Learning to fly was a dangerous business in 1917 and 1918. More than 14,000 of the men who joined the Royal Flying Corps lost their lives and 8,000 of them died while they were in training. The Royal Flying Corps (which became the Royal Air Force on April 1st, 1918) ran two pilot training camps close to Deseronto: Camp Mohawk on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory and Camp Rathbun to the north of Deseronto, either side of the Boundary Road. The camps opened in the Spring of 1917, with three training squadrons based at Camp Mohawk and two at Camp Rathbun. In the winter of 1917-1918 the Deseronto wing was transferred to Camp Taliaferro in Texas to continue training in the warmer conditions there.
Fifty-five men associated with these camps lost their lives, bringing the First World War very close to home for people in Deseronto. Local doctors were called upon to register the deaths. The picture below is believed to show Deseronto doctor Elgin D. Vandervoort (1853-1939) at the site of one of the crashes.
Of the 55 deaths, 40 were caused by flying accidents, 10 by the 1918 influenza epidemic, three from other diseases and two by other accidents. We will be marking the 100th anniversaries of these deaths as part of our First World War commemorative project over the next two years.
The chart below shows a comparison between the number of deaths over the course of the war of the Deseronto and Tyendinaga men who joined the army (in green) and those men who died while attached to the Deseronto training squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps (in blue).
Not all the crashes were fatal, despite the flimsy nature of the aircraft of the time. A report from the Deseronto Post on September 20th, 1917 describes one such event on September 13th:
On the same day that the Camp Mohawk fatality [the deaths of Cadets Domville and Kramer] occurred a cadet from Camp Rathbun was forced to come down, which he did in about ten feet of water, quite near the Iron Works. After the plunge he rose to the surface and climbing up the tail of the machine calmly smoked a cigarette until rescued from his perch.
On that day no less than thirteen machines were smashed up more or less and yet everybody seemed happy.
Deseronto Archives 
May 16, 2017 at 2:19 pm
Awesome work in pulling this information together. Crashes were quite common and design of aircraft allowed it to collapse on impact, absorbing the deadly energy so that most walk away (or swim!) as indicated in the news clipping. These aircraft were used for barnstorming after the war as a tribute to its maneuverability and slow speed handling. Various factors are cited for crashes including cadet afraids of flight (cadet killed in Vernon Castle’s plane froze on the controls), cadets unafraid of flight (some archive photos show these daredevils buzzing hangers) and the fact this was a early flight training school where pilots were sent up alone after relatively low hours of instruction. No time for creating muscle memories important for experienced aviators.
Was there any information regarding crashes due to mechanical failures either as hard number or percentage of total crashes?
May 18, 2017 at 12:37 pm
Hi Jamie – I haven’t seen any formal statistics as to the percentage of crashes that were due to mechanical failure, but certainly the 50 or so that I’ve looked at were generally caused by pilot error of one kind or another. If there was a mechanical problem, it tended to be caused by the pilot putting the plane under extreme stress, from what I’ve seen in these records.