Hi Kathy in Alaska, I was traveling, so I haven’t been able to get back in here...I wanted to tell folks who are interested, a great book to read on this is called “The Aviators” by Winston Groom (Who, oddly enough, wrote “Forrest Gump” which takes some heat in conservative circles, but...this book is decidedly not of that bent!)
It tells about the lives of three pioneers in aviation: Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, and Jimmy Doolittle.
I have the audiobook and have listened to it several times, it is excellent! It talks about Jimmy Doolittle as a crazy young Army officer, doing handstands on a balcony while drunk for a bunch of Chileans, then having the ledge on the balcony crumble and give way dumping him two stories onto concrete where he broke both ankles. He had casts on both ankles, but had them cut off and modified so he could fly a demo for the South American generals who were thinking of buying the planes...
But the part about Rickenbacker was a real new one to me. There was a lot in there I didn’t know, particularly about his horrific accident in 1941 when a DC3 he was taking to visit and inspect one of his Eastern Airlines offices crashed. He was pinned beneath a dead crewman for hours, had one of his eyes gouged out, multiple rib fractures, collapsed lung, crushed pelvis, etc. doused in gasoline (he could hear other injured passengers arguing about lighting a fire to keep warm, and he had to scream at them in his state to keep them from doing so. It was a long, grueling recovery for him, and he wasn’t even fully healed when the government asked him to go on missions to talk to the troops, which he agreed to do, even so recently healed from his horrific accident. It was on one of these missions his plane was lost and they spent all that time at sea.
Amazing man. He made the others in the rafts hate him so much that they decided to live just to piss him off and spite him.
Sounds like a very interesting book. Those early pilots could be crazy. They wanted what they wanted when they wanted it.
Thanks for sharing the stories.
Anger like that can keep people going a long time. He did what he had to do to make they try to survive.