Word: badere
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...Abandon. Last week Bader was in the midst of a U.S.-Canada inspection tour. While in Ottawa, he met some of his Battle-of-Britain buddies at the Royal Canadian Flying Clubs' Association. As old flyers will, he got to reminiscing about the old days when aviation was still a sport...
Between world wars, when Douglas Bader was a cocky, teen-age R.A.F. cadet, the planes he flew were as perky as their pilot. Light wood, fabric and singing wire, they could bounce to a landing on some farmer's field as handily as they touched down on military runways. Flat-hatting across the countryside with his face in the slipstream, a man could navigate by eye and the nearest railroad track and fly by the seat of his pants...
Just for the fun of it one bright December morning in 1931, Pilot Officer Bader decided to buzz the officers' club at Woodley Aerodrome near Reading, rolled into the turf, and lost both legs as a result of the crash. But after eight difficult years spent learning to move skillfully on a pair of artificial legs, he was back in the R.A.F. as a fighter pilot, and during World War II Squadron Leader Bader personally accounted for 22½-German planes. His career became a British legend, faithfully recorded in Paul Brickhill's biography, Reach...
What he missed most, said Bader, was "the gay abandon of the prewar days, with a little clubhouse and a field with light airplanes on it, people having tea under sunshades, and all that pleasant peaceful scene." Flying then was "something exciting and different, and we all wanted to go up in an airplane. It was of course a two-seater, open-cockpit.job . . . Our ardor might have been damped if our first experience of flying was sitting in a pressurized tube looking out of a small side window with 40 other people . . . There is far more exhilaration, fun and impression...
Reach for the Sky, by Paul Brickhill. The heroic story of Douglas Bader, a legless RAF ace who fought in the Battle of Britain, destroyed 22½ enemy planes and kept his German captors busy recapturing him (TIME...