Every prospective pilot had seen that on-board film, and it was not a droll experience to watch it. The camera had been mounted just behind the pilot in the cockpit. It was a stop-frame camera that took one picture per second. In one frame the pilot and his white helmet would be upright in the cockpit. In the next you would see his head, body, and helmet keeled over, crashing into the wall of the cockpit. In the first you saw a mountain ridge framed in the cockpit window, as if he were headed down in a dive, and in the next you saw empty sky: he was going end over end like an extra-point kick. The film seemed to go on forever. It was eerie looking at it, because you knew that at the end that little figure bouncing around in the white helmet would be dead. >> |
||