Aeronautical Fun Facts for the Occasion of Each Reed Presidency

We’re going up, up, up, it’s our moment… Gonna be, gonna be fun facts! Here is an aviation fun fact for every year that a new president took the reins of Reed.

William Trufant Foster, 1910: Georges Legagneux flies a Blériot XI monoplane up to 10,499 feet (3,200 meters) near Paris—the first time a plane has been flown above 10,000 feet.

Richard F. Scholz, 1921: The Caproni Ca.60, a 100-foot long, nine-winged flying boat with three sets of 74-foot wide triplane wings, crashes on its second flight. This real-life plane is featured in the Studio Ghibli movie The Wind Rises.

Norman F. Coleman, 1925: The Lost World is the first in-flight movie on a scheduled flight, an Imperial Airways flight between London and Europe. The movie is about dinosaurs and features stop-motion special effects made by Willis O'Brien, who later worked on King Kong.

Dexter M. Keezer, 1934: The record for the longest formation flight is set by six United States Navy Consolidated P2Y flying boats. They flew 2,400 miles from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Arthur F. Scott, 1942: While testing the Heinkel He 280, the first jet fighter ever to fly, Helmut Schenk becomes the first person to ever use an ejection seat. The plane’s controls froze due to ice and Schenk ejected safely; the plane crashed and was not recovered.

Peter H. Odegard, 1945: U.S. Marine Corps pilot J. C. West flies a Ryan FR-1 Fireball onto the aircraft carrier USS Wake Island, the very first landing on an aircraft carrier under jet power. The Ryan FR-1 Fireball has both a jet engine and a propeller engine! This landing was made using only the jet engine.

E.B. MacNaughton, 1948: The first helicopter air mail service in the United Kingdom starts. It is run by British European Airways (BEA), which later merged with British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and other airlines in 1974 to become British Airways.

Duncan S. Ballantine, 1952: The first regular service flown by a jetliner begins: BOAC’s multi-stop route from London to Johannesburg, flown by the de Havilland DH.106 Comet 1. The first flight is flown by G-ALYP, with 36 passengers aboard. This is the first year that a jet aircraft lands in South Africa.

Richard H. Sullivan, 1956: After 128 lives are lost in a mid-air collision over the Grand Canyon, extensive government regulations are enacted in response, laying the groundwork for the creation of the Federal Aviation Agency (later Federal Aviation Administration). The aircraft involved were a United Airlines Douglas DC-7 and a Trans World Airlines Lockheed Super Constellation. Also in 1956, a United States Air Force B-47E-95-BW Stratojet carrying two containers of material for nuclear weapons mysteriously disappeared near Oran, Algeria, while descending into dense clouds en route to a midair refueling. Despite extensive searches, no trace of the aircraft, cargo, or its three crewmembers have ever been found.

Victor G. Rosenblum, 1968: There are a whopping 21 instances of American aircraft being hijacked to Cuba this year! Even crazier, 1968 is not the year with the most United States-Cuba hijackings: 33 happen the next year! Most of them end peacefully. The spate of hijackings culminates in a Pan Am Boeing 747 flight from New York City to San Juan, Puerto Rico, being hijacked to Havana in 1970; Fidel Castro himself visited the pilots to make sure the 747 was able to take off again safely from the small runway at Havana’s airport. By a chilling twist of fate, that very same 747 crashed seven years later in the Tenerife airport disaster, the deadliest accident in aviation history. It might be hard to imagine in a post-9/11 world, but back then, the extreme frequency and relative peacefulness of these incidents made the phenomenon practically comical. Political cartoons from that era include aliens hijacking another alien’s flying saucer and demanding to be taken to Havana!

Paul E. Bragdon, 1971: There are 13 flights from the United States hijacked to Cuba — and the captain of one of those flights had previously been hijacked to Cuba in 1961 as well! There is also an India-Pakistan hijacking, a United States-Italy hijacking, a Colombia-Mexico hijacking, a South Korea-North Korea hijacking, and a Philippines-China hijacking, all of which end with all passengers being okay, as well as an attempted United States-North Korea hijacking with one passenger fatality. In non-hijacking news— of which there is comparatively little— Jeanne M. Holm becomes the first female general in the United States Air Force. 

James L. Powell, 1988: The mythical flight of Daedalus is recreated by Kanellos Kanellopoulos, who flies the 74 miles from Crete to Santorini in three hours and 54 minutes in the MIT Daedalus, a pedal-powered aircraft.

Steven S. Koblik, 1992: Nicky Smith becomes the first female helicopter pilot in the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force. The Airbus A330 flies for the first time, and the 2,000th C-130 Hercules is built.

Colin S. Diver, 2002: An unmanned NASA scientific balloon sets the world record for the highest balloon flight at 161,000 feet, and simultaneously sets the record for the largest balloon launched successfully, at 60,000,000 cubic feet. In other balloon news, Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly solo around the world non-stop in a balloon.

John R. Kroger, 2012: More world records: Jhonathan Florez sets four world skydiving records in a single jump over La Guajira, Colombia: longest wingsuit flight at nine minutes and six seconds, highest-altitude wingsuit jump at 37,265 feet, greatest horizontal distance flown in a wingsuit at 16.315 miles, and greatest absolute distance traveled while in freefall at 17.52 miles. Also, Matevž Lenarčič completes a 62,000-mile round-the-world flight in a Pipistrel Virus SW914 ultralight aircraft, claiming to be the first person to circle the world in an ultralight without a copilot. The flight began from Slovenia on  January 8, 2012, and included passing Mount Everest at an altitude of 29,344 feet—only 300 feet above its summit! In addition, an unmanned Boeing 727 was also crashed deliberately near Mexicali, Mexico, and filmed for television to gather data about what would happen in a crash. This was the second time in history that a deliberate crash of an unmanned airliner was done for scientific purposes: the first time took place in 1984 with a Boeing 720 in a joint NASA-FAA test.

Audrey Bilger, 2019: The last Boeing 707 in civil service crashes in Iran with 15 fatalities, ending the 707’s 61 years as a commercial airliner. The 707 remains in service as an aerial refueling tanker for U.S. military aircraft, and as a military aircraft for Chile, India, Iran, Israel, and Venezuela.

Stay tuned for possible additional presidential fun facts in future issues of the Quest!