Word: gehlbach
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...such talk Pilot Gehlbach's answer is blunt and brief: "I'll fly anything, anytime, anywhere, for money, marbles or chalk...
Last week he took the single-seater experimental fighter to the Navy's proving ground at Dahlgren, Va. for final acceptance tests. Carefully "beefed up" to withstand the terrific strain of power dives and pullouts, the ship was built to outperform and outfight any combat plane in existence. Gehlbach took it up 12,000 ft., kicked it over into a tight spin. The plane never came...
...Gehlbach wrestling with the control stick, vainly trying it at every conceivable position," Commander De Witt C. Ramsey, the Navy's official observer, told newsmen afterward. "Using an old pilot's trick, he even stood upright in the cockpit, hoping the wind pressure on his body would right the plane. Finally, at 2,000 ft., with the earth rushing at him 200 ft. a second, he bailed out and descended easily while the plane hurtled into a nearby pine tree...
Congratulated on his narrow escape, Pilot Gehlbach shrugged, joined Navy officials reviewing a motion picture of his flight. The Navy decided to do its future testing of difficult, dangerous X-737 in the new spinning-tunnel at the NACA laboratory, Langley Field...
...leader in his highly hazardous profession at 32, Lee Gehlbach became an aeronautical engineer because he was "a farmer's son who couldn't get used to getting up at 4 in the morning." Graduated from the University of Illinois in 1924, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, resigned five years later to become a free-lance pilot and consultant. Best known as a racing pilot, he won first place and $15,000 in the 5,541-mi. All-America Flying Derby of 1930, beating such famed speed merchants as the late Lowell Bayles and Jimmy Wedell...