Word: bassetts
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...most cautious and experienced pilots have been known to make just such errors. Example: the St. Louis crash that killed Astronauts Elliott See and Charles Bassett. Pilot See, having missed his first pass at the runway, told the tower that he planned a second instrument-landing approach in his T-38 jet trainer. He inexplicably continued to fly a visual pattern and made a wide turn just below the overcast, ran into a patch of fog, apparently lost orientation, slammed a building-and just barely missed demolishing the room where all the space capsules for the next four Gemini flights...
...earnest, self-effacing civilian engineer who was to have commanded the Gemini 9 mission, had spent six years checking out the hottest planes aloft as a General Electric test pilot when he became an astronaut in 1962. Bassett, an outgoing Air Force major who was to have taken a 60-minute walk in space during the flight toting an instrument-crammed, 166-lb. pack on his back, served as a fighter pilot in Korea and a test pilot at California's Edwards Air Force Base before joining the space program...
...plane's right wing glanced off the metal roof of McDonnell's Building 101-where the Gemini 9 capsule was being readied for shipment to Cape Kennedy later in the week. The plane bounced, hit the building again, then plummeted into a parking lot, bursting into flames. Bassett was decapitated. See was hurled through the shattered fuselage and killed instantly. Stafford and Cernan, unaware of the crash, touched down safely on a runway nearby...
...deaths of See and Bassett brought to three the number of astronauts killed since the U.S. launched its manned space program in 1959, though not a single life has been lost during the 1,355 hours of U.S. space flights. The first fatality was Astronaut Theodore Freeman, who died in October 1964 when a flock of geese disabled another T-38. As for Gemini 9, the space center plans to send it off on schedule, with Stafford and Cernan at the controls...
Died. Elliot M. See Jr., 38, civilian astronaut slated to command next May's Gemini 9 mission; with his capsule copilot, Air Force Major Charles A. Bassett II, 34, in the crash of their T-38 jet trainer at St. Louis' Lambert Field (see THE NATION...