The USAF Thunderbirds

... during practice flights on the day before the Wings Over Pittsburgh Air Show, on June 15, 2007 ...


... and immediately afterwards, on the tarmac at the 911th Airlift Wing U.S. Air Force Reserve Base in Moon Township, Pennsylvania ...

Helicoptering

Paul Cornu was born on this day in 1881 in Glos-la-Ferriere, France.

An engineer living at Lisieux, Cornu designed a 28-pound working model of a vertical flying machine (or helicopter) which he had flown successfully in 1906. He decided to build a life-sized version of his helicopter for a try at the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize, a bounty of 50,000 francs offered by a pair of wealthy Parisians to the first to achieve manned, mechanically-powered flight over a specified 1-kilometer course. Cornu raised 100 francs from about 125 friends, built a 573-pound version of his flying machine, and after several unmanned tests with a 110-pound sand bag on board, on November 13, 1907, Cornu piloted his awkward copter to one foot above the ground and hovered for about 20 seconds -- the first manned helicopter flight ever.

On later flights, Cornu managed to ascend to five feet and accidentally achieved a record for two-person flight when his brother grabbed the frame of the machine to keep it from tipping and was briefly swept aloft. In 300 flight attempts, Cornu gingerly guided his craft forward and backward at a maximum speed of 6 miles per hour, but could not achieve the Deutsch-Archdeacon objective; the prize was won by Henri Farman in an airplane in 1908. Cornu gave up his experiments in 1909, lacking necessary funding.

It took another 31 years before Igor Sikorsky would design a practical, stable and navigable helicopter. Cornu died in 1944.

Tether-Plane

Jacon Christian Ellehammer, motorcycle manufacturer and aviation pioneer, was born on this day in 1871 in Bakkeboll, Denmark.

Ellehammer made tests on a craft of his own design, a tractor biplane, on the small private island of Lindholm. Because Lindholm wasn't large enough to accommodate a straight runway, Ellehammer tethered his plane to a pole and tested his plane by lifting off and flying around the pole in a circle, without worrying about steering or control issues. In this strange little "lab," Ellehammer managed to fly for 42 meters on September 12, 1906 (almost 3 years after Orville Wright's first successful flight), but he would not make a sustained, untethered flight until 1908; nonetheless, some Danes make the case that Ellehammer was the first to fly. He died May 20, 1946.

Wilbur

"An unfailing intellect, imperturable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadfastly, he lived and died." -- Bishop Milton Wright, in a eulogy to his son, 1912.

History lumps Wilbur and Orville Wright together, but they were very different characters, both essential to the breakthrough at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903 that launched the phenomenon of aviation.

Born on this day in 1867 near Millville, Indiana, the elder of the two brothers, Wilbur was a handsome, serious, dedicated student who hoped to follow in his father's footsteps (who was a progressive bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ) by going to Yale and becoming a minister. Just before he was to graduate from high school, however, Wilbur was playing street hockey and got hit in the mouth with a hockey stick, losing all of his front top teeth. Ashamed of the way he looked, he developed heart palpitations that overlayed his depression and self-doubt, and shortly thereafter he abandoned all hope of pursuing the life plan he had mapped for himself. Instead he consigned himself to the inside of the Wright home for three years, reading and caring for his mother who was dying of tuberculosis.

Avid young Orville pestered his brother out of his melancholy, inviting him to join Orville's fledgling printing and newspaper business and later, as a partner in the brothers' hand-crafted bicycle shop. His attention to engineering issues at the bicycle shop and the ongoing press accounts of the developmental failures of would-be aviators Otto Lilienthal and Samuel Langley (among others) encouraged Wilbur to begin to think about the possibilities of machine-powered flight.

He and Orville began to think of the aviation riddle as three separate problems: (1) building wings that would lift the weight of the pilot and the motor off of the ground (something Lilienthal had already done with his gliders), (2) having a power plant to propel the craft through the air, and (3) the most difficult problem, having a way to control the craft once it was airborne. Wilbur thought that being able to twist the wings, a mechanism later to be known as "wing warping," would give the pilot control over his craft, and began to experiment with a biplane box kite he and Orville built, with wings braced with wires which could be twisted to make the kite bank and turn. They reported their success with wing-warping to Octave Chanute, then considered the country's expert on aeronautics, who immediately recognized that they were ahead of most of the people who were working on flight.

In 1900 the brothers began to test their glider designs at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, an isolated stretch of dunes on the Atlantic coast which offered them privacy and by reputation the steadiest winds in the U.S. The first year they learned that their initial wingspan did not create enough lift to raise a human being off the ground, but that the control mechanisms seemed to work when the craft was flown as a kite; the following year, amid torrential rains and mosquitoes, they learned that a larger wingspan permitted the glider to carry Wilbur on short hops, but that the controls, theoretically based on Lilienthal's calculations of lift tables, couldn't keep Wilbur from smacking into the ground and splitting open his forehead.

After developing a revised set of lift tables back in Dayton, they returned to Kitty Hawk in 1902 with a new glider design, and following intense discussion and debate, fitted the back of the glider with a hinged tail rudder which was linked to the wing-warping mechanism. The moment Wilbur launched from the top of West Hill, he knew that the control mechanism finally worked. In 1903, they reappeared in Kitty Hawk with a new glider, the Flyer, fitted with an engine and propellers built by their bicycle shop mechanic Charley Taylor. Without press coverage or government observers, at 10:35 a.m. on December 17, Orville lifted off in the Flyer for the first sustained powered and controlled flight in history, a mere 12-second voyage. Taking turns at the helm, the brothers made three more flights that day, Wilbur's being the longest at 59 seconds and 852 feet.

When they tried to inform the press, the U.S. government and the Europeans (who, within the next 5 years, were to make strides through the work of Alberto Santos-Dumont), all quarters refused to believe that the little bicycle shop mechanics had actually achieved flight. The Wrights secured their patents and went underground for awhile, hoping to find financial backing for their technology. After Santos-Dumont claimed the title of "father of aviation" with his wobbly 200-foot hop in 1906, Professor Chanute pleaded with the Wrights to put on a show.

Wilbur went to LeMans, France, and on August 8, 1908 effortlessly took off before a wide-eyed crowd, turning and banking with ease. The French conceded defeat, and Wilbur became the toast of Europe. After a successful test for the U.S. government, a crash and a recovery, Orville joined Wilbur on the grand tour of the continent, with "princes and millionaires . . . as thick as fleas," flying demonstrations before delighted onlookers. By the end of the tour, the world's first barnstorming pilot had grown tired of barnstorming, and Wilbur dragged Orville back to Dayton in 1909 to continue to work on airplane designs and defend their patents against infringements in a series of lawsuits.

Wilbur died of typhoid fever at the age of 45 on May 30, 1912, only catching a glimpse of what his work would do to transform the lives of human beings forever.

More Things in Heaven and Earth ...

Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, the first person to die during a space mission, was born on this day in 1927.

The dashing air force pilot Komarov joined the Soviet cosmonaut group in August 1961. In October 1964, Komarov was the commander of the first Voskhod mission, in which he, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov became the first people to enter space in a multi-manned spacecraft. The three, who did not wear space suits because there wasn't any room in the hastily refurbished craft, remained in orbit around the Earth for just over a day.

The mission was reportedly to have lasted longer, but Soviet politics seems to have intervened: when Voskhod I was launched, Nikita Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union; when it returned, Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Kosygin had succeeded him following a bloodless coup. The first public appearance of the two new leaders was at the ceremony celebrating the return of Komarov and the other cosmonauts to Moscow. Legend has it that Komarov protested when asked to return early from orbit, only to be told by ground control, quoting from Shakespeare in a veiled reference to Khrushchev's fall, that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Three years later, the Soviets abandoned the Voskhod project in favor of the Soyuz, a spacecraft designed for long-distance flight and possible use in a Soviet manned lunar program, and Komarov was chosen to fly solo in the first Soyuz mission. On April 23, 1967, after a brief test orbit, Komarov died after his spacecraft tangled in its parachute during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere. One report revealed that the Soviets had experienced serious failures in the re-entry phase during the four unmanned Soyuz tests made before Komarov's flight. Given the track record, Komarov's last flight must be viewed as an extraordinarily courageous gamble.

Wrong Way Corrigan

In 1938, Douglas Corrigan was an obscure 31-year old pilot/mechanic -- a grease monkey at Ryan Aeronautical when the company built Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis -- who spent most of his free time nursing an ancient, radio-less Curtiss Robin J-6 monoplane he had picked up in an auction for $325 through failed inspections and bumpy, tentative flights around southern California.

After a lot of pleading, he finally received clearance from the department of commerce to fly from Long Beach, California to New York, which he did in June 1938 in less than 28 hours. Held back from returning to California right away due to bad weather, on July 17 he told officials at Floyd Bennett Airfield that he was leaving that morning to fly back to California; but when he took off, ground crewmen dropped everything as they watched Corrigan fly off over the Atlantic in his junk of a plane.

Flying through thick fog for 24 hours, Corrigan landed at Baldonnel Airport in Dublin, Ireland and, with a wink and a grin, he explained that he had thought he was flying to California and had only "accidentally" flown the wrong way across the Atlantic. Although no one took him for a fool and knew that he was an ambitious if somewhat reckless character, he stuck to his story, blaming the fog, a faulty compass and his lack of radio communication for his mistake. When he returned to the U.S. he was welcomed as an unlikely hero -- given public congratulations by U.S. ambassador to Great Britain Joseph Kennedy, a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and several ad endorsement contracts.

He subsequently portrayed himself (somewhat stiffly) in a film version of his misadventure (The Flying Irishman, 1939, written by Dalton Trumbo) and during World War II tested bombers for the U.S. government. In 1946, he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate from California on the Prohibition Party ticket, and finally retired to a 20-acre orange grove in Santa Ana, California, all the while still claiming, at least officially, that his precarious transatlantic crossing was inadvertent -- although privately he admitted that he had been telling that story for so long that he was beginning to believe it.

Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan was born on this day in 1907 in Galveston, Texas. He died on December 9, 1995 in Orange, California.

Aida

Socialite and philanthropist Aida de Acosta Breckinridge, a real "get-it-done" woman, was born on this day in 1884 in Elberon, New Jersey.

The daughter of wealthy Cuban parents, Aida de Acosta attended the Sacred Heart Convent in Paris. While she was there, she became fascinated by the flying experiments of Alberto Santos-Dumont, who was in Paris testing his dirigible, the Santos-Dumont IX, by flying it around the Eiffel Tower. Attracted by the young woman's curiosity, Santos-Dumont began giving her ground instruction in the operation of his craft; and one Sunday afternoon (June 29, 1903), without a warning of his intentions, he impetuously hoisted the 19-year old de Acosta into the basket of the dirigible, started the engine and let loose the ropes, sending her on a 5-mile course and giving her instructions from his bicycle on the ground. By this impromptu flight, Aida became the first woman ever to pilot a dirigible. Her parents, reading about the incident in the newspapers, were so mortified by their daughter's un-ladylike display that they immediately dragged her back to New York.

Not to be kept under wraps, Miss de Acosta began to make a name for herself in charitable causes, starting a milk fund for poor children. She married Oren Root (nephew of diplomat Elihu Root) in 1908 and subsequently gave birth to 2 daughters, but during World War I she sold "Victory" bonds -- raising more than $2 million, a record-breaking sum, from stunts such as having Enrico Caruso sing to Wall Street from the steps of the Treasury Building in New York. After the War, she went to France with the American Committee for Devastated France, helping to provide food, shelter and day care to displaced families.

In 1922, while on vacation, she developed an eye inflammation, which turned out to be glaucoma; shortly thereafter, she and Root were divorced in Paris. After several operations, she managed to recover sight in one eye, and (following her marriage to her old friend, ex-assistant secretary of war Henry S. Breckinridge; they would divorce in 1947) she was inspired to raise over $5 million for what eventually became the Wilmer Opthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins, opened in 1929. She followed this in 1944 by organizing the world's first bank for corneal transplants, the Eye Bank for Sight Restoration at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, an enterprise to which she devoted much of the rest of her life with indefatigable energy and an uncanny ability to keep people from saying "no."

De Acosta was also known as a patron of the arts, serving as New York City art commissioner (appointed by Fiorello LaGuardia in 1935) and financing such projects as Robert Flaherty's documentary, Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1925).

She died on May 26, 1962 in Bedford, New York.

Amelia

The American media, with its habit of producing instant celebrities without intensive labor or talent, occasionally lights upon a latently talented person and actually becomes an instrument for her evolution. One such media star was Amelia Earhart (born on this day in 1898 in Atchison, Kansas), a tomboy who wore gym suits as everyday clothes and delighted in shooting rats.

When she was 23, she had her first plane ride, and knew immediately that she wanted to learn to fly. While taking flying lessons and eventually sidelighting as a somewhat wobbly air show barnstormer, she drifted into pre-med studies at Columbia, a failed career in photography and social work in Boston when her big break came. In 1928, a group headed by explorer/publishing heir George Putnam and Admiral Richard Byrd sought to finance the first flight of a woman across the Atlantic, a year after Charles Lindbergh's historic first solo flight across the Atlantic. The original candidate for the trip, a wealthy Brit named Mrs. Frederick Guest, had to pull out due to family objections, so Putnam and Byrd cast about Boston flying circles for a suitable replacement.

Earhart wasn't the most accomplished of woman pilots, but there weren't many to choose from in Boston, and it didn't hurt that she somewhat resembled the lean, freckled Lindbergh. There was a catch, however: Earhart was only going to be a passenger in a plane flown by two men; the objective was to fly a woman across the Atlantic for the first time, not to have a woman pilot a plane across. Disappointed, Earhart nonetheless accepted the mission for the adventure, and on June 18, 1927, she landed in Wales after a 21-hour flight from Newfoundland with Wilmer Stutz and Louis Gordon at the helm. Putnam handled her publicity carefully; while Stutz and Gordon were quickly forgotten, Earhart received a ticker tape parade in New York City and her fresh Midwestern face began to appear in magazine endorsements. Her mother even cashed in on a baking ad.

Earhart's modern media miracle financed her dream to become a real pilot, and become a real pilot she did. Later that year, she was the first woman to fly solo round-trip across the U.S., stopping frequently for hugely attended personal appearances along the way. In 1931, Earhart married Putnam (a "marriage of convenience," as he managed her career), and set a world altitude record (18,415 feet). On May 20, 1932, Earhart flew a bright red Lockheed Vega from Newfoundland to Ireland, finally becoming the first woman, and only the second person, to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic. In 1935, by this time one of the most perennially famous women in America, Earhart was the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.

At the age of 40 in 1937, Earhart undertook her most ambitious mission, a round-the-world trip. With navigator Fred Noonan, she began in Miami, landing in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Dutch Guiana, Brazil, French West Africa, Chad, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Java, Darwin, Australia and Lae, New Guinea -- 20,000 miles in about 3 weeks. On July 2, 1937, on her way from New Guinea to Howland Island, a tiny speck in the Pacific, the U.S. Navy lost contact with her, and no trace of her was ever found.

Her disappearance has been the subject of rampant rumor and speculation. Following one preposterous mythical strand, the movie Flight for Freedom (1943, with Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray) depicted a story about a woman aviator who became deliberately lost at sea so that the U.S. had an excuse to investigate the area and examine Japanese military preparedness. It is more likely that brave Amelia Earhart and her comrade Mr. Noonan simply lost their way.

John Glenn

John Glenn was born on this day in 1921 in Cambridge, Ohio.

Glenn was selected as one of the original seven Mercury astronauts in 1959 following a distinguished career as a Marine and Air Force "exchange" pilot, having flown 63 combat missions in Korea (alongside a fellow pilot, the baseball legend Ted Williams) and setting a transcontinental jet flight record from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours and 23 minutes. He quickly became a favorite with the press for his courteousness, confident spokesmanship and apparent patriotism, and was widely expected to become the first American in space.

Instead, Glenn waited until after Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom made their sub-orbital flights to become the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. In the Mercury capsule Friendship 7, Glenn circled the Earth three times. As Glenn started his second orbit, having observed the presence of strange "fireflies" outside his craft, flight controllers picked up signals that his capsule's heat shield was loose. If the heat shield were to break free, Glenn's capsule would burn up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, so ground control advised Glenn not to jettison the capsule's retrorocket pack, which was strapped on top of the shield. The capsule re-entered without incident, and upon Glenn's return he became the most celebrated national hero since Charles Lindbergh.

President Kennedy early on identified Glenn's charisma, and encouraged him to consider running for Senate from Ohio with Kennedy's sponsorship. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, however, Glenn put his political plans on hold. Having been grounded by Kennedy in the service of Kennedy's political objectives, Glenn left the space program and entered business as an executive with Royal Crown Cola. He remained close to the Kennedy family, and was the person called upon to tell Bobby Kennedy's children of their father's death in 1968.

Glenn took a run at the Senate in 1970 and was beaten badly, but succeeded in 1974, entering the Senate as a middle-of-the-road Democrat. As one of the more visible members of the Senate, he was briefly considered as a running mate for Jimmy Carter in 1976. In 1983, Glenn declared his candidacy for President, and for a time the pundits thought they had identified a front-runner in Glenn: a legitimate hero, whose story would be retold for younger voters in Philip Kaufman's film of Tom Wolfe's book, The Right Stuff, scheduled for release in the fall of 1983. The film, although excellent, did not do well at the box office -- and neither did Glenn's campaign. He did not enjoy the relentlessness of the national campaign, nor the gamesmanship, and withdrew from the race prior to the Convention after several disappointing primary showings, leaving Vice President Mondale, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson to slug it out for the nomination. He continued to serve in the Senate, being temporarily staggered by public charges that he interfered in the federal investigation of Lincoln Savings and Loan owner Charles Keating; although Glenn was cleared of the charges, his reputation suffered.

In January 1998, the 77 year-old Glenn was chosen by NASA for an upcoming shuttle flight as a payload specialist to study the effects of weightlessness on aging, leading comedian Dennis Miller to quip, "Senator Glenn has been cleared to pilot the space shuttle, but he has not been cleared to leave the left turn blinker on the whole way." Glenn defended his selection, demonstrating an impressive knowledge of physiological literature on aging and reminding the press that it would be foolish to send a sick, inexperienced 77-year old when he was battle-tested, healthy and available. His triumphant return to space took place in October 1998, and back on Earth he was given a second ticker-tape, New York City parade after 36 years, before retiring from public life.

"I don't think this is what Von Daniken had in mind when he was talking about 'ancient astronauts.'" -- Felix Blueblazes, 1998.

Croce-Spinelli

Balloonist and aeronautics engineer Joseph-Eustache Croce-Spinelli was born on this day in 1843 in Dordogne, France. Croce-Spinelli was deeply interested in manned flight and had not only made several balloon expeditions but had published articles on propeller design when on April 15, 1875, with Gaston Tissandier and an assistant named Henri-Theodore Sivel, he flew to 29,000 feet over India in the helium-balloon Zenith -- short of the altitude record set by James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell. Although the men had been advised by Paris physiologist Paul Bert about the supplemental oxygen required at such altitude, in the excitement they failed to heed the advice, and Croce-Spinelli and Sivel asphyxiated in the inhospitably thin air. Tissandier miraculously survived to tell the tale.

Croce-Spinelli's claim to fame, however, stems not so much from his contributions to aeronautics but from the design of his much-visited tomb at Pere Lachaise in Paris: the monument displays lifesized effigies of Croce-Spinelli and Sivel lying side-by-side, holding hands, bare-chested and otherwise covered in a shroud. The sculpture is obviously a tribute to their comradeship, but some have asserted, without further evidence, that Croce-Spinelli and Sivel were gay lovers. Heroic death in the company of one's peers was a heady theme for the post-Romantic French. Who's to say?

That Breckinridge Boy

Henry S. Breckinridge, a hale and hearty scion of an illustrious American family who pops up as a footnote in a lot of unlikely places, was born on this day in 1884 in Chicago, Illinois.

A member of the famous Kentucky Breckinridge clan (his great-grandfather, John, was a U.S. senator and attorney general; his second cousin, once removed, John C. Breckinridge, was U.S. vice president; his uncle, William C.P. Breckinridge, was a rather notorious congressman; and his cousin, Sophonisba, was a Hull House reformer), Henry Breckinridge's appearance at the birthday party of President Benjamin Harrison's grandson while still a youngster was considered noteworthy fodder for the Washington Post society pages.

After attending Princeton and Harvard Law School, without relevant experience Breckinridge was appointed Assistant Secretary of War by President Wilson in 1913, and shortly thereafter was charged with personally delivering $3 million in gold to Europe, to be provided to U.S. citizens stranded in Europe at the outset of World War I. He resigned in 1918 with Secretary of War Lindley Garrison over Wilson's failure to create a reserve force, and served briefly in the U.S. Army in World War I, seeing action as a battalion commander at Vosges, St-Michel and the Meuse-Argonne. After the War, Breckinridge won a bronze medal at the 1920 Olympics as a member of the men's fencing team, in the foil competition, and served as captain of the men's team in the 1928 Olympics.

As a practicing lawyer, Breckinridge represented Charles Lindbergh and acted as his intermediary in the unsuccessful negotiations for the release of Lindbergh's kidnapped child Charles, Jr. in 1932. He was, in fact, the first person Lindbergh called when he realized his infant son was missing, and he later served as a witness in Bruno Hauptmann's trial for the murder of the Lindbergh baby.

In the wake of the tragic crash of the Akron airship off the New Jersey coast in 1933, Breckinridge served as counsel to the joint congressional committee to investigate dirigible disasters -- not a coincidence, perhaps, since his then wife (second of three), Aida de Acosta, was the first woman to pilot a dirigible back in 1903.

He subsequently flirted with electoral politics as an anti-New Deal Democrat, running for Senate from New York as a Constitutional Party candidate in 1934 and entering Democratic presidential preference primaries against President Roosevelt in 1936 before supporting Alf Landon in the general election. Unlike his friend, Col. Lindbergh, however, Breckinridge was a quick supporter of stemming the tide of Nazism in Europe, declaring, "If Hitler makes one move to touch Iceland or Greenland, the United States should immediately occupy them and loose its sea and air power upon the Nazi bandit whose victory would mean the end of all civilized freedom in the world."

Breckinridge died on May 2, 1960 in New York City.

Tiny, the Doll Girl

"To tell the truth, I feel just as much at home jumping out of an aeroplane with my father's life preserver as I would if sitting on the front steps. Of course, one must understand aeronautics to perform a feat successfully, but I have had experience, and I know it is impossible for the device to fail." -- Tiny Broadwick, 1915.

Pioneering skydiver Tiny Broadwick was born Georgia Ann Thompson on this date in 1893 in Henderson, North Carolina.

The foster child of balloonist Charles Broadwick, 4-foot tall, 85-lb. "Tiny" Broadwick (known as the "Doll Girl") was one of Charles' band of high-altitude barnstorming performers when she made her first parachute jump from a balloon at the age of 15. This, of course, was a feat that might have been cause for a call to child welfare authorities today. At any rate, after Capt. Albert Berry's first successful parachute jump from an airplane in 1912, Tiny became the first woman to jump from an airplane on June 21, 1913, when Glenn Martin (pictured with Broadwick, above) flew her up to 2000 feet above Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Neither Capt. Berry's jump nor Tiny's 1913 jump were freefall jumps, but jumps in which their parachutes opened automatically.

While demonstrating her foster father's design for a static line parachute pack (whereby the pack was attached to a static line on the back with a breakaway tie which would open the chute automatically shortly after jumping) for the U.S. Army on September 13, 1914, however, Tiny made history again. She used the static line 4 times during the U.S. Army demonstration, but during the 4th jump the static line tangled with the airplane; so on the 5th jump, Tiny cut the static line to a length long enough to reach with her own hands, and jumped, pulling the cord herself once she cleared the Curtiss biplane and sailing safely to the ground using the risers in Charles Broadwick's parachute to steer her way to her landing target. With that, Tiny Broadwick became the first person to make a premeditated freefall jump. The tests ultimately resulted in the U.S. Army ordering its first Broadwick coatpack parachute, and Tiny had ushered in a new era of skydiving.

With a record of over 1,100 jumps, Tiny retired in 1922. She passed away in August 1978.