Boy King on Beachey Keen

"In the early days of flight, there was this man named Lincoln Beachey. 
     Lincoln Beachey solved the issue of the tailspin.
     Beachey was a barnstormer and a pioneer aviator when avionics were a brand-new science, and the mortality rate for aviators was in the 90th percentile.  In particular, they grappled with the issue of mid-flight stall, and the going logic at the time, based entirely on intuition, was to turn your propeller away from the plummet and try to restart the engine with friction. 
     This eventually happened to Beachey, and defying his own intuition and popular logic, he instead turned his plane into the dive, into the plummet, increasing his downward plunge and decreasing his response time to seconds.  But it worked: The dive decreased the kinetic friction against the propeller to restart his engine, and suddenly, the stall was no longer an issue for flyers.  Lincoln Beachey solved it by defying his impulses of self-preservation and diving headlong into what was a risk."


---Domingo Martinez