 I present a short documentary on a man like no other. Who fought in 3 wars back to back. Who flew dozens of fighter aircraft ranging from the P80, F86, F104, F100 to the Northop F5. Who is one of the few to eject out of a F100 and live to tell about it. And at the age of 85 continues to this day to carve the clouds in the sky with his airplanes. I present to you USAF Ret, Colonel Jack Wilhite, and his story of survival, his close calls with dogfighting Mig 15's and some insite on his personal 2 seat Mig 17 in which very few are left in the world to this day. Filmed by: Breed of Speed founder Nathan Finneman. .  It was shot down and belly landed in a field during the Battle of Britain in 1940. It is currently with the Russel Aviation Group, Ontario Canada.  A passenger who was injured when a propeller crashed through the window of a commuter airliner is lucky to have made it through the ordeal relatively unscathed.
A propeller can be seeing jutting out of the body of an Air Canada Bombardier Q-400 that made an emergency landing Thursday night when a tire blew during take-off, a passenger told CTV. Christina Kurylo was hit in the head by a propeller blade that sliced through the body of the Jazz Aviation plane when it landed at the Edmonton International Airport, CTV reported. “All of a sudden, something came crashing through my window and I got hit in the head,” Kurylo told CTV Edmonton on Saturday. She said the blow from the propeller knocked her glasses off and left her dazed. Her only injury was a few bumps on her head and some bruises. The incident is being investigated and no one else was injured.  Decades after pieces of World War II-era history were left to deteriorate in the desert, one aircraft artifact is close to flying again.
It has been a 14-year project in the Air Capital of the World to restore a B-29 Superfortress named “Doc.” It is a full-circle journey, since the historic warplane was originally manufactured in Wichita in 1944. Doc’s squadron was named for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.After service in the Korean War, this B-29 and others were used for target practice in the Mojave Desert. “They towed about a hundred of them out there with Doc and they blew all of them up — but Doc.,” TJ Norman, project manager for the restoration, said. “The story is they dropped missiles or bombs six different times and missed it all six times,” It took years of negotiations with the U.S. Navy to get it released. The non-profit organization Doc’s Friends now owns it. The organization’s volunteers have logged roughly 250,000 hours of painstaking work to give it new life with wires, cables, hydraulics, tubing and skins. They run on donations. When Doc takes to the skies this October or November, it will be one of only two flight-ready B-29s in the world. “There are no more to be restored,” Norman said. “We’ve looked all over the world. There’s just no more. The desert is empty, boneyards are empty, there’s no more to be had.” This also means a lack of sources for tools and parts. The team has had to fashion new ones, while staying true to the original design. Boeing, which manufactured the B-29s, did not even have the plans anymore. They had to work from drawings preserved by the Smithsonian. “Reading the blueprints is like a second language,” tooling technician Dan Wimberly said. “You have to be able to know what symbols mean and be able to do precision measuring, because everything has to fit.” Many of the people working on it are in their 70s or older. With an older group, there are safety limitations. “I finally had to set a rule last year that if you’re older than the airplane, you couldn’t be up on top of the wings,” Norman said. Some have an aviation background, like Herbert Berger, who put in more than 40 years with Boeing. His work partner for the day, Bob Gerrell, says he’s with the post office, but has an interest in the past. “I restore old cars and tractors,” Gerrell said. “This is my first airplane, quite an airplane to be restoring.” Many share a personal connection to the original warplane assembly effort. “Most everybody in this hangar had relatives that worked during the war on B-29s… that’s just the way it was. Everybody worked on airplanes,” Norman said.  Investigators are trying to figure out how Virgin Galactic’s pilot, Pete Siebold, managed to parachute to safety from about 50,000 feet without a pressure suit or oxygen mask and survive with only a shoulder injury.
Investigators are still trying to understand how Siebold, who they have not interviewed, managed to escape from the cockpit of the spacecraft, which was moving at Mach 1 (the speed of sound), when it broke up over California Friday. The crash killed co-pilot Michael Alsbury, 39. AP Photo/Scaled CompositesIn this undated photo released Saturday, Nov. 1, 2014, by Scaled Composites, shows Peter Siebold, the Director of Flight Operations at Scaled Composites. Siebold was piloting SpaceShipTwo on Friday, Oct. 31, 2014, when it exploded in flight. Acting National Transportation Safety Board chairman Christopher Hart said Siebold did not get out through the escape hatch. “We know it wasn’t through there, so how did this pilot get out?” he said earlier this week. Some employees of Scaled Composite, the company testing Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, spoke on the condition of anonymity to the Washington Post. “[They are] calling Siebold’s survival miraculous, and they describe his escape like something out of a movie script. According to sources, Siebold found himself flying through the air while still attached to his ejection seat. When he spotted the chase plane, he managed to give the pilot inside a thumb’s up, and then unbuckled himself at about 17,000 feet, deploying his parachute. He landed under his own power and suffered a shoulder injury from the force of the parachute that required minor surgery.” The rocket ship broke up after a device to slow the space plane’s descent deployed too soon, federal investigators said. The cause of Friday’s crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo has not been determined, but investigators found the “feathering” system — which rotates the twin tail “feathers” to create drag — was activated before the craft reached the appropriate speed, National Transportation Safety Board Acting Chairman Christopher Hart said. The system requires a two-step process to deploy. The co-pilot unlocked the system, but Hart said the second step occurred “without being commanded.” “What we know is that after it was unlocked, the feathers moved into the deploy position, and two seconds later, we saw disintegration,” Hart said. The finding moves away from initial speculation that an explosion brought down the craft. The investigation is months from being completed, and officials are looking at factors that include pilot error, mechanical failure, design problems and whether pressure existed to continue testing, Hart said. AP Photo/Scaled CompositesIn this undated photo released Saturday, Nov. 1, 2014, by Scaled Composites, shows Michael Alsbury, who was killed while co-piloting the test flight of Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo on Friday, Oct. 31, 2014. “We are not edging toward anything. We’re not ruling anything out,” he said. “We are looking at all these issues to determine the root cause of this accident.” Virgin Galactic — owned by billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Aabar Investments PJS of Abu Dhabi — plans to fly up to six passengers at a time more than 62 miles above Earth, where they can experience weightlessness. The company sells seats on each prospective journey for $250,000. Branson told Sky News on Monday that the company will move forward despite the crash. He said there would be a “whole massive series of test flights” before any trips are made. He still plans to be on the maiden voyage, with his family. “We need to be absolutely certain our spaceship has been thoroughly tested — and that it will be — and once it’s thoroughly tested, and we can go to space, we will go to space,” Branson said. “We must push on. There are incredible things that can happen through mankind being able to explore space properly,” he said. SpaceShipTwo tore apart Friday about 11 seconds after it detached from the underside of its jet-powered mother ship and fired its rocket engine for the test flight. Initial speculation was that an explosion occurred, but the fuel and oxidizer tanks and rocket engine showed no sign of being burned or breached, the NTSB said. Sandy Huffaker/Getty ImagesSheriff's deputies inspect the wreckage of the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo in a desert field Sunday north of Mojave, California. The feathering system is a feature unique to the craft to help it slow as it re-enters the atmosphere. After being unlocked, a lever must be pulled to rotate the twin feathers toward a nearly vertical position to act as a brake. After decelerating, the pilots reconfigure the feathers to their normal position so the craft can glide to Earth. A review of footage from a camera mounted to the ceiling of the spaceship’s cockpit showed the co-pilot moving the feathering lever to the unlock position, Hart said. The feathers activated at Mach 1.0, the speed of sound, or 760 mph, Hart said. They should not have deployed until the craft had reached a speed of at least Mach 1.4, or more than 1,000 mph. Sandy Huffaker/Getty ImagesDebris from Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo sits in a desert field Sunday north of Mojave, California. Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides issued a statement Sunday to tamp down on conjecture about the cause of the crash. “Now is the time to focus on all those affected by this tragic accident and to work with the experts at the NTSB, to get to the bottom of what happened on that tragic day, and to learn from it so that we can move forward safely with this important mission,” he said. SpaceShipTwo has been under development for years and has seen setbacks. In 2007, an explosion killed three people and critically injured three others during a ground test in the development of a rocket engine.  A friend and former coworker recently remarked to me that, as professional pilots who were starting our careers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we were part of a lost generation of pilots. We began our flight training with the plan to move quickly from the regional airlines to the cockpit of “heavy iron” at the majors. Everything changed after September 11, 2001.
Aviation’s lost decade started with the terrorist attacks of September 11. Almost immediately, airlines stopped hiring and started furloughing pilots. Less than a year after the attacks, the airline bankruptcies started with a filing by US Airways in August 2002. Many airlines were only beginning to recover when the second half of the one-two punch, the 2008 recession, landed. Before the wave of bankruptcies was over, almost every major airline would be affected. The airlines used the bankruptcies to negotiate with unions for reductions in employee pay and work rules. Pay rates were decreased at most companies. For some pilots who were downgraded from captain to first officer, the cut in pay approached 50 percent according to the N.Y. Times. Changes to union contracts meant that pilots worked more for less pay. Generous pension plans were dissolved and replaced with 401(k) plans. The economic crisis also set off a wave of airline mergers as companies sought strength in combining operations. Amid falling ticket prices, companies merged to strengthen their route structures and reduce the number of seats available in hopes of driving up prices. The smaller number of airlines also meant that fewer pilots were needed. Pay cuts and loss of pensions may have contributed to the decision to change the “Age 60 Rule” as well. This controversial rule, first established by the FAA in the 1950s, required that airline pilots retire when they turned 60. In 2007, President Bush signed a bill into law that changed the mandatory retirement age for airline pilots to age 65. Overnight, the airline hiring outlook changed drastically as thousands of senior airline pilots nearing retirement found their careers extended by five years. This meant that, with little growth in the industry, airlines could put off hiring new pilots for another five years. For first officers already flying with the airlines, it also meant that their upgrades to captain would take years longer than expected. By 2012, when senior airline captains began turning 65, a career at a major airline wasn’t as attractive as it had been. Pilots who now had stable corporate flying jobs or who were senior at regional airlines often did not want to take the cut in pay or to lose their good schedules to start over at a major airline. Airline Pilot Central reports that the current first year pay for a United Airlines pilot is $66 per hour. This sounds like a lot at first, but the pay is for flight hours only. The United contract specifies a minimum pay of 70 hours per month. This works out to about $55,000 per year. For most pilots, it would take years return to their old pay rates. Airline Pilot Central also reports that the most junior captain at United was hired in 1996. As retirements increase, future new hires might upgrade quicker, but most can expect to spend a long time in the right seat. The numbers for other major airlines are similar to those of United. For companies like Southwest, Spirit, and JetBlue, the upgrade might be quicker but starting pay is lower. In addition to the pay cuts and quality of life issues, many pilots of the Lost Generation are skeptical of the stability of the airlines. After having seen two horrific cycles of long-term furloughs, few are willing to risk a stable corporate or charter flying job to go to the bottom of an airline seniority list. Airline seniority means “last hired, first fired.” Returning to the airlines would also likely mean the loss of precious free time to pilots of the Lost Generation. Airline pilots can live anywhere, but they must commute on their own time. For many, this would mean spending days off commuting on airliners. With the high passenger loads common in today’s airline industry, commuting as a standby passenger would be an uncertain and frustrating way to get to work. The alternative would be to move for a lower paying job. Along with good salaries and quality of life, many of the pilots of the Lost Generation have found that our priorities have changed. As we have aged, flying heavy airliners to the far corners of the world is less important than being home to watch our children grow up and making a life with our spouse. Flying is not as important as it was when we were 20 years younger and our logbooks were several thousand hours lighter. It has become a means to an end rather than an end in itself. For pilots who give up their current jobs, willingly or not, the airlines still provide an attractive career path. For those who take this path, the rewards can be attractive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that airline pilots and flight engineers (themselves an endangered species) earn a median income of $114,200 annually. For those at the top of the profession, captains of large jets, Salary.com shows a median income of $122,014. As airline pilots gain seniority, they typically work less as well. A crewmember on a heavy airliner on transoceanic trips might reach his maximum monthly flight time in two or three trips. As more and more airline captains reach the cutoff age of 65, the airlines will have to look harder and harder to qualified pilots to fill their cockpit seats. Recent rule changes that require more flight experience and a reduction in flight training since 2001 mean that those seats will soon be hard to fill. The shortage of qualified pilots may exert some upward pressure on pilot salaries. Nevertheless, for many pilots of the Lost Generation, an airline career is not in our future. It simply wouldn’t be worth the reduction in pay and the upheaval in our lives. After more than decade of watching our industry undergo gut wrenching change – and finding ourselves changed in the process – we’re okay with that. This video truly encompasses what life as a crop duster pilot back in the day was like. Volatile chemicals, dangerous aircraft, and unforgiving terrain put these pilots lives at risk daily. If your an aviation buff this is a great video and worth 8 minutes of your time.
A snapshot from the Cold War: Polish used Mig-15s to clear snow off railroad tracks 50 years ago.In the 1960s, PKP, the Polish State Railways, used Polish Air Force MiG-15s to clear snow off of railroad tracks. As the top image shows, the Polish not only used the engine, but the entire FRONT section of the Fagot (including the cockpit).
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