From Building a Black Box to Filling One

Jerome Lederer, the man who sent Charles Lindbergh to what he thought was certain death and later launched NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight Safety after the launchpad space capsule fire in 1967 that killed astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil Grissom and Edward White II 101; Pioneer in Plane and Spacecraft Safety, died at the age of 101. "I did not have too much hope that he would make it," Lederer admitted years later of Lindbergh. "I just went out because I was a friend of his, and I wanted to see the airplane, to look the situation over." Among Lederer's other contributions to defying the heavens was the development of the black box flight data recorders on board all aircraft.