These plane crash pictures show one photographer’s quest to chronicle early aviation failures
Leslie Jones documented the growing pains of air travel
The 1920s and 1930s were a formative time for aviation in America. Passenger flights gained momentum after World War I, when decommissioned bombers found second lives as commercial airliners. Between 1930 and 1938 alone, the number of people using airplanes for travel spiked from 6,000 to 1.3 million. Emerging technologies, however, always go through a period of trial and error. And aviation, which only began in earnest with the Wright Brothers in 1903, had a steep learning curve. The higher you go, the more it hurts coming down.
News photographer Leslie Jones worked for The Boston Herald Traveler for nearly four decades between 1917 to 1956. His coverage of Northeast life at that time ranged from the quotidian (dog and cat shows) to the spectacular (murder scenes) to the bizarre (ice-encrusted fishing boats). A large selection of Jones’ photographs donated to the Boston Public Library after his death in 1967 reveal the lensman’s consistent interests in a handful of distinct subjects, however. One being his predilection for documenting plane crashes. It’s not entirely surprising that a photographer would find themselves covering so many aviation mishaps, given the exponential prevalence of air travel at the time. Many of these crashes were non-fatal, involving low-altitude flights with few passengers. Some are calculated crash landings. But a glance through Jones’ work on the subject reveals his interest in recording the people drawn to these scenes, in addition to the wrecks themselves.
There’s something unsettling about the onlookers milling about—children and others who’ve walked across empty fields to help with recuse efforts, or just to get a better look. Some even pose for photos with the wreckage. There is a “vast wrongness to them,” to paraphrase Bradbury’s 1955 short story, The Crowd. No doubt the fiction writer was inspired by scenes similar to those published in Boston at a time when machine-age innovations were coalescing with the aspirations of interwar consumerism. The world was expanding rapidly, violently at times, and the results could be as intoxicating as they were brutal.
