The pilot who climbed onto his wings midflight

A closer look

Early commercial aviation was roughly ten percent crude engineering and ninety percent wildly suicidal acrobatics. In 1919, while perilously crossing the Atlantic in a heavily converted bomber, Arthur Brown had to repeatedly leave the open cockpit, bravely crawl out onto the freezing, highly slippery wings mid-flight, and manually clear heavy ice chunks from the air intakes just to keep the plane from plummeting into the ocean.