John Gillespie Magee was an 18-year-old student at Yale University as the momentum of the second World War began to gather pace during the hot summer of 1940. Imbued with a spirit of adventure, he abandoned his studies in September that year and crossed the border to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. In June 1941 he was sent to England, and exulted in soaring through the skies as he learned to fly a Spitfire. A sensitive and religious lad, he captured his feelings in a poem called High Flight, which he enclosed in letter to his parents that September:
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling Mirth of sun-split clouds,
And done a hundred Things you have not dreamed of.
A few weeks later, he was dead. He was killed 60 years ago today, on December 11th, 1941, and not in the whirl of combat over the war-torn European skies, but in a simple mid-air collision with another aircraft over Lincolnshire as he emerged from cloud on that misty winter's day.
Statistics tell us, and common experience confirms, that weather is a factor in a significant number of fatal aircraft accidents. But the kind of weather is of interest. Ice on the airframe, even 60 years ago, was not a major cause of tragedy. Neither do thunderstorms, downdraughts or microbursts and their associated turbulence figure very highly here, as they do in the United States.
The vast majority of fatal, weather-related aircraft accidents in these islands, it seems, can be traced to the pilot becoming disorientated in fog, low cloud or rain or snow. In many cases, it turns out that the aircraft is not really where the pilot thinks it ought to be, and all too easily it can end up in collision with a hill or mountain shrouded in low cloud or fog - or, as in the case of John Magee, in collision with another aircraft.
Be that as it may, a local farmer saw Magee struggling to escape from the cockpit of his Spitfire. He succeeded, but at only 400 ft above the ground, and his parachute failed to open in sufficient time. John Gillespie Magee was just 19. He died instantly , but his High Flight has survived to become a kind of aviator's anthem:
Up, up, the long, delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind
I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.