Rudolph William Schroeder

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Rudolph W. Schroeder (1920)
Schroeder's Packard-LePère-LUSAC-11 biplane over McCook Field

Rudolph William "Shorty" Schroeder (born August 14, 1885 in Chicago , † December 29, 1952 in Cook County , Illinois ) was an American pilot of German - Irish descent. In 1920 he was the first to reach an altitude of 10,000 meters in a powered airplane .

Life

Rudolph William Schroeder was the son of John and Anna Schroeder. He was nicknamed Shorty , although or because he was six feet tall. Schroeder graduated from the Crane Technical School in Chicago. In 1910 he became a mechanic for Otto Brodie (1888–1913), a flight pioneer who carried out sightseeing flights with an early Curtiss double-decker and from 1911 with a Farman double-decker. Schroeder learned to fly from him. After Brodie had a fatal accident in 1913, Schroeder was a mechanic for Newell M. ("Mickey") McGuire (1886-1914), who flew a Curtiss Pusher . After his death, he worked for a while with Katherine Stinson .

In October 1916, Schroeder joined the aviation division of the US Army Signal Corps . By the end of the First World War , he rose to the rank of major . Schroeder became the Signal Corps chief test pilot at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio , and performed high altitude flights. On September 18, 1918, he set his first world altitude record for powered aircraft in an aircraft produced by the Bristol Aircraft Company at 8,800 m. In 1919 three more height records followed. In August 1919, Schroeder won the handicap competition for military aviators at the Great New York - Toronto - air racing . On February 27, 1920 he carried out a flight in the LePère LUSAC-11 biplane of the Packard Motor Car Company , which took him to an altitude of 10,093 m within an hour and 47 minutes. He exceeded the mark of 9,760 m, which had been reached on June 17, 1919 by BMW test pilot Franz Zeno Diemer . Only the Berlin meteorologists Arthur Berson and Reinhard Süring had previously reached a higher altitude with the Prussen gas balloon in 1901 . When he took off his goggles to change the oxygen bottle , Schroeder's eyes froze. Without breathing oxygen, he passed out shortly afterwards in the thin air. Two minutes later, he regained consciousness - just 600 meters above the ground - and, although almost blind, was able to intercept the plane and land safely.

Schroeder's eyesight was limited after the record flight, but he remained an avid aviator. In 1920 he took part in the competition for the Gordon Bennett Cup in Paris, but had to give up prematurely because of an engine failure.

After retiring from the army, he worked on aviation safety issues, initially at Underwriters Laboratories . In the mid-1920s, he worked as a test pilot at Stout Metal Airplane Company , a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company . He was the first to fly the three-engined passenger aircraft Stout 3-AT (first flight on November 25, 1925) and Ford 4-AT (first flight on June 11, 1926). At the end of the 1920s, he was design manager at Curtiss-Wright , later assistant director at the Bureau of Air Commerce. In 1940 Schroeder became Vice President for Security at United Airlines . A year later he suffered a stroke . In 1945 he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross . He died at the age of 67 on December 29, 1952.

Rudolph William Schroeder was married to Lillian Anne Schroeder. The couple had two children, son Leonard and daughter Ann.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ 28,900 feet
  2. ↑ 33,114 feet

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ An American Height Record. (PDF) In: FLIGHT, March 4, 1920. Flightglobal.com , March 4, 1920, p. 265 , accessed on April 26, 2016 (English).
  2. ^ Robert F. Pauley: Michigan Aircraft Manufacturers . Arcadia Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-7385-5218-7 , pp. 33–34 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
personal data
SURNAME Schroeder, Rudolph William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shorty (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American pilot
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH December 29, 1952
Place of death Cook County (Illinois)