page_title: Barnstorming
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Barnstorming / History / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Moisant International Aviators promotional poster from 1910.
context_page_description: Barnstorming was a form of entertainment in which stunt pilots performed tricks—either individually or in groups called flying circuses. Devised to “impress people with the skill of pilots and the sturdiness of planes, ” it became popular in the United States during the Roaring Twenties.
  Barnstormers were pilots who flew throughout the country selling airplane rides and performing stunts; Charles Lindbergh first began flying in this capacity. Barnstorming was the first major form of civil aviation in the history of aviation.
context_section_description: The Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss had early flying exhibition teams, with solo flyers like Lincoln Beachey and Didier Masson also popular before World War I, but barnstorming did not become a formal phenomenon until the 1920s. The first barnstormer, taught to fly by Curtiss in 1909, was one Charles Foster Willard, who is also credited as the first to be shot down in an airplane when an annoyed farmer broke his propellor firing a squirrel gun.
  During World War I, the United States manufactured a significant number of Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes to train its military aviators and almost every U.S. airman learned to fly using the plane. After the war the U.S. federal government sold off the surplus material, including the Jennys, for a fraction of its initial value (they had cost the government $5,000 but were being sold for as low as $200). This allowed many servicemen who already knew how to fly the JN-4s to purchase their own planes. The similar-looking Standard J-1 biplane was also available.
  At the same time, numerous aircraft manufacturing companies sprang up, most failing after building only a handful of planes. Many of these were reliable and even advanced designs which suffered from the failure of the aviation market to expand as expected, and a number of these found their way into the only active markets—mail carrying, barnstorming, and smuggling. Sometimes a plane and its owner would drift between the three activities as opportunity presented.
  Combined with the lack of Federal Aviation Regulations at the time, these factors allowed barnstorming to flourish.
caption: An advertising poster for the early flying exhibition team, the Moisant International Aviators
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