Joynath Victor Denow, a steward for Indian Airlines, was told in 1998 to shave off his handlebar mustache. He refused, and began a decade-long court battle to save his whiskers and his job.
De filed a writ petition in Calcutta High Court, pleading that the moustache was part of family custom. He told the court that his ancestors had sported handlebar moustache as well. The court, however, set the emotional plea aside and asked De to comply with the manual rules. [Link]
An airship crashed into a windmill in Aurora, Wise County, Texas, the morning of April 17, 1897. An article in the Dallas Morning News reported that its place of origin was extraterrestrial.
The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.The article closed with, "The pilot's funeral will take place at noon to-morrow." I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at that funeral.
Genealogy Blog passes along this story of a baby born somewhere over the Atlantic, together with a link that explains what her birth certificate might say.
A baby girl has been delivered by a British Airways crew and two medical students after her mother went into labour five hours into a flight.
Baby Nadine was born six weeks prematurely before flight BA 215, from London to Boston, could land at the nearest airport in Halifax, Canada.
Mr Dobe said he had noticed the woman looking "uncomfortable" during the pre-flight emergency procedures demonstration.
"She was clearly pregnant and I could see she was a bit uncomfortable. But I thought she was just scared of flying," he said. [Link, via Genealogy Blog]
Descendants of a Georgia mountain man are convinced that he mastered flight decades before the Wright brothers took off. "I would just put my life on it that it's a true story," says Roma Sue Turner Collins, whose grandmother swore she saw Micajah Clark Dyer's contraption aloft.
Dyer's flying machine looked more like a boat carried by a balloon and the 19th-century inventor reportedly built rails up the side of Rattlesnake Mountain then slid the craft down the mountain, gathering speed to take off into a cornfield across a nearby creek.Micajah, a man ahead of his time, also has his own blog.
Family members are hoping someone eventually will build a full-scale version of his machine, listed as Patent No. [1]54,654 as his "Apparatus for Navigating the Air." [Link]
From The (Nags Head, N.C.) Outer Banks Sentinel of Dec. 17, 2005:
Wright Memorial unveils new statues
BY CHARLEY BUNYEA, SENTINEL STAFF
The national memorial of the first powered flight in history is now complete and forever frozen in time as three new statues were unveiled at the Wright Brothers National Memorial on Friday.
"Forever memorialized and captured in bronze is that one 500th of a second when flight was first achieved," said US Coast Guard Chaplain Rob Heckathorne during the ceremony.
More than 50 descendents of the four individuals who witnessed the first flight were present to see their distant relatives immortalized in bronze.
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[Read the whole story]
