Aviation Anecdotes

  Amelia Earhart   Emptied is old Lorenzo’s royal crypt; Breathless now stands the startled Taj Mahal; Amelia lies in that blue manuscript- The sea, true heroine’s memorial. So, she achieves. What if the fatal prize Be misty tomb with airy marble set? Who knows where Desdemona’s kerchief lies, Or where the last word of dark Juliet? A sudden courage plucks us from ourselves, Bids us be heroine though death the price; Wherefore we bed on many lilied shelves The straight defenders of the sacrifice. Count her among the beautiful and brave, Her turquoise mausoleum in each wave. -          Nathalia Crane   Courage   Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; Knows not the livid loneliness of fear nor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings. How can life grant us boon of living, compensa...

  The Airline Boss who ditched in the Pacific His father died when he was 12. The day after the funeral he went down to a glass company and talked them into a job, saying he was 14. That was the end of his schooling. He worked 12 hours a night, six nights a week, and turned his weekly $3.50 pay-check completely to his mother. Then he got a better job ($6 a week) in a foundry. Then at $10 a week at a shoe factory, and finally at a garage. He took correspondence courses in engineering and then began winning automobile races in 1910. Four years later he pushed a Blinzen Benz to the unbelievable world record of 134 miles per hour. When World War I started he was the driver of General Pershing. He then got into aviation, and when World War I ended, he was America’s highest scoring Ace with 26 victories. In the 1930s he was a leader in the air-transport industry as the Chairman of Eastern Airlines, one of the leading airlines in the world- Edward Vernon Rickenbacker.   The Atl...

                                                              The Airman’s Alphabet   Ace                                          Pride of parents                                                 and photographed person                         ...

                                                                                  Candy Bomber Lieutenant Halvorsen's role in the Berlin Airlift was to fly one of many planes used to ferry supplies into the starving city. During his flights he would first fly to Berlin, then deeper into Soviet-controlled areas. Halvorsen had an interest in photography and on his days off often went sightseeing in Berlin and shot films. One day in July, he was filming plane takeoffs and landings and he saw about thirty children lined up behind one of the barbed-wire fences. He went to meet them and noticed that the children had nothing. Halvorsen remembers: "I met about thirty children at the barbed wire fence.They were excited and told me that 'when the weather g...

  Four hijackers, 2 Israeli Prime Ministers and Air India. Reginald Levy, who was the captain of a hijacked Belgian airliner in 1972 was hailed as a hero for enabling Israeli commandos to storm the plane and rescue all 100 passengers and crew members. Sabena Flight 571 from Brussels to Tel Aviv was 20 minutes out of Vienna on May 8, 1972, when four Arabs waving pistols rushed the cockpit. Captain Levy calmly told the 90 passengers, “As you can see,we have friends aboard.” The “friends” were members of Black September, a terrorist organization that grew out of the Palestinian defeat in the 1970 Jordanian civil war and was responsible for the killing of 11 members of the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics four months after the hijacking. The hijackers — two men and two women — ordered Captain Levy to land at Lydda Airport (later Ben-Gurion International Airport), where they threatened to blow up the plane unless 317 Palestinian guerrillas were released from Israeli prisons. Within a...