November 2020 edition of African Pilot

Legendary top Israeli air force test pilot Danny Shapira recalls his career heights: “Every new plane that Israel received, I flew it.” “Ever since I was a young boy, I wanted to be a pilot,” Shapira told The Jerusalem Post from his home in Haifa. At 93 years old, he has fought in six wars and has watched his beloved air force grow ‘from zero to a regional superpower.’ “I started when we did not have our own country, our own army or air force. We did not fight with weapons, but we fought with our hearts; we had to win,” he said. “The wish for freedom, sacrifice, dedication, and the dream to have our own country under our own flag is what won the War of Independence.”

Leslie Leroy Irvin was born on 10 September 1895 in Los Angeles, California. He became a stuntman for the fledgling Californian film industry. Flying in balloons he performed using trapeze acrobatics and parachute descents. For the 1914 film Sky High, Irvin made his first jump out of an airplane whilst the plane was flying at 1,000 feet above the ground. In 1918, he developed his own life-saving static line parachute, jumping with it several times and promoting it to the US Army. Irvin joined the Army Air Service’s parachute research team at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio where he made the first premeditated free-fall jump with the modern parachute on 28 April 1919.