In 1911, an Oklahoma auto dealer named Clyde Cessna taught himself to fly by crashing his hand-built monoplane at least thirteen times on the salt flats of northern Oklahoma, because there were no flight schools within reach, no manuals worth trusting, and no one nearby who had flown one and could tell him what he was doing wrong
Before there were flight schools west of the Mississippi, a Kansas farmer named Clyde Cessna assembled a mail-order monoplane and taught himself to fly by breaking it, rebuilding it, and trying again. The method that eventually produced the world's most-built light aircraft compa…