Knights Without Parachutes

I (Karen) would like to take this opportunity, as on February 19th it will be the 72nd anniversary of the landing on Iwo Jima, to tell about a man I learned about from my swim teacher Bill Hudson, an Iwo Jima Marine. Realizing the Vintage Aero Flying Museum exists because Dr. James Parks was collecting stories while the men were alive and available, I decided to write about Iwo Jima vet Bill Hudson for a generation that will never meet him. I was able to give Bill Hudson the finished book before he died, and he was pleased with it, but said I...

Okay, a bit of an anachronism there, since they weren't called teenagers then, and maybe the book was aimed at those a bit younger than the century. But we just added to our list of books and movies about WWI and aviation a book Andy showed us in his collection: Dave Dashaway the Young Aviator by Roy Rockwood. (Rockwood is the pseudonym for a syndicated series like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books.) Andy pointed out that the book was published in 1913, so the picture on the cover shows an airship not so different from what had flown at Kitty Hawk 10 years previously....

Eddie Rickenbacker's Tribute to Balloon Busters Apparently it's not just our generation; it's always been confusing why a balloon is not a big, fat, poppable target. Eddie Rickenbacker took time in his autobiography Rickenbacker and Fighting the Flying Circus to explain why "Balloon Buster" Frank Luke was something beyond even an ace, the "most daring aviator of the entire war." Rickenbacker had gained the title of American Ace of Aces when he scored his 7th victory, but Luke took it away from him by shooting down ten balloons and four other aircraft in eight days, a record which Rickenbacker pointed out...

For perspective on how much courage it took to get into one of those flying machines. Shredded Wings – before the days of rip-stop nylon, before the days of flame-retardant fabric, if the fabric caught fire or started ripping off, the aircraft acquired the aerodynamic characteristics of a brick. Fire – Sitting next to an engine that worked by igniting a series of fires and spit out oil and sometimes sparks, surrounded by fabric painted in flammable dope to tighten it, sitting somewhere next to the fuel that fed the engine, staying airborne by means of parts moving fast enough to produce...

Frederick Libby, like many other airmen, got into aviation because it sounded better than the infantry. In Libby’s case, it was the rain that got to him; he felt sorry for the men entrenched in what had been a swampland, since the Germans across from them had seized the ridge. Whatever else he knew, he knew airplanes didn’t fly in the rain. Except that sometimes they did. The Red Baron once got lost trying to get to Berlin in spite of bad weather. “I laughed at the clouds and the beastly weather even though the rain came down in buckets....