homepage Forums SimHQ Community Community Hall Fighter ace causes of death

I've spent a good part of today and yesterday reading short biographies of famous fighter aces from WWI and WWII and what surprised me was how many of them died from non-combat causes. There are probably more examples but these are the aces I read about so far:


Werner Molders - Died when the HE-111 he was on crashed while attempting to land.

James McCudden - Died while hot-dogging in his SE5 shortly after take off.

Hans-Joachim Marseille - Engine malfunction and died while trying to bail out.

Dick Bong - Died during takeoff while test flying the P-80 in California.

Gerhard Barkhorn, the number 2 ace, was killed in an auto accident in the 1980s

I would remove Marseille. He was on a combat mission.

There was also a Japanese ace with 60+ kills who died when the transport aircraft he was traveling in was shot down.

Top Canadian, George Beurling. Very interesting man and pilot. In 1948, Beurling was recruited to fly P-51 Mustangs for the Israeli Air Force. After a test flight, Beurling fatally crashed his Noorduyn Norseman transport aircraft while landing at Aeroporto dell'Urbe in Rome on 20 May 1948.

Joseph C. McConnell was killed test flying the F-86H.

I wasn’t aware of the connection of his death and Chuck Yeager.


“ In 1954, he was temporarily assigned to the service test program for the new F-86H Sabre. This was the last and most powerful version of the Sabre, and was intended to be a nuclear-capable fighter-bomber. On 25 August 1954, while testing the fifth production F-86H-1-NA (serial number 52-1981) at Edwards Air Force Base, McConnell was killed in a crash near the base following a control malfunction.[7] The cause of the accident was attributed to an incorrectly installed bolt. Then-Major Chuck Yeager was assigned to investigate the crash and replicated the malfunction at a much higher altitude. This height advantage allowed him to safely regain control of the aircraft before it hit the desert floor.”

I believe it was either this accident or a similar one involving the F-104 that was traced back to the factory where an assembly line worker had decided to insert a bolt in the opposite direction called for by the specs because doing so was easier.

And that's just how things were done; find out and fix it -- no endless theoretical studies and examination

Also goes to show the balls on men like Yeager. He was going to duplicate a known-deadly manoeuvre with the only hope that additional altitude might help him survive.

I included Marseille because his death was not due to any enemy action. It was due to a faulty engine design of the BF109 variant that he was flying at the time and also his mis-judgement on when to bail out of the plane which caused his body to slam into the rear tail.

They don't make men like him anymore.

Balls of steel.

Many WWI pilots also died in crashes or mid-airs.

Here a fighter pilot that still living being honored

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Rosenkranz

https://onemileatatime.com/news/delta-captain-charters-a330-retirement-flight/

He is also mentioned here

https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the...t-as-good-as-stealthy-precision-strikes/

He is the author of https://www.amazon.com/Vipers-Storm-Diary-Fighter-Pilot/dp/0071400400