Skip Fry of the Wilmington Marine Center, 3410 River Road, Wilmington [Map this], says he’s never seen one or heard of a landing.

This question also stumped spokesmen at Air Wilmington and the Wilmington International Airport. Gary W. Broughton, the airport’s operations manager, said that seaplanes could land there if they also had conventional landing gear, but he didn’t know of any docking ports for seaplanes in this area.

For the real answer, we had to turn to local aviation pioneer Anna Pennington, who remembers that seaplanes used to land in the Cape Fear periodically before World War II. The most famous occasion was on April 24, 1927, when a U.S. Army seaplane squadron landed near the site of the World War I shipyard, on the way back to Fort Bragg and Hampton Roads, Va., from a goodwill tour of Mexico and Central and South America.

The earliest seaplane landing may have been in 1915, when aviator Howard M. Rhinehart landed a Wright “Hydro-Aeroplane” at Price Aviation Co. in what is now Sunset Park. The plane, the Wilmington Morning Star reported, was “equally at home on the water as on the land.” Rhinehart advertised a series of exhibitions of his plane for Jan. 22-24, 1915, including a “race” with a motorboat. While preparing for the event, however, Rhinehart “hit an air pocket” over Swann Street, apparently went into a stall and crashed. The pilot emerged from the river, uninjured, but the plane was damaged, and the exhibition was postponed again and again. Eventually, the New Hanover County sheriff seized the Hydro-Aeroplane for default on a contract. Its eventual disposition went unrecorded.

Date posted: November 18, 2009

User-contributed question by:
David Staebler