08/22/2026
Berry and Janus would not be happy with this image. Neither would Benoist.
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On March 1, 1912, Captain Albert Berry climbed into an airplane near St. Louis with a plan that still sounds reckless more than a century later. According to the Smithsonian, Berry went aloft in a Benoist pusher-type airplane piloted by Tony Jannus. The aircraft climbed to about 1,500 feet. Attached beneath it was a conical container holding a parachute. Berry was going to leave a moving airplane and trust that the device would open in time for him to reach the ground at Jefferson Barracks.
Early aviation was still an experiment in public. Airplanes were fragile frames of wood, wire and fabric. Pilots flew in open air. Engines were unreliable compared with anything modern. Parachuting had existed from balloons, but jumping from a powered airplane created a different problem: airflow, aircraft structure, timing and the violent transition from machine to free fall all had to work. Berry's descent became one of the landmark early demonstrations that a parachute could be used from an airplane. The National Air and Space Museum preserves an image identifying Berry in St. Louis on that date, using a parachute pulled from a conical pack attached to the Benoist aircraft.
The Missouri setting makes the story even better. Jefferson Barracks is usually associated with military history, not the edge of aviation experimentation. Yet the same ground that had seen generations of soldiers became the landing place for a man dropping out of one of the newest machines on earth. That combination of old military landscape and new technology is pure early-20th-century America. The height matters because 1,500 feet gives the scene scale: Berry was not stepping off a tower for a stunt. He was leaving an airplane with enough altitude for a parachute system to prove itself. If you had been standing on the grounds at Jefferson Barracks watching that tiny aircraft overhead, would you have believed anyone was actually about to jump out of it?
