Visitors looking at the Early Flight display case at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center will see a checkerboard “Early Bird” cap belonging to Elmo Neale Pickerill, an early aviator recognized as the pioneer of aircraft radio. For years it was believed that on August 4, 1910, Pickerill made the first radio-telegraphic communication between the air and the ground while flying solo in a Curtiss pusher from Mineola, Long Island, to Manhattan Beach and back.
