The Man Who Fell to Earth

On 16 August 1960, 32-year-old U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger—kitted out in a pressure-suit and a specially constructed and rigged parachute—boarded a gondola tethered to a helium balloon, ascended to 102,800-feet above the New Mexico desert—and jumped.

During the ensuing four-minute 36-second free-fall, Kittinger’s body accelerated to 614-miles-per-hour—0.80 Mach—and endured temperatures approaching negative-one-hundred-degrees Fahrenheit. At 14,000 feet, Captain Kittinger deployed his 28-foot main parachute and—in addition to setting records for the highest parachute jump and longest free-fall the world had yet seen—provided the Air Force data that would help save the lives of innumerable pilots compelled by misfortune to eject from high-speed, high-altitude jets.

The following month, during a ceremony at the White House, President Dwight D. Eisenhower personally presented Kittinger with the Harmon Trophy—an award honoring the world’s outstanding aviator, aviatrix, or aeronaut.

Such a story would mark the literal and figurative apogees of most lives, but Joe Kittinger’s was a wondrous, often wild, eminently admirable life punctuated in equal parts by academia, adrenaline, peril, and unwavering patriotism.

Trained as a fighter pilot, Kittinger—a Florida native—began his Air Force career flying specimens of America’s last generation of reciprocating-engined warplanes around West Germany. Notwithstanding the commencement of a lifelong love-affair with North American’s P-51 Mustang, postwar garrison duty in Europe held limited appeal for Kittinger, whose zeal for precipices prompted him to enroll in the U.S. Air Force’s Test Pilot School. In short-order, bearing fresh test pilot credentials, Kittinger found himself at New Mexico’s Holloman Air Force Base, flying chase airplanes in furtherance of research endeavors that would, in a few years’ time, give rise to America’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo enterprises.

In 1963 Kittinger volunteered to serve in the USAF’s First Special Operations wing—known informally as the air commandos—and was promptly deployed to Vietnam. The air commandos, during the early years of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, flew counterinsurgency missions in Martin B-26 Marauders (later designated A-26s). Among the outfit’s aims was the interdiction of freight traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail—a storied, if not idyllic thoroughfare linking Laos and North Vietnam. During his time with the air commandos, Kittinger pioneered the use of the beer bottle as a weapon of war—loading his Marauder’s bomb bay with empties and dumping them from low altitude. Whether or not Kittinger’s tactic resulted in enemy casualties remains unknown. Its value as a morale-booster, however, was indisputable.

In 1964, accompanied by a contingent of his fellow combat pilots, Kittinger testified before the U.S. Senate that America was not winning the war in Vietnam.

After two tours of duty, Kittinger returned to the U.S. and transitioned to the F-4 Phantom—among the Vietnam era’s most iconic aircraft. He volunteered for a third tour, and in 1971 returned to the Southeast Asian theater—this time as commander of the 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron—the famed Triple Nickel.

On 11 May 1972, mere days before he was scheduled to rotate home, then-Lieutenant Colonel Kittinger and his weapon systems officer, First Lieutenant William J. Reich, were shot down deep inside North Vietnam. Captured after his ejection, Kittinger was remanded to the keeping of the H?a Lò Prison, an infamous hellhole to which American POW’s ascribed the ironic and historically-enduring moniker Hanoi Hilton.

1973’s Paris Peace Accords brought ends to both American involvement in the Vietnam War and Kittinger’s internment. On 29 March 1973, Colonel Kittinger—promotion was among captivity’s consequences for many U.S. servicemen, including Kittinger—departed North Vietnam aboard a C-141.

“We never doubted we would get released,” Kittinger would later confide. “It made us better Americans, to appreciate what we had. Being a POW was life-changing.”

On 24 May 1973, President Richard Nixon hosted a gala White House soiree for a group of American POWs and their wives. It remains to this very day the largest formal dinner ever held at the Executive Mansion. “That was one of the greatest parties I have ever been to,” Kittinger said of the event.

In 1978—after a restful spell at the Air War College at Maxwell AFB and a stint as the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing’s vice commander, Kittinger chose to retire from Active Duty military service. “I had 29 great years in the Air Force,” he remarked.  “I loved the flying, I loved the experience, I loved the companionship. I loved the Air Force team.”

Kittinger’s stratospheric leap remained a world record for more than half-a-century. In 2008—after turning down numerous similar requests, the eighty-year-old USAF veteran and aerospace legend joined Red Bull’s Stratos effort, and served as mentor and ground-control communicator to Austrian adventurer Felix Baumgartner, who in 2012 leapt from an altitude of nearly 24-miles, finally breaking Kittinger’s record—a portion of it, anyway.

Though he fell farther, Baumgartner—whose parachute deployed prematurely—did not fall longer than Kittinger. Ergo, Joe Kittinger retains the world record for longest free-fall duration.

Colonel Joseph William Kittinger II passed away 09 December 2022 at the age of 94. Upon learning of the death of his countryman and constituent, Florida Senator Rick Scott solemnly asserted: “Our nation lost a legend and hero … We’re forever thankful for his service and contributions to our country.”

Aero-News Network offers its condolences to Colonel Kittinger’s loved ones, and its compliments to the memory of a truly great American. We had the pleasurew to know Joe as a patriot, adventurer, pilot and, best of all, a good friend.

FMI: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7651429-come-up-and-get-me