{"id":19232,"date":"2016-02-23T17:11:09","date_gmt":"2016-02-23T16:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=19232"},"modified":"2016-02-23T17:11:09","modified_gmt":"2016-02-23T16:11:09","slug":"remembering-the-sky-high-achievements-of-eric-winkle-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=19232","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the sky-high achievements of Eric &#8216;Winkle&#8217; Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my many interests is aviation which is why on my web site I have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/2010\/aviation.shtml\">a section on aviation<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/afilms.html\">a section on aviation films<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So I was saddened to hear of the recent death, aged 97, of the legendary &#8211; but not so widely known &#8211; Eric Brown, a British test pilot known as &#8216;Winkle&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/uk-news\/2016\/feb\/22\/eric-winkle-brown-obituary\">This obituary<\/a> concludes with an explanation of his nickname and a reminder of how the attribute which led to it actually saved his life:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #3366ff;\">He was 5ft 7in \u2013 short for a pilot \u2013 which earned him his nickname and helped save his life when in 1949 he was flying the De Havilland 108, which he called \u201ca killer\u201d. This was the plane in which the test pilot Geoffrey de Havilland had died three years earlier when, at Mach 0.88; the plane slipped out of control. Propelled upwards, De Havilland had broken his neck on the canopy. \u201cHe was a big man. I was short,\u201d wrote Brown. \u201c\u2026 This was the moment of truth.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my many interests is aviation which is why on my web site I have a section on aviation and a section on aviation films. So I was saddened to hear of the recent death, aged 97, of the legendary &#8211; but not so widely known &#8211; Eric Brown, a British test pilot known [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19232"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19237,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19232\/revisions\/19237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}