Arthur Hugo Wilder, of Penn Yan, New York, passed away Feb. 18, having spent three decades leading the restoration team at the Glenn H. Curtiss Museum in Curtiss’s native Hammondsport. Wilder’s engineering talents, masterful hands-on skills, and fierce determination led to the scratch-built construction of a remarkable string of flying Curtiss aircraft. The museum’s OX-5-powered fleet includes airworthy examples of the U.S. Navy’s first airplane, the single-seat A1 Triad, right up to the twin-engine seaplane America, which Glenn Curtiss built in 1914 to cross the Atlantic. The looming threat of European conflict scotched that plan, but the airplane was used as a pattern for submarine spotters built by the Royal Navy during the first world war.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/art-wilder-master-builder-of-flying-curtiss-replicas-dead-at-92