Background
Bertrand Blanchard Acosta was born on January 1, 1895 in San Diego, California, United States, the son of Alphonse Ferdinand and Martha Blanche Snook Acosta.
Bertrand Blanchard Acosta was born on January 1, 1895 in San Diego, California, United States, the son of Alphonse Ferdinand and Martha Blanche Snook Acosta.
Acosta is reputed to have taught himself to fly and to have constructed and flown both a glider and an airplane in early adolescence. When he was sixteen he enrolled in Throop Polytechnic Institute (now California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena, where he studied engineering from 1912 to 1914.
Beginning in 1911, he worked first as a grease monkey and then as a flight instructor at Glenn Curtiss' flying camp near San Diego. Automobile racing also caught his fancy. Acosta sporadically barnstormed along the West Coast, attaining a reputation as an irrepressible but skilled flyer. Following the outbreak of World War I, he trained Canadian cadets for combat at a Curtiss school outside Toronto. Although Acosta himself did not see active combat, he aided the United States war effort as a civilian instructor, test pilot, and flying and engineering consultant to the Bureau of Aircraft Production. Near the end of the war he was appointed captain in the United States Air Service Reserve. After the war Acosta again worked with Curtiss, but as a test and racing pilot and engineering consultant for various firms. During this period he reached his prime professionally.
In 1920 Acosta took part in an important coast-to-coast aerial survey to assist in the establishment of the first transcontinental airmail service.
Acosta also had several crashes, including a serious one in 1922 that incapacitated him for weeks.
By 1927, when transatlantic flying had become the game, Acosta's expertise and escapades had established him as the most gifted natural flyer in the United States and one of the best-known civilian aviators in the world. That spring he was asked to pilot a flight backed by Rodman Wanamaker, whose aim was to demonstrate the feasibility of transatlantic passenger service and to project United States goodwill toward France. The aircraft used was the America, a trimotor designed by Anthony Fokker. Its crew included the polar explorer Richard E. Byrd as commander and United States Navy lieutenant George O. Noville as flight engineer and radio operator. The Norwegian naval aviator Bernt Balchen later implied that he was added as relief pilot when Fokker discovered that Acosta had never learned instrument flying. While a series of flight delays met with public criticism, Charles A. Lindbergh made his celebrated May flight and Chamberlin flew with Charles Levine to Germany in June.
On June 29, when Byrd finally decided to start, Acosta made probably his greatest flying achievement by getting the heavily laden America up and on course under conditions that had already caused one fatal failure of the transatlantic effort. Bad weather soon plagued the crew. In a memoir Balchen wrote that he piloted when visibility was bad; he also stated that Byrd's choice of an indirect route to Paris ensured their passage through stormy darkness over France and forced them to ditch off the Normandy coast. Noville and Acosta were discreet about the events of the flight, but newspaperman Charles J. V. Murphy claimed in a book published in 1928 that Acosta had his hands locked on the controls as the plane wandered over France and that Byrd was on the verge of clubbing him when Acosta collapsed and Balchen took over. Byrd merely praised his crew and blamed instrument failure and bad weather for the situation that led to Balchen's skillful ditching, which all survived. They were received as heroes in France and given a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
After his return to the United States, there was a slow spinning-in for Acosta. Low flying over a city and then stunting when he had been grounded cost him his pilot's license for a number of years. A venture he was involved in to build airplanes failed in the Great Depression. He increasingly turned to alcohol, and this caused further difficulties with the law. Rehabilitated temporarily by his daughters, he had a last aerial hurrah when he flew as a mercenary for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War in 1936; but the planes were inadequate, there was a squabble over pay, and Acosta almost ran afoul of American neutrality laws.
During the next fifteen years, Acosta drank heavily, struggled to reform, and despaired. Penniless, he collapsed in New York City in 1952. Two years later he died of tuberculosis in the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society's nonsectarian sanitarium near Denver, Colorado.
Acosta was a record-setting aviator. In 1921 he won the Pulitzer silver trophy in Omaha, Nebraska, for setting a world's closed-course speed record of 176. 9 miles per hour, and in 1927 he and Clarence Chamberlin established a world's endurance record of 51 hours, 11 minutes, 25 seconds over New York.
A heavyset and darkly handsome man, Acosta was genial and impulsive, with an appeal to and affinity for women.
The details of Acosta's first marriage are unknown, but in 1921 he divorced his wife, Mary Louise Brumley, with whom he had two daughters, and married Helen Belmont Pearsoll; they had two sons.
