That is, instead of being surrounded by huge, sturdy metal planes with state-of-the-art avionics, these guys sat in rickety frames of plywood wrapped in flammable fabric, next to large tanks of highly combustible fuel. Then they took to the skies and tried to kill each other.

We usually think of fighter pilots as kick ass cowboys of the sky, living out our video game fantasies and handing out bitchin' nicknames all day long. But today's fighter pilots have nothing on the first of their kind -- the guys who appeared in the first world war when airplanes themselves were new and experimental.

6 Sir David Grahame Donald

Right off the bat, you're going to call bullshit on this story. We weren't there, all we can say is that the pilot himself spent 55 years insisting it was true.

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Sir Grahame Donald started out like a lot of RAF pilots: young, brave and parachute-less. Which is often a problem when you're flying a machine held together by twine and good intentions. The official reason why the Allied forces didn't issue parachutes to pilots was not that they hadn't been invented yet, because they totally had, but that they feared pilots would abandon their planes as soon as they were hit rather than try to save them.



"It's not that the planes are worth more than your life, but...well, they are."

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So with that in mind, Donald was 6,000 feet in the air when he discovered that his safety belt wasn't of the highest quality. Specifically, he discovered this tiny fact as he was hanging upside down in the middle of a looping maneuver and the belt snapped. Donald fell nearly 2,000 feet before BAM!

... He landed on the top wing of his own goddamned airplane, which had continued on its loop without him.



Which is not a situation they teach you how to handle in pilot school. Probably. None of us are pilots.

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Grahame Donald was now frantically holding on to the edge of the wing, trying to stop himself from slipping into a whirling propeller while his plane hurtled toward the ground at 140 mph. His first attempt to reach his joystick sent the plane into a violent spin that nearly flung him off. Finally, he was able to hook the stick with his foot and bring the plane back under control, eventually slipping back into the cockpit with a whole 800 feet to spare. In a later interview, the pilot took the whole experience in stride:

"The first 2,000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably 'firma'. As I fell I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her."