Aviation museum inducts honorees
The ceremony was to be run by producer Tony Bill.
DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- The first black American to earn a pilot's license, the first person to fly six times the speed of sound, and pilot and actor Cliff Robertson will be the newest enshrinees in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.
The inductees, enshrined Saturday night, include Robertson, Bessie Coleman, David Lee "Tex" Hill and Robert White.
Coleman, who was born in Atlanta, Texas, earned her pilot's license in France in 1921. Postponing her dream to start a flying school for blacks, she earned a living performing aerobatic flying demonstrations at air shows.
After recovering from an accident in 1926, she went on a flight with a mechanic in preparation for an air show in Florida. The mechanic was flying the plane when it malfunctioned and Coleman fell from the open cockpit to her death.
Flew fighter planes
White, a native of New York, flew fighter planes during World War II, escorting bomber missions out of England. In 1945, he was shot down over Germany and spent two months in a prison camp.
White later became a test pilot and was the lead pilot in the X-15 hypersonic research program that NASA conducted with the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy and North American Aviation, Inc.
He became the first person to fly at four, five and six times the speed of sound and in 1962 set an altitude record of more than 59 miles above the Earth's surface.
Hill, who was born in Korea, in 1941 joined the Flying Tigers, an American volunteer group based in China during World War II. Hill shot down 18 enemy aircraft during the war.
Robertson, who grew up in La Jolla, Calif., as a teenager would wash airplanes and clean engines in hopes that a pilot would give him a ride and a lesson.
In 1969, he organized an effort to fly food and medical supplies into war-torn Biafra in Africa. And in 1978, he organized a similar effort for famine-stricken Ethiopia.
Ceremony
Master of ceremonies at the enshrinement event will be film producer director Tony Bill.
Bill, 65, who has been a pilot for 50 years, directed "Flyboys," which opens Sept. 29 and is about the birth of aerial combat during World War I. He won an Oscar for best-picture in 1973 for producing "The Sting."
The event, at the Dayton Convention Center, is to feature a stage that resembles the cockpit of a transport jet. Event programmers plan to start the ceremony with a simulated takeoff, complete with views of a runway and clouds and the sound of a pilot chatting with a control tower.
The aviation hall was founded in 1962 in Dayton, the hometown of the Wright brothers, and later established by Congress. Wilbur and Orville Wright were the first of 186 enshrinees.