Word: piloting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...alight in Addis Ababa. He and the Dictator's two bombing sons did so well at making headlines for themselves that Father Mussolini ordered that they never be mentioned again in this connection, lest they get swelled heads. Ciano, according to brother aviators, is an in different pilot, but recklessly brave. He eats more spaghetti, prepared with copious melted butter and cheese, than Edda thinks good for his figure. He seldom downs a cocktail, which Italians consider fattening, takes a glass or two of wine at every meal. When Father-in-law Mussolini went on what amounted...
Without Orders (RKO) contains one exciting sequence in which an airline stewardess (Sally Eilers) takes over the controls of a transport plane in a storm, lands it safely on radio instructions from her pilot boy friend (Robert Armstrong), who is on the ground. For the rest, one more minor-league investigation of air travel implying that this is an adventure rather than a convenience, Without Orders is likely to arouse more indignation from airline executives than enthusiasm from lay audiences. Best and most inevitable shot: the wrecked plane of a stunt flyer (Vinton Haworth) bursting into flames after its crash...
...designed with little thought for the comfort or convenience of the men who flew them. Like the prehistoric pterodactyl, which they somewhat resembled in appearance, most of these types are extinct now, were being supplanted before the War was over. Gaunt, unstable contraptions, held together with piano wire (the pilots used to say that canaries could be caged in their rigging) most of them rose slowly and landed fast, crashed easily and were hard to control in the air. When Cecil Lewis began his training, the average life of a British pilot on the Western Front was three weeks...
...wires and trenches, the miles of invisible men, walking, talking, fighting, dying, the great chaos of war always seemed insanely futile from the air. From the new perspective of height the men who fought "in verminous filth to take the next trench 30 yards away" seemed incredible, since the pilot could see, beyond that objective, one after another, 70 miles away. Lewis' strongest memories were not of isolated battles, although he recalled several of them, but of poetic and philosophic experiences high above the earth: his first sight of the War from the height of two miles, flights over...
Cecil Lewis' more conventional War experiences included a love affair with the mistress of a French officer, a number of accidents and one wound, a bad defeat in mimic warfare with the great French Pilot Guynemer, flights through the spectacular bombardment that opened the Somme offensive, a ludicrous mishap when his plane got away and raced around a field until it crashed. At 19 he was exhausted, weakened with eyestrain, his nerves ajangle, motivated only by a fatalistic conviction that, he would get through. The only time Lewis felt any anger against an enemy air man was during...