, and the Parker River. The aeroplane, called the Flying Fish, first made three short flights on April 17. In May Burgess brought additional aeroplanes from Marblehead and built an additional building. Tests continued through the spring and summer of 1910 with longer and higher flights.In August 1910 Burgess and his team discontinued the test flights in order to prepare for the Harvard-Boston Aero Meet to be held the following month in Squantum, on Dorchester Bay. As a result of Burgess’s interaction with the world’s leading aviators at the H-B Aero Meet, he sold seven biplanes to English aviator Claude Graham-White, believed to be the first U.S.-built aircraft sold abroad. Burgess also drew the interest of the Wright brothers, who contracted the Burgess Company to build Wright Flyers under license. Burgess built over a hundred airplanes of various designs through the end of World War I, when his factory in Marblehead burned up. He built the world’s first flying wing, the Burgess-Dunne, which he sold to the Canadian armed forces. He also built the first aircraft to both take off from and land on water. In 1915, he was awarded the prestigious Collier Trophy, still recognized as the pre-eminent aviation award for the greatest progress in aviation in the preceding year.
