Zoilo H. Garcia

Zoilo Hermogenes García Peña (December 21, 1881 - December 11, 1916) was a civil engineer and aviator from the Dominican Republic. Besides being a prolific engineer credited with building, among other things, the first theater of La Vega, he is best remembered for designing and flying the first Dominican heavier-than-air aircraft in 1911–1912.

Garcia traveled to Paris to study civil engineering, graduating in 1906 as the first Dominican to do so. He returned to La Vega and in 1908 married Luisa Teresa Fernandez Perez. a Long Island airplane manufacturer specializing in Bleriot monoplanes. Construction began on 4 February 1911 using equipment and parts used for the Bleriot planes.

In July of the same year he began taking flying lessons with the instructor James Lester Weeks and also engaged Weeks as the aviation instructor for the Dominican army. He seemed to have rejected the name change as it is continually referred to as a 'Poliplano'.

By August 1911 the manufacturers ran into trouble with Garcia's design, possibly due to a miscalculation in the weight of the Roberts engine.

Garcia returned to Long Island in January 1912. Construction had continued and the plane was completed on February 20, 1912. The first flight attempts on the Nassau Boulevard Aerodrome seem to have been a failure. The pilot and flight engineer Fred Schneider who had worked with the Wright and Curtis planes, was quoted as saying that the design was to blame. Some Dominican news outlets falsely reported that the plane was destroyed in a fire,

[...]I myself have touched and have seen the device rising to a very high altitude... The most perfect balance I have seen him keep the device in the air was at the moments when Mr. García let it fall abandoned to its weight to show the slowness with which, in a given case and without the slightest bit of danger, a descent could be made, when for some reason the engine or any other part of the apparatus would deprive it of its initial impulse[...]

The same article shows that Garcia later approached the directors of the Aviation Center to recommend the dissolution of said organization. He wrote off the Polyplane as a financial loss. The plane is reported to have remained at the Sabana de Ponton landing strip where it rotted away.

Death Garcia died in 1916 after battling a high fever. He was 34 years of age, 10 days shy of his 35th birthday.

Gyrocopter In 1983 the son of Garcia, Tirso de Jesus García Fernandez, built and flew a gyrocopter called the Cabra Loca, the Mad Goat, from Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic.