Monoplane Differs From Biplane in all Respects. Mestach, Who Will Fly at Fair in This City Next Week, Is Startling Visitors at Fargo Fair – Knew Both Parmalee and Hoxsey. The monoplane in action is an entirely different air machine, both in the manner in which it acts in the air and in the method of construction, as one could wish, and Aviator Geo. Mestach, the Frenchman who will fly in Grand Forks next week, is as much different from the aviators with whom North Dakota crowds, on visits to Grand Forks fairs in the last two years, as one could imagine. With Mestach, who has been flying at the fair in Fargo during the past few days, and whose work there was witnessed by a Herald representative, the flying game is a business proposition, pure and simple. He flies because he likes it, of course, and he is also in the game for the money there is in it – not for his health, as might be popularly supposed.
Mestach doesn’t like to talk about the dangers of the air. In fact, he says he tries to forget them as much as possible, and after examining the machine in which he flies, one does not wonder that he prefers to think about other things than a possible dash of several hundred feet to the earth. He monoplane is a peculiar machine. In the air it has the appearance of a great bird, with its single set of planes, and its long tail and rudders, with the propellers and engine placed in front of the machine. It is quite difficult to describe the machine. The planes, one on each side placed at the top of the machine. The engine cylinders are placed on the same shaft that operates the propelling blades, and revolves with them. In that respect it differs very materially from the other air crafts that have been seen in Grand Forks. To the rear of the planes, and in a box shaped affair, about two and a half feet square where the planes are joined onto it, the aviator (is) seated. The box tapers toward the rudder. All that can be seen of the aviator, when he takes his place, are his head and shoulders.
With his single set of wings, the machine responds more readily to the whims of its driver, or to the influences of the air. At the conclusion of his first flight in Fargo, Mestach declared that North Dakota air is filled with pockets, and time after time he was seen to take perilous dips for no apparent cause. These pockets bid fair to give Mestach all kinds of trouble during his flights in Grand Forks next week, but he says he will be on the job and will give Grand Forks some first class stuff. This Mestach has been in the flying game about three years, getting his start in France, where he flew about a year, coming to America at that time and since then he has been engaged in giving exhibitions throughout the country. He participated in the Chicago International aviation meet of last year, in which Parmalee, the illfated who appeared in Grand Forks last year, was a contestant. Mestach was acquainted with both Parmalee and Hoxsey, the two aviators who were killed within a few months of the time they flew at Grand Forks.
Mestach, when informed of the fact that both aviators who had flown at Grand Forks, had been killed a short time afterwards, didn’t have much to say, except that he wasn’t going to let the city’s third aviator take the same route if he could help it. As against Jimmy Ward, flying the biplane at the Fargo fair this week, Mestach has been a big favorite. The monoplane makes greatly faster time than does the biplane, and its work in the air is far more graceful and more bird-like. It surely will be a big feature at the Grand Forks fair next week, and to the person who thinks they know all about the air craft stuff because they have seen biplanes in operation, will find that they were laboring under a false impression when they see the single winged affair in action. (Grand Forks Daily Herald, Friday Morning, July 26, 1912, Volume XXXI, Number 232, Page 10)