Neil Armstrong
HOUSTON, TX — On Saturday, 25 August, America lost one of her heroes, Neil Alden Armstrong. The first man to walk on the Moon, Armstrong passed away due to complications after a blocked coronary surgery. He was 82.
Armstrong flew for the first time in 1930 at six years old, when his father took him up in a Ford Tri-motor. During the short excursion, the plane began to lose control and the pilot panicked. Sensing danger, the six year old Neil head-butted the man to silence his feminine cries, telling him to shut up, then seized the controls, landing the aircraft so well that observers thought the pilot was still at the stick.
Fascinated with flight for the rest of his life, Armstrong joined the Navy in 1949, and trained to become a naval aviator. During the Korean War, Armstrong was on a bombing mission, flying low enough to see the whites of his enemies’ eyes before he sent them back into the Stone Age, when a mechanical issue caused the plane to hit a pole approximately 20 feet off the ground. Lesser pilots would have immediately ejected, but Armstrong decided to come around for another bombing run. With his last remaining piece of ordnance he obliterated the offending pole, and machine gunned the site for good measure.
