On This Day: Two pilots die after freak air current catapults them to the ground during race

DECEMBER 8, 1937: Two pilots died during one of the world’s biggest aerobatic races after a freak air current caused them to spin out of control and crash.

Rudy Kling and Frank Haines plunged to the ground within seconds of each other after they’d both flown round the first hairpin turn at the Miami All-American show.

Their wives, children and thousands of fans watched in horror as they perished while racing each other for a $1,000 prize.

A British Pathé newsreel – titled Florida’s Death Race – showed the twisted wreckage of Kling’s Folkerts SK-3 and Haines’s self-built Haines Special.

The bodies of the two American flyers had to be cut out of their crumpled planes with hacksaws.

Their tiny planes had both encountered a freak air current after rounding the first pylon.

Neither of their engines were powerful enough for them to pull out of the stream – and the flyers were catapulted to their deaths.

The newsreel also shows some of the other pilots competing in the aftermath.

They included aviation pioneer Jacqueline Cochran who had just set a new record flying time from New York of four hours and 10 minutes.

The footage also showed a U.S. Marines flying group in woefully outdated biplanes, which would be obsolete by the time they entered World War II four years later.

Earlier in the show, which at the time was the only one in the world to be held in winter, Kling had won the Thompson Trophy Race.

The $9,000 prize – worth $141,000 today, or £86,000 – was also the biggest during the Great Depression era and attracted dozens of pilots from across America.

The free-for-all involved flying 200 miles – twenty times around the 10-mile circuit at Miami Municipal Airport, which opened that month.

Kling, from Lemont, Illinois – where a wall mural in his honour still exists – beat Earl Ortman by two-tenths of a second in a shock finish.

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The race had first been staged in 1929 with the inaugural Miami All-American and was stopped in 1961.

The air show was one of the biggest during the heyday of experimental aviation, when new records were being set all the time.

Planes so captivated the public then that America’s biggest celebrity was pioneering pilot Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic.

He was so hounded by the Press that he left America in 1935 – three years after his son was kidnapped and killed in what was dubbed the 'crime of the century'.

The deaths of Kling and Haines, both from Detroit, were also widely reported – although pilots routinely died in an age when the phrase 'death or glory' rang tragically true.