On April 17, 1964, Jerrie Mock, who looks to all the world like an Eisenhower era housewife dressed up for a PTA meeting, became the first woman to successfully circumnavigate the globe solo by airplane (a Cessna!)…
Mock was 38 at the time. She went on to set another 7 official aviation world records by 1969…
Reblogged from agooddaytodie|10 notes |#
John William Alcock was a British airman who piloted the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic:
“On 14-15 June 1919 he and Arthur Brown as navigator made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic in a Vickers Vimy, a journey which took 16 hours 27 minutes. He was knighted that year, but died in a flying accident on December 18, 1919.”
Above: Sir John William Alcock by Ambrose McEvoy - oil on canvas, 1919 (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Tonight we celebrate Amelia Earhart, First Lady of the Air, on the occasion of her 115th birthday…
Amelia Earhart, the most famous female aviator in history, was born on July 24, 1897, and disappeared without a trace in 1937 during an attempted global circumnavigation (the long way around, tracing a near-equatorial route)…
Earhart had already become the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic, and set a number of other firsts (not merely records for female fliers), making her a media darling and major celebrity.
No big OF spotlight tonight, just a lone American hero…
Chuck Yeager (b. Feb. 13, 1923) was a test pilot in the early days of jet and rocket planes. He became the first man to break the sound barrier in 1947, flying a Bell X-1 plane - named Glamorous Glennis, after his wife, of course…
Yeager continued flying and setting records long after his formal retirement. His exploits were memorably described in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff…
“That’s all a man needs… To be forty years old and to fall one hundred goddamned thousand feet in a flat spin and punch out and make a million-dollar hole in the ground and get half his head and his hand burned up and have his eye practically ripped out of his skull and have the Good Samaritan, A.A.D., arrive as if sent by the spirit of Pancho Barnes herself to render a midnight verdict among the motherless Joshua trees while screen doors bang and the pictures of a hundred dead pilots rattle in their frames: ‘My God!… you look awful.’” —Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
Above - Chuck Yeager with the Douglas X-3. (U.S. Air Force photo)
Birthday of Italian airship pioneer Umberto Nobile (Jan. 21, 1885 – 1978), who together with Roald Amundsen flew the airship Norge across the North Pole in 1926…
Nobile also designed and in 1928 flew the Italia, a second polar airship (photo above); this second expedition ended in a deadly crash and provoked an international rescue effort. Among the men lost searching for Nobile was his friend Amundsen who perished in the crash of a French seaplane which disappeared between Tromsø and Svalbard…
8 of Nobile’s crew died, but he and several other surviving crew members were eventually rescued after over a month on the ice…
Otto Lilienthal was a German glider pioneer who experimented successfully with a number of wing designs in the last decade of the 19th C.
Lilienthal was killed when his glider stalled during a flight and he fell to the ground, breaking his spine. He died on August 10, 1896, aged 48. His dying words were “Small sacrifices must occasionally be made…”
Photo of one of Lilienthal’s 1893 test flights…
Because of the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart (and her navigator Fred Noonan) she has entered popular culture as the subject of numerous songs, books and films.
Possibly the first tribute album dedicated to the legend of Amelia Earhart was by Ian Matthews’ band Plainsong, “In Search of Amelia Earhart,” Elektra K42120, released in 1972. Both the album and the Press Pack released by Elektra are highly prized by collectors and have reached cult status… I own a vinyl copy and recommend it highly.
28 notes |#