To the right is another cool image, but this one has nothing to do with astronomy, though you will likely be hard pressed to figure out exactly what you are looking at without some study. It is clearly some broken metal object inside a forest, but identifying its exact nature is not obvious.
What you are looking at is the remains of a propeller plane (likely flown on a reconnaissance mission) that crashed in the jungles of Vietnam during that long and tragic war of the 1960s and 1970s. Most amazingly, despite its twisted nature, the pilot survived and was fortunately quickly rescued by American troops before the arrival of the Vietcong.
That pilot’s name was Francis James Floyd. His son Jeffrey, a regular reader of Behind the Black, sent me the picture to illustrate that guys who fly wingsuits are not the only ones willing to do crazy things in the air. As he wrote,
Our dad fought in WWII, Korea and Vietnam as an Air Force pilot. While he had to learn how to parachute jump, he hated it. Even if the engine(s) failed, as long as he had his wings attached, he would not exit (jump). He said “There are two kinds of people that jump out of airplanes: idiots, and people in the armed services.”
So, the attached photo is what was left of his plane in Vietnam. He used the tops of the forest trees to try to slow down, like skimming the water. Fortunately, the good guys reached him first, and he came home.
Francs Floyd however was not an exception or rare thing, like the wingsuit fliers are today. He was one of a massive generation of Americans who, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, quickly enlisted to defend the United States and — more importantly — its fundamental principles of freedom and limited government.
Floyd was only twenty when he enlisted in 1942. He had no flight experience, but was quickly trained to become a pilot who flew fighter bomber missions over Italy. Later he returned to fly in the Korean War, and then again in Vietnam. As his son adds,
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