Flying Tales of Flamingos and Waterfalls

I was actually searching for details about the extinct and largely forgotten metal airplane built at Ohio’s Lunken Airport (KLUK) in the late 1920s and early ’30s, and, specifically, about the guy who flew it in the ’30s, searching for a “river of gold” in Central and South America. The airplane was similar to other high-wing, strut-braced cabin monoplanes of the era but all metal and larger.

The biggest mystery is the name. This lumbering, 115 mph corrugated-metal, single-engine airplane looks more like an ungainly albatross than the graceful flamingo. 

At least two manufacturers built airplanes at Lunken in the late 1920s and early ’30s. Early Aeroncas were built there in a hangar that’s still standing. Twenty-one of the less familiar Flamingo’s were manufactured in a large hangar that was eventually moved to Middletown, Ohio.

After that facility closed, it was bought by Aeronca, which moved from Lunken because of the frequent flooding and the less than cooperative city of Cincinnati. The flooding problem has been tamed—alas, not the city. 

Ralph Graichen of Ford Tri-Motor fame designed the Flamingo for the new Metal Aircraft Corporation, financed by big money names like Fleischmann, Yeiser, Crosley, and others. The all-metal, high-wing monoplane with a sturdy 410 hp (later 450) Pratt & Whitney engine was spacious and sturdy but cruised at only 115 mph.

Allegedly, the prototype was assembled in a nearby glass bottle manufacturing building with plenty of room since it was during the depth of Prohibition. Alas, the completed Flamingo was too large to get out of the building (sound familiar?), so they knocked out part of a wall and towed it down to its new hangar.

The first airplane was christened by John Paul Riddle’s wife, Adele, and the Embry-Riddle Company bought three for its airmail and passenger routes between Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Chicago. Several more went to Mason-Dixon Airlines on its Cincinnati-Detroit route, and seven to US Airways with routes between Kansas City, Missouri, and Denver. A total of 21 were built when the Great Depression took its toll, and the company went out of business.

A pilot with a rather mysterious past bought one from US Airways in 1937. Jimmie Angel came from a large family in southeastern Missouri and claimed to have taught himself to fly at age 14. Angel’s stories (and there were many) mentioned he flew for the Lafayette Escadrille in France during World War I, for Lawrence of Arabia in the desert, and in China.

The verifiable facts are that he was a barnstormer, flew in flying circuses around the country, and hauled freight whenever and wherever. He did fly one of the 100 airplanes used in Howard Hughes’ famous movie Hell’s Angels. 

Angel’s career began in 1922, hauling payrolls for oil companies in Mexico. A reporter called him a “hell-raising soldier of fortune who claimed to be available anytime to fly anything anywhere”—and he could. He may have told wild stories, but Angel was demonstrably one helluva pilot. 

He’d heard of a “river of gold” in Venezuela from an old prospector who allegedly paid him to fly back and find it. By 1933, working as a pilot-guide for the Santa Ana Mining Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Angel was flying a Travel Air 6000 and working around a flat-top mountain in southeast Venezuela called a Auyan-tepui (or just “Tepui”) by the Pemon natives in the La Gran Sabana Kamarata Valley below.

He first saw the magnificent waterfall later in 1933 and wrote in his logbook, “I found myself a waterfall.” Assuming the shimmer of the falling water was the glint of gold, he made more exploratory trips for the Case Mining Company with his wife and various passengers to La Gran Sabana, where he took pictures and drew a map. The world’s largest waterfall was actually 3,212 feet.

In 1937, he purchased a Flamingo from US Airways and named it El Rio Caroni after the Caroni River that he and his wife used as a navigational aid in Venezuela. He finally raised money from a Tulsa nightclub owner, Joel Meacham, to support the next Tepui landing expedition with his wife, Marie, Meacham, and two passengers. The valley below the mountain where they camped wasn’t exactly a vacation spot. In fact, Meacham was terrified, so Marie stayed and guarded their camp while Angel flew him to the city of Bolivar—the closest thing to civilization.

After three helpers scaled the huge mountain and reported they’d scouted out a landing spot, Angel made a few flights over the area. He finally decided to land the Flamingo on top with four passengers aboard. After a normal touchdown, when the airplane hit mushy, soft ground, the main gear sank deeply into the mud, and the airplane went up on its nose and crumpled the left wing. They had plenty of supplies but no way down except a brutal, 11-day perilous hike through the jungle to their camp at the base. He did leave a note in the airplane that was finally found in1955.

The truth is, Jimmie Angel didn’t really discover what is now known as Angel Falls. Natives had, of course, known about it, and an explorer named Ernesto Sanchez La Cruz had formally discovered it in 1910 as it was mostly unknown to the rest of the world.

Angel would make trips back to Venezuela as well as on gold mining expeditions to Mexico and South America amid several revolutions. But he never found the river of gold. The family—Marie and his two sons—lived for a time in Central America, but it wasn’t good for the boys’ health, so they moved to Santa Barbara, California, in 1954. But civilization didn’t have much appeal for Angel, who was still obsessed with the idea of finding that river of gold. 

In May 1956, he bought a Cessna 180 but crashed it in Panama. Unsecured cargo in the back smacked him from behind, but he walked away with just a bump on his head. A few days later he suffered a stroke and was in and out of hospitals in Panama. He never recovered and died at age 57 that December.

Originally, his ashes were interred in the Portal of the Folded Wings in Burbank, California, but his wife moved them, scattering them as he’d requested over Angel Falls.

This column first appeared in the October Issue 951 of the FLYING print edition.