Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wally Schirra acquired his interest in flying and sophisticated machinery by inheritance. His father, a retired engineer, now 68. was a bomber pilot in World War I who was shot down over the Western Front but managed to survive and fly again. He kept flying after the war, and for eight months was a barnstormer at county fairs. Sometimes when he stunted to impress the customers, his young wife Flo climbed out on the lower wing of his beat-up biplane...
Schirra spent time on carriers and at naval shore bases. When the Korean war got going, he was assigned to an Arkansas National Guard squadron as an exchange pilot. His flying mates remember him as "a gung-ho, heads-up, by-the-book Annapolis man." but they forgave him because he was such a good pilot. He flew 90 missions, mostly ground strafing and low-level bombing. His missions got him credit for 1½ MIGs, a Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals. He also buzzed a U.S. camp, blew down lines of tents and was hotly reprimanded...
After Korea. Schirra went through the Navy's test-pilot school and then was assigned to the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent. Md. For a flyer this was longhaired stuff, and fine for Schirra's desire to emphasize the engineering side of aeronautics. His work was checking out the hottest new aircraft, and sometimes playing games with antiaircraft missiles. When he first heard about the Mercury man-in-space program, he put it out of his mind as visionary, but later realized that space flight is the logical next step in aviation, and went after...
Captain Robert Se'mer, 40, of Falls Church, Va., a Navy jet pilot, was walking with two companions along 47th Street near Third Avenue one evening when a high wind whipped a plank from a nearby building under construction. The plank crashed down on him and severed his right...
...first postwar airliner, the F27. Powered by Rolls-Royce Dart engines, the F-27 (price $700,000) carries from 40 to 52 passengers, cruises at 300 m.p.h. It has a maximum range of 1,270 miles and an enviable safety record of only three crashes-all due to pilot error. So far, Fokker has sold 256 F275 to customers in 25 countries, including 93 made under license in the U.S. by the Fairchild Stratos Corp...