Male Pioneers in Aviation

Charles Lindbergh, 1902 -1974, was a male aviation pioneer famous for the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. His airplane was called the Spirit of St. Louis. Afterward, he became one of the world's most famous aviators and was an important voice on behalf of the aviation industry.

From an early age he was interested in machinery and dropped out of college to join a pilot and mechanics training program with an aircraft company. He bought his own plane and became a barnstormer. One of his early jobs was an airmail route - he was known for delivering the mail under any circumstances.

A tragic incident in the life of Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Ann, was the kidnaping of their young child, 20 month old Charles Augustus Lindbergh in March of 1932. The baby's body was later found and identified by his father. After the tragedy, they moved abroad to try and escape all the publicity surrounding them.

Charles Lindbergh was an important pioneer in aviation history. The photo at upper right shows his grave in Hawaii where he is buried.

Source: Wikipedia

Orville and Wilbur Wright, brothers from Dayton, Ohio, first had a bicycle shop. They began experimenting with gliders and then designed their own airplane and built the engine in their bicycle shop. The principles they used are still being used in almost all modern aircraft.

December 17, 1903 was the Wright brothers first uncontrolled flight. Orville flew 120 feet in 12 seconds. Later that day Wilbur Wright flew 852 feet in 59 seconds.

After they toured Europe demonstrating their airplane, they became world famous. Wilbur's flight around the Statue of Liberty brought them even more attention.
Source: Wikipedia

In January 1907 the Wright Brothers submitted a bid to the U.S. War Department to design a plane for $25,000. This bid came as a response to a War Department request issued a month earlier for a "Heavier-than-air Flying Machine." While Wilbur Wright went off to Paris to promote the Wright Flyer, Orville Wright stayed in Dayton, Ohio to design a plane for the Army Signal Corps. By August Orville's plane was ready and he headed to Fort Myer, Virginia, where the air trials were to take place. From August 20, 1908, to September 17, 1908, Orville performed test flights for the Army. On September 17th a split propeller caused the plane to crash, injuring Orville and killing his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge. In spite of the crash the Army believed that the Wright plane would work. In July 1909, when Orville was able to fly again, he completed the test flights and surpassed all of the Army's requirements for a military plane: to carry a passenger for at least 125 miles at a speed of 40 miles per hour and stay aloft for at least one hour, easily transportable, controllable and steerable at all times and in all directions, and land without damage. On August 2, 1909, the Signal Corps accepted the Wright Flyer as the world's first military aircraft, naming it Signal Corps Airplane No. 1.

On October 24, 1911 Orville tested a new glider and broke all the previous gliding records by actually soaring and staying in flight for 9 minutes and 45 seconds. His record lasted for over a decade.

Source: NASA

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In August of 1917 Eugene Jacques Bullard, an American volunteer in the French army, became the first black military pilot in history and the only black pilot in World War I. Born in Columbus, Ga., on Oct. 9, 1894, Bullard left home at the age of 11 to travel the world, and by 1913 he had settled in France as a prizefighter. When WWI started in 1914, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and rose to the rank of corporal. For his bravery as an infantryman in combat, Bullard received the Croix de Guerre and other decorations.

During the Battle of Verdun in 1916, France suffered 460,000 casualties and Bullard was seriously wounded. While recuperating, he accepted an offer to join the French air force as a gunner/observer, but when he reported to gunnery school, he obtained permission to become a pilot. After completing flight training, Bullard joined the 200 other Americans in the Lafayette Flying Corps, and he flew combat missions from Aug. 27 to Nov. 11, 1917. He distinguished himself in aerial combat, as he had on the ground, and was officially credited with shooting down one German aircraft. Unfortunately, Bullard -- an enlisted pilot -- got into a disagreement with a French officer, which led to his removal from the French air force. He returned to his infantry regiment, and he performed non-combatant duties for the remainder of the war.

Source: USAF

After the war, Bullard remained in France as an expatriate. When the Germans invaded France in May 1940, the 46-year-old Bullard rejoined the French army. Again seriously wounded by an exploding shell, he escaped the Germans and made his way to the United States. For the rest of World War II, despite his lingering injuries, he worked as a longshoreman in New York and supported the war effort by participating in war bond drives.

Source: USAF

Bullard stayed in New York after the war and lived in relative obscurity, but in France he remained a hero. In 1954 he was one of the veterans chosen to light the "Everlasting Flame" at the French Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, and in 1959 the French honored him with the Knight of the Legion of Honor.

On Oct. 13, 1961, Eugene Bullard died and was buried with full military honors in his legionnaire's uniform in the cemetery of the Federation of French War Veterans in Flushing, New York. On Sept. 14, 1994, the secretary of the Air Force posthumously appointed him a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force.

Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Junior (June 9, 1922 - December 11, 1941) was a British-American aviator and poet who died as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II. He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war. He is undoubtedly most famous for his poem High Flight.

Source: Wikipedia

'High Flight' has endured as a favorite poem among aviators and, more recently, astronauts. Portions of this poem appear on many headstones in Arlington National Cemetery. Today it serves as the official poem of the RCAF and RAF and it is required to be recited by memory by first year cadets at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). Songs and symphonic compositions have been based on Magee's text. Many U.S. television viewers were introduced to 'High Flight' when some TV stations ended (and sometimes also began) their programming day with short films based on it. For example, the start and end films used by Washington, DC TV station WUSA featured the spoken poem played to music and video of an F-15 doing aerial acrobatics. Novelist Arthur Hailey quoted its first two lines as an epigraph for his bestselling novel Airport. American President Ronald Reagan quoted two brief phrases from the poem at the end of his address to the nation following the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986. The poem also appears as part of a display panel at the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, -and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of-wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew-
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Source: Wikipedia

Magee's posthumous fame rests mainly on High Flight, a Petrarchan sonnet he wrote on 3 September 1941, shortly before his death. He was flying a high-altitude (30,000 feet / 10 000 m) test flight in a newer model of the Spitfire Mk V and as he orbited and climbed upward, he was struck with the inspiration of a poem -- "To touch the face of God." He completed the poem later that day after landing. The first person to read this poem later that day was almost certainly Air Vice-Marshall M.H. Le Bas in the officers mess, with whom Magee had trained.

Magee enclosed the poem on the back of a letter to his parents and his father, then rector of Saint John's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, reprinted it in church publications. The poem became more widely known through the efforts of Archibald McLeish, the then Librarian of Congress, who included it in an exhibition of poems called 'Faith and Freedom' at the Library of Congress in February 1942. The manuscript copy of the poem remains at the Library of Congress.

Source: Wikipedia

Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, the son of Theodore Roosevelt, seated in a Nieuport 28 fighter plane while serving in France during the World War I. Quentin was a pilot in the 95th Aero Squadron, part of the 1st Pursuit Group. On July 14, 1918, he was shot down behind German lines by Sgt. Thom, a German ace with 24 victories.

Eugene Ely, shown in flying gear, standing by his Curtiss pusher biplane, circa 1911.

Eugene Burton Ely, (October 21, 1886 - October 19, 1911) was an aviation pioneer, credited with the first shipboard aircraft take off and landing.

Ely, was also the first person to take off from a warship, on November 14, 1910 and was the first person to land an aircraft on a ship on January 18, 1911.