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ICE FLY

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ICE FLY

How many pilots died and old aircraft lost when they flew over jagged snowy peaks in the remotest corners of the world? Doing a dangerous job knowing the risks and trusting in fate and luck to bring the through. Some never made it, there planes impacting vertical mountain sides in sickening crashes. Bodies lost forever, frozen in the time of death. Icily cold and otherworldly remote.

From the Andes to Himalayas, Alps to the Rockies. If you screw up or your engine stops, you’re going to crash and suffer. Survive and you’re screwed, twenty thousand feet above sea level with no chance of rescue, just a slow cold death.

Of the ones who live and beat death in the mountains, they have stories to hold their grand kids in awe. Did you really fly a C-46 over the Hump, risking Jap fighters and Mother Nature? Sure did son, it was a walk in the park. Of the ones who didn’t make it, they remain forever on coldly beautiful mountains holding up the roof of the world.

Maybe their ghost will remain there forever, in rapture of the beauty of icy mountains, forgetting how they died.

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Comments

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nick armbrister

Fri 24th Feb 2012 00:44

yes i saw the program a bit ago, a Lancastrian plane. found bodies etc. i read a good book called the last sunrise by robert ryan. fiction but good. i read when i was a kid, gold was thrown out of a curtiss c-46 commando to save the plane. i thought alps but probably the himalayas. must research it.

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M.C. Newberry

Thu 23rd Feb 2012 14:53

There must have been a number of such tragic miscalculations before the existence of that high atmospheric air stream came to be understood. How many pilots must have had their judgement ruined by the unknown effect of that hidden head wind? There was a TV progamme about one such incident and they actually found the wreckage of the aircraft many thousands of feet up and just a short distance from making it over the peaks - in the Andes, as I recall. Those people were the equivalent of olden day explorers for nerve and endeavour.

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