This July 22nd marks what would have been Pancho Barnes' 125th birthday. That is a number worth sitting with for a moment. A hundred and twenty-five years since Florence Leontine Lowe came into the world in Pasadena, California, born into wealth and privilege, and proceeded to spend the next seven and a half decades doing exactly as she pleased with all of it.
We salute General Chuck Yeager (February 13, 1923 – December 7, 2020), a true American hero, on what would have been his 100th birthday. Among his many achievements, on October 14, 1947, while piloting the experimental Bell X-1, General Yeager became the first to fly faster than the speed of sound. That evening Yeager and his X-1 team celebrated this milestone in aviation with Pancho Barnes at her Happy Bottom Riding Club. Pancho Barnes and General Yeager were close friends. [Read More]
The current US Air Force Flight Test Museum is located behind the gates at Edwards Air Force Base. Because the Museum is currently located behind the gates on a top security air base, access is often not possible for non-military personnel.
To make the museum fully accessible to the public, it is currently being rebuilt and relocated to just outside the West Gate to Edwards Air Force Base. As Art Thompson, Board Chairman of the Flight Test Foundation recently noted, “In the new location, the Flight Test Museum seeks to not only preserve and protect the history of flight test but also be the conduit to connect it to a new generation. The developments at Edwards have always [Read More]