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1926: The United States Army Air Corps is created. 1937: Amelia Earhart disappears over the Pacific Ocean while attempting the first round the world trip along the equator-probably without a Link 12 bubble sextant... 1982: Larry Walters of San Pedro California uses a lawn chair with 45 helium filled balloons to rise to 16,000 feet and lands eight miles away in Long Beach. "After 45 minutes in the sky, he shot several balloons, and then accidentally dropped his pellet gun overboard. He descended slowly, until the balloons' dangling cables got caught in a power line, causing a 20-minute blackout in a Long Beach neighborhood. Walters was able to climb to the ground. The lawn chair used in the flight was reportedly given to an admiring boy named Jerry, though Walters regretted doing so when the Smithsonian Institution asked him to donate it to its museum. Twenty years later, Larry, by then an adult, sent an email to Mark Barry, a pilot who had documented Walters's story and dedicated a website to it, and identified himself. The chair was still sitting in his garage, attached to some of the original tethers and water jugs used as ballast. The chair is now on loan to the San Diego Air & Space Museum, on exhibition through 2014." Lawnchair Larry" died, sadly, in 1993 at age 44. A former truck driver and security officer like myself, who dared 'rise above it all-California style' he crosses my thoughts often to this day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Walters . As to the Army Air Corps: My gratitude! My dad, a Pratt chemistry-math engineer grad, signed up for the army after Pearl Harbor along with his classmates. In its wisdom, the army assigned them to chemical weapons ie flame throwers for use against pillboxes-an expendable one-way-trip up the beach to a pillbox slit-and a preferred Jap sniper's target, especially in the Pacific Island campaigns. The heavens opened!: My dad, after basic, transferred to the Air Corps; completed OCS and became an Engineer/Navigator (Short crews in Ferry Command) on B25's and 29's rising to 1st Lt. He never saw any of his classmates again... His offices in the 40's: The navigation station and the engineer station on B-29's The top gun turret came and went; the navigation dome (sextants) stayed...the Link model 12 bubble sextant, obviously the 'weapon of choice' across the wide Pacific; and used on the Enola Gay too. The devil is in the details and Nav math is a lot of details: 5 degrees of variation can be the difference between Howland island or(possibly) ditching at Gardiner Island 500 miles away(Earhart?)...-thanks Dad!