The United States had also experimented on a limited basis with military operations in aircraft. Glenn Curtiss experimented with the plane as a means of bombardment in June 1910 with his Golden Flyer. On August 20, 1910, at Sheepshead Bay racetrack near New York City, Lieutenant James Fickel fired the first shot from an airplane--a rifle at a target from an altitude of 100 feet (30 meters) with Glenn Curtiss piloting.
On November 14, 1910, Eugene Ely made the first takeoff from a warship, the cruiser Birmingham, anchored near Hampton Roads, Virginia, in the Curtiss Hudson Flyer. On January 18, 1911, he made the first carrier landing onto a 125-foot (38-meter) platform on the warship Pennsylvania, anchored in San Francisco Bay.
In 1912, an Army officer, Captain C.D. Chandler, fired a 750-round-per-minute, air-cooled recoilless machine gun successfully from a Wright B flyer over College Park, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. But, in spite of these achievements, no country had developed an air attack or bomber by this time.
