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In
the 1920s and '30, barnstorming pilots and wingwalkers got the world
excited about airplanes and flying in general. You could make a good
living risking your life this way, but most of the stunt artists did it
for the thrill, the adrenaline rush, and the love of flying. Those
old-time wingwalkers died out -sometimes literally. Only a very few
remain that dare recreate the stunts of the early days of aviation. One
is Carol Pilon.
Pilon has been wingwalking for 17
years, and she is among the few who sought out the sport — as opposed to
coming from an aviation background, or through a relationship to a
pilot. Pilon resists giving her age, but begrudgingly allows that
biographical details suggest she is in her 40s. She grew up in rural
Canada and had been casually taking flight lessons when she saw a
commercial on TV for an air show in Ottawa. Wingwalking, she said, “just
came and picked me up, right by my backbone. I had no education about
flying, about aircraft. But that stuff just sang to my soul.”
She
immediately began contacting wingwalking teams. “I hounded them, I
stalked them,” she said, eventually taking her first walk in 2001. That
same year she contacted air show veteran Jimmy Franklin, owner of the
air show acts collective Franklin Flying Circus. “I said, ‘Hey, I want
to do this, let me try.’ And I ended up marrying him.”
Pilon
performs with her own plane and pilot, and was the only professional
wingwalker in America until she started teaching younger women how to do
it. Read about
this extraordinary woman's life and career at Buzzfeed.
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