Word: piloting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Benito Mussolini signed an aviator's license, embraced affectionately, pinned a pilot's gold wings on his handsome 17-year-old second son, Bruno, after proudly watching him qualify at Rome's Centocelle Field. Son Bruno thus became Italy's youngest licensed pilot...
...Bertrand Blanchard ("Bert") Acosta was chief pilot of Admiral Byrd's transatlantic flight. According to legend, Byrd had to hit him over the head with a fire extinguisher when he got out of hand during the flight. Drink had by that time made him a "physical wreck," according to no less an authority than Anthony H. G. ("Tony") Fokker. Acosta's reply was that "Tony Fokker can go to hell...
...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...
...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...