Patrick Hamblin > Recent Status Updates

“There was an Air Force pilot named Mike Collins…Mike Collins has undergone eleven weeks of combat training at Nellis Air Force Base…and in that eleven weeks twenty-two of his fellow trainees had died in accidents…Then there was a test pilot Bill Bridgman. In 1952 when Bridgman was flying at Edwards Air Force Base, sixty-two Air Force pilots died in the course of thirty-six weeks of training.” (15)

“As late as 1970 I was to discover an article by a military doctor in a medical journal a career Navy pilot faced a 23 percent likelihood of dying in an accident. This did not even include deaths in combat, which at the time, with the war in Vietnam in progress, were catastrophically high for Navy pilots.” (xviii)