Alexandru Papana

Alexandru Papana
nation	Romania
birthday	October 18, 1906
place of birth	Bucharest
job	Soldier, pilot
date of death	April 17, 1946
Place of death	Las Vegas, USA
Career
Medal table
Type of medals 1 × 0 × 1 ×
1933 World Bobsleigh Championship gold Schreiberhau Two-man bobsleigh 1934 World Bobsleigh Championship bronze Engelberg Two-man bobsleigh
last change: July 31, 2015

The YR-PAX by Alexandru Papană (1938)

Alexandru "Alex" Papană (born October 18, 1906 in Bucharest , † April 17, 1946 in Las Vegas ) was a Romanian pilot and bobsleigh driver . In 1933 he became world champion in the two-man bobsleigh together with Dumitru Hubert .

biography

Bobsleigh and aerobatics

Alexandru Papană was a son of the Romanian general Ion Papană and joined the Romanian Air Force, where he was promoted to lieutenant . He was active in many sports, including tennis , fencing, and soccer ; so he played as a goalkeeper at the football club Colțea Bucharest . In 1928 he acquired his flight license.

Papană also ran bobsleigh, in 1928 and 1931 he was Romanian champion. In 1932 he started together with a pilot friend, Dumitru Hubert, at the Olympic Games in Lake Placid and took fourth place. The two athletes also took part in the Olympic races in four-man bobsleigh with Ulise Petrescu and Alexandru Ionescu ; the Romanian team finished sixth. The following year, Papană and Hubert became world champions in the two-man bobsleigh in Schreiberhau . At the Bobsleigh World Championships in the following year they won the bronze medal. In August 1934 Hubert had a fatal accident with his plane at an air show in Brașov in front of 10,000 spectators. His machine collided with another in midair, and he was dead on the spot.

Papană also flew regularly at air shows, completed long flights and set several flight records for distance and altitude. He drove a speed record from Bucharest to Brașov by car. On September 11, 1935, shortly after the start of a planned night flight from Bucharest to Tokyo , a fire broke out on board the aircraft. Papană's fellow pilot, Captain Alexandru Popiteanu, saved himself by parachute . Papană himself, who had given the order to jump, stayed behind and tried to save the plane, but finally had to jump from 300 meters. Because of this incident, both pilots were awarded the gold pin of the Caterpillar Club of the parachute manufacturer Irvin . This was just one of several life-threatening situations in his life.

At the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin , Papană was the only Romanian to take part in a competition for acrobatics , the International Aerobatic Competition . The winner and thus the unofficial world champion was the German Otto Heinrich Graf von Hagenburg , Papană took twelfth place and was personally congratulated by Charles Lindbergh . He then received an invitation to the Los Angeles Aerobatics Championship , which he accepted. Together with his aircraft, a Bücker Jungmeister with the registration YR-PAX and one of two machines of its type, he traveled from Frankfurt to New York on board the Hindenburg airship .

As an aerobatic pilot and pilot in the USA

At the Cleveland Air Races in 1937, Papană and Graf Hagenburg fought a show fight, both in Bücker-Jungmeister aircraft, Papană on YR-PAX and Hagenburg on D-EEHO. Papana put a deep inverted front before the match and wanted as Hagenburg it imitate him, his plane touched the ground, and they went to break. Hagenburg hardly injured himself. Papană then lent his machine to Hagenburg so that he could finish the competition.

In 1937, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Lindbergh's Atlantic flight , Papană planned a flight from New York to Bucharest and ordered a new aircraft, a Bellanca . A fundraising campaign was held in Romania to finance this flight, and King Carol II and the government supported the project. The aircraft was to be given the Romanian registration number YR-AHA and the proper name "Alba Iulia 1918" in memory of the vote on December 1, 1918, through which Transylvania came from Hungary to Romania. Numerous technical breakdowns and accidents during the preparations, however, thwarted this project. In January 1940, the YR-Pax was damaged by the propeller of a Boeing P-12 at Chicago Airport . Alex Papană managed to get off his plane at the last minute without being injured.

Papană was married to Dina Isvoranu for the first time. The couple divorced in 1938, only to remarry shortly after in Reno . In the same year Dina Papană died giving birth to their daughter Dina; the child survived. Apparently out of pain at this loss, Papană went on a hike alone in the southern Carpathians near Sinaia in November 1938 and had to be rescued by a military force, half frozen to death.

Test pilot and entrepreneur

At the beginning of the Second World War , Papană left Romania, went to France and applied as a pilot in the French army. When it was made a condition that he give up his Romanian citizenship, he left France and traveled by ship to the USA. There he received a draft order for the Romanian army. When he did not obey this, a military court in Romania denied him his officer rank for disobedience . He also turned down an offer to fly for the United States Army Air Forces because he would have had to give up his Romanian nationality to do so.

During the war Papană worked as a flight instructor and test pilot and completed a degree in flight engineering at the San Francisco Polytechnic College . From 1944 he worked for the Northrop Corporation , where he tested, among other machines, the Black Widow P-61 , the first American fighter aircraft specially designed for the night. In 1945 he was featured in the US aviation magazine Flying as Vice President of Aircraft Testing Co. , a company he had founded shortly before.

In March of the same year, Alexandru Papană went into a second marriage in Beverly Hills . He had met his wife, Jean, while at Northrop, while she was working in the tower on the Hawthorne airfield . Jean Papană wanted to divorce her husband in the spring of 1946 and traveled to Las Vegas for this purpose. In April 1946, Papană's car, in which there was a suicide note to his wife, was found abandoned on a highway outside Las Vegas; after an intensive search, his body and two other farewell letters were discovered six days later in the Nevada desert . He had poisoned himself and apparently suffered a long, painful death. In one of his farewell letters, he asked that his ashes from an airplane be scattered over the desert. His wife told authorities that Papană had been extremely nervous during their marriage and repeatedly threatened to kill herself and herself, even on the day of their marriage.

literature

• Karl Lennartz , Wolf Reinhardt, Ralph Schlueter: The Games of the X. Olympiad 1932 in Lake Placid and Los Angeles . Agon, Kassel 2015, ISBN 978-3-89784-406-3 , p. 49 .

Web links

• Alexandru Papană in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Coltea Bucuresti - statistics. In: Romanian Soccer. Retrieved July 3, 2015 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Alex Papana and Bü133 Jungmeister YR-PAX. (No longer available online.) In: Förderverein Bücker-Museum Rangsdorf. Archived from the original on July 18, 2011 ; Retrieved July 2, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Dumitru Hubert Bio, Stats, and Results. In: Sports Reference. Retrieved July 2, 2015 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Mihai Andrei: Alex Papana, Aerobatics Champion of the Two Americas. In: Aeroclubul Romaniei. March 16, 2003, archived from the original on March 16, 2003 ; Retrieved July 4, 2015 . 
5. ^ Project LZ 129 - Notes on the passenger Zeppelin, LZ 129 Hindenburg: The Hindenburg's Seventh North American Flight. In: Project LZ 129 January 19, 2015, accessed on July 3, 2015 . 
6. ^ Joint photo by Papană and Hagenburg in Flight from September 23, 1937
7. ↑ Eberhard Kranz: Bellanca 28-92. In: fliegerweb.com. Retrieved July 4, 2015 . 
8. ^ The Lincoln Star , October 23, 1938, p. 30
9. ↑ Then the aircraft went to the aerobatic pilot Mike Murphy and then to Beverly Howard , who won numerous competitions with the aircraft. In 1971 Howard had a fatal accident at an air show. The aircraft that was wrecked in the accident was restored and Howard's family donated it to the National Air and Space Museum ( Smithsonian ) in Washington, DC in 1973 .
10. ↑ Warren Thompson: P-61 Black Widow Units of World War 2. Osprey Publishing, 2012, ISBN 978-1-782-00678-7 , p. 10 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
11. ↑ Alex Papana: "I Learned About Flying From That!". In: Flying Magazine. dated Nov. 1945, ISSN  0015-4806 , Volume 37, No. 5, p. 48 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
12. ^ Nevada State Journal , Apr. 24, 1946, p. 3
13. ↑ Thomas G. Matowitz: Cleveland's National Air Races. Arcadia Publishing, 2006, ISBN 978-0-738-53996-6 , p. 70 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
14. ^ Kingsport Times . April 25, 1946, p. 3