The Hero Pilot
The notion that you have to be a special kind of human being to be a pilot, which persists to this day with some folks, was a huge obstacle in…
The notion that you have to be a special kind of human being to be a pilot, which persists to this day with some folks, was a huge obstacle in the way of the creation of a sensible, accessible aviation segment. How it happened is clear: For 20 or 30 years, the world of aviation was one that was inextricably connected to two things, insanely high levels of risk and war. After Kitty Hawk, it took the brothers Wright no time at all to realize that the biggest and most readily fulfillable pathway for the practical use of aircraft, and therefore a profitable commercial application. was for military uses.
By the early-to-mid 1910s, European powers were sending aircraft to war against each other, and in the United States, American flyers were doing battle in Mexico. In none of these cases were the aircraft anything close to practical weapons of war. Nor were they reliable. The stories of U.S. pilots operating Curtiss JN-3s in Mexico are filled with tales of crashes in every phase of flight, forced landings behind enemy lines due to mechanical failure, with the desperate pilots resorting to trucks and mules for transport back to American lines and some semblance of safety.
But the real genesis of the hero pilot myth was in World War I, especially when America entered the war in the spring of 1917. Those hero pilots' names are still familiar to us, even those of us who aren't pilots. U.S. ace Eddie Rickenbacker, Canadian pilot Billy Bishop and famed German flyer Manfred Von Richthofen (aka the Red Baron) all enjoyed movie star-level fame here and abroad.
The question, which was seldom asked aloud, was, if you had to be a hero to be a pilot, if you had to risk life and limb to take to the air, if only a very few had what would come to be known as "the right stuff" to be a pilot, what was the difference between what these daredevils did and the acts that high-wire artists and human cannonballs performed? They were for grand causes or great spectacle, not for sport.
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