A piece of wood
Discussion
I'm currently reading 'My Flying Life', the autobiography of Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith. That got me researching other aviators of the interwar period that he mentions, and what a period it was. Single-handed or with a crew of up to four, they set off to cross vast distances from continent to continent, over land and ocean, in day and night, and often battling storms.
The careless or over-confident aviators met early deaths, such as those in the Dole Air Race to Hawaii; the wiser ones created record after record until their luck finally ran out. Kingsford-Smith's co-pilot from their epic trip across the Pacific, Charles Ulm, later perished near Hawaii after overflying it in the dark and running out of petrol. Kingsford-Smith almost died in Northern Australia after getting lost; his friends Anderson and Hitchcock died trying to find him when their engine failed. So far I haven't found one pilot who survived, and most of them have never been found.
And so we come to Bert Hinckler. It was Hinckler's record from England to Australia that led to the disappearance of Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith in 1935 when he was trying to beat it. And so today I looked up Bert Hinckler... as well as his remarkable career, here are snips from Wikipedia
'After gaining an understanding on the principles of flight, he constructed two gliders. In 1912 he launched one of his first home-made gliders on Mon Repos Beach and flew 10 metres (33 ft) above the sand dunes.'
'A small piece of wood, a relic from one Hinkler's hand-made gliders, was presented to the US astronaut Don Lind in early 1986 as a token of appreciation for his coming to Bundaberg to contribute to the Hinkler Memorial Lectures. Lind in turn gave it to Dick Scobee, the captain of the ill-fated final Space Shuttle Challenger mission. Scobee took the wood with him on board the Challenger, inside a small plastic bag that he placed in his locker.'
'After the explosion, the bag and the wood were recovered from the sea, identified, mounted, and later returned to the Hinkler Memorial Museum.'
The more I read about these men (and a few women), the more fascinating the story becomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Hinkler
The careless or over-confident aviators met early deaths, such as those in the Dole Air Race to Hawaii; the wiser ones created record after record until their luck finally ran out. Kingsford-Smith's co-pilot from their epic trip across the Pacific, Charles Ulm, later perished near Hawaii after overflying it in the dark and running out of petrol. Kingsford-Smith almost died in Northern Australia after getting lost; his friends Anderson and Hitchcock died trying to find him when their engine failed. So far I haven't found one pilot who survived, and most of them have never been found.
And so we come to Bert Hinckler. It was Hinckler's record from England to Australia that led to the disappearance of Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith in 1935 when he was trying to beat it. And so today I looked up Bert Hinckler... as well as his remarkable career, here are snips from Wikipedia
'After gaining an understanding on the principles of flight, he constructed two gliders. In 1912 he launched one of his first home-made gliders on Mon Repos Beach and flew 10 metres (33 ft) above the sand dunes.'
'A small piece of wood, a relic from one Hinkler's hand-made gliders, was presented to the US astronaut Don Lind in early 1986 as a token of appreciation for his coming to Bundaberg to contribute to the Hinkler Memorial Lectures. Lind in turn gave it to Dick Scobee, the captain of the ill-fated final Space Shuttle Challenger mission. Scobee took the wood with him on board the Challenger, inside a small plastic bag that he placed in his locker.'
'After the explosion, the bag and the wood were recovered from the sea, identified, mounted, and later returned to the Hinkler Memorial Museum.'
The more I read about these men (and a few women), the more fascinating the story becomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Hinkler
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