John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941) was an American aviator and poet, made famous for his poem High Flight. Magee served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States entered the war; he died in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire in 1941.

Early life

John Gillespie Magee was born in Shanghai, China, to an American father and a British mother, who both worked as Anglican missionaries. His father, John Magee, Sr., was from a family of some wealth and influence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Magee Senior chose to become an Episcopal priest and was sent as a missionary to China. Whilst there he met his future wife, Faith Emmeline Backhouse, who came from Helmingham in Suffolk and was a member of the Church Missionary Society. Magee's parents married in 1921, and their first child, John Junior, was born 9 June 1922, the eldest of four brothers.

Magee began his education at the American School in Nanking in 1929. In 1931 he moved with his mother to the UK and spent the following four years at St. Clare, a boarding school for boys, near Walmer, in Kent.

Flight

Flight is the process by which an object moves, through an atmosphere (the air in the case of earth) or beyond it (as in the case of spaceflight) without direct support from any surface. This can be achieved by generating aerodynamic lift, propulsive thrust, aerostatically using buoyancy, or by ballistic movement.

Many things fly, from natural aviators such as birds, bats and insects to human inventions such as missiles, aircraft such as airplanes, helicopters and balloons, to rockets such as spacecraft.

The engineering aspects of flight are studied in aerospace engineering which is subdivided into aeronautics, the study of vehicles that travel through the air, and astronautics, the study of vehicles that travel through space, and in ballistics, the study of the flight of projectiles.

Types of flight

Buoyant flight

Humans have managed to construct lighter than air vehicles that raise off the ground and fly, due to their buoyancy in air.

An aerostat is a system that remains aloft primarily through the use of buoyancy to give an aircraft the same overall density as air. Aerostats include free balloons, airships, and moored balloons. An aerostat's main structural component is its envelope, a lightweight skin containing a lifting gas to provide buoyancy, to which other components are attached.

High

High may refer to:

Science, technology and economics

Music

Albums

Songs

Other uses