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Lincoln J. Beachey (March 3, 1887 – March 14, 1915) was a pioneer American aviator and barnstormer. He became famous and wealthy from flying exhibitions, staging aerial stunts, helping invent aerobatics, and setting aviation records.〔 He was known as ''The Man Who Owns the Sky,'' and sometimes the ''Master Birdman''.〔Marrero, Frank. ''Lincoln Beachey: The Man Who Owned the Sky'' Scottwall Associates (1997) ISBN 978-0-942087-12-3〕 Beachey was acknowledged even by his competitors as "The World's Greatest Aviator".〔 He was "known by sight to hundreds of thousands and by name to the whole world." ==Birth== Born on March 3, 1887, in San Francisco, Beachey was a lonely, chubby kid who, according to authors Sam Kean and Frank Marrero, nobody would have suspected of becoming a hero. By the age of 10 he was hurtling down San Francisco’s steep (Fillmore Hill ) on a bicycle with no brakes. Following in his older brother Hillary's footsteps, he worked as a ground crewman for dirigible pilot Thomas Scott Baldwin. He helped build the dirigible "California Arrow" and made his first dirigible flight in 1905, at the age of 17. Later he helped design a faster, more aerodynamic dirigible known as the "Beachey-Baldwin". In 1910 he piloted his Beachey-Knabenshue Racing Airship balloon at the 1910 Los Angeles International Air Meet at Dominguez Field, and raced fixed-wing aircraft around a course at an altitude of . Meanwhile, his brother Hillary began flying aeroplanes at the meet (the Gill-Dosh Curtiss-type biplane), and soon began axperimenting with such craft, too.〔LINCOLN BEACHEY - A Brief Biography.mht〕 At the 1911 Los Angeles airshow, Beachey got his big break: a star pilot got hurt and Beachey took his place. He shot upwards 3,000 feet into the air…and his motor failed. He went into a nose-diving spin no pilot had ever survived. He did what no pilot had ever done: he turned into the spin, regained control, and landed safe and sound.〔http://niagarafallsinfo.com〕 After that, Beachey joined the exhibition team of aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss. Unfamiliar with Curtiss' designs, it is said he crashed three times while learning to fly them, but soon achieved mastery of this new design. In June the organizers of the U. S.-Canadian Carnival offered $1,000 to the first person to fly an aeroplane over Niagara Falls. Beachey responded in his Curtiss D biplane, and on June 27, 1911 Beachey took off into a drizzle and flew over the lower falls of Niagara Falls, then above American Falls, before an estimated 150,000 spectators. While gradually climbing, Beachey circled his plane over the falls several times. After he completed this performance he dove down into the mists of the falls, within 6 m of the waters surface. Then he flew his plane under "Honeymoon Bridge," above the rapids. (Local papers described his plane as looking like "a beat-up orange crate.") Although Wilfred Parke is credited with developing "Parke's technique" to recover from a tailspin,〔http://www.fleetairarmoa.org/fleet-air-arm-history-timeline August 25, 1912〕 Beachey is also cited as having discovered the maneuver.〔Bruno, Harry. ''Wings over America: The Story of American Aviation'' (Halcyon House: Garden City, New York, 1944).〕 Climbing to 5,000 feet, he forced his plane into the spin and then turned the rudder in the direction of the spin, allowing him to level out. He repeated the maneuver eleven more times to confirm that it worked.〔http://www.nationalaviation.org/beachey-lincoln〕 Thus Beachey soon became an aviation superstar. At a time when the entire population of the U.S. was just 90 million people, 17 million came out to see him fly in just one year. He invented figure 8s and the vertical drop, and was the first pilot to achieve terminal velocity by flying straight toward the ground. In fact, what Beachey did was so extraordinary and so dangerous, a wave of pilots died trying to imitate him. After the death of a dear friend of his, Beachey vowed to retire. And he did—for three months. Until he finally gave in and strapped himself back in a cockpit to master the trick of all tricks: the loop. Lincoln perfected it. At the 1911 Chicago International Aviation Meet, Beachey raced a train—and let his wheels touch the top of the moving train as it passed underneath. Here he also won multiple awards for his stunts, and set a new altitude record. To do this he filled his tanks with fuel, then said he would point the plane's nose skyward and keep going until the fuel ran out. For an hour and forty-eight minutes he spiraled upwards until the engine sputtered and died. He then glided in spirals to the ground, and climbed out, numb and stiff from the cold. The barograph aboard the plane showed he had reached a height of , temporarily setting the world's altitude record. In 1912, Beachey, Parmelee, and aviation pioneer Glenn Martin performed the first night flights in California with acetylene burners, fuses, and small noise making bombs dropped over Los Angeles. In 1913, Beachey took off inside the Machinery Palace on the Exposition grounds at the San Francisco World's Fair. He flew the plane at 60 miles per hour and landed it, all inside the confines of the hall. His stunt speciality was the "dip-of-death", where he would take his plane up to , and dive toward the ground at full speed with his hands outstretched. At the very last moment he would level the plane and zoom down the raceway, with his hands off of the controls, gripping the control stick with his knees. In a jest aimed at Blanche Stuart Scott, another member of the Curtiss exhibition team, Beachey dressed up as a woman and pretended to be out of control in a mock terror to hundreds of thousands.〔"Air Eddies." ''Flight'', February 24, 1912, p.171〕 Orville Wright said, "An aeroplane in the hands of Lincoln Beachey is poetry. His mastery is a thing of beauty to watch. He is the most wonderful flyer of all." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lincoln J. Beachey」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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