Pegoud Loops a Bleriot!

[Hauksbee]

Found this while looking for something else. [serendipity] It's a German post card celebrating Alphonse Pegoud's being the first person to do a loop. (pretty bold being in a Bleriot) In fact, a Russian pilot was the first. By 12 days. 'Guess news didn't travel so fast in those days.

[Capitaine Vengeur]

Pyotr Nesterov was indeed the first to loop the loop. He was punished for having endangered the Czar's property, while Pégoud won awards and international fame for the same feat performed later. As such, he teached many foreign pilots, including Germans. Nesterov was also the first pilot to destroy an enemy plane in air combat, an Austrian Albatros B.II by ramming on 25 August 1914, one month and half before Frantz & Quénault's first air kill, actually but the first crew to down an enemy plane and come back alive to report it. Adolphe Pégoud may have been the first pilot in History to shoot or force down 5 confirmed enemy aircraft. He was killed on 31 August 1915 by UOff Otto Kandulski, one of his former German students. Kandulski and his observer came back later to drop a funeral wreath over the place, as tribute for an internationally respected airman. During obituaries, a French journalist called late Pégoud "L'As", the Ace, and it seems to be the origin of the word for a 5-kills champion of the air.