Your Café staff learned about the article linked here from Gary “Doc” Childers of the Stemme Owners Group (SOG). While not a conventional soaring tale, it does, as SOG’s Marc Arnold puts it, “… include shutting down an engine and gliding from 70,000 feet—quite a final glide!”
The story is by Amy Shira Teitel, a freelance space writer, whose work appears regularly on Discovery News Space and Motherboard, among many other sites.
“The year was 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was at its peak, and it had been only days since President Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was establishing missile sites in Cuba. The U.S. Air Force was on DEFCON-2. American and Soviet military forces were an order away from launching a nuclear attack.
But on Saturday, October 27, it wasn’t a military general or political leader who nearly upended that delicate world balance and set off World War III. It was the aurora borealis.”
