Former astronaut Gen. Joe Engle died July 10 at the age of 91. Engle was an accomplished Air Force pilot with the distinction of flying two different winged spacecraft, the X-15 and the Space Shuttle. Beyond that he flew 185 aircraft and accumulated 15,400 hours, including the first operational shuttle flight and another later on.
Engle grew up in Kansas, the son of an agriculture instructor, but he never considered a life kicking the clods. “My mom used to say … that she couldn’t remember me seriously wanting to do anything but fly airplanes,” he told NASA’s Oral History Project in 2004. “I never met an airplane I didn’t like,” Engle said of his love affair with flight. “Some are less relaxing and less enjoyable and less fun to fly and some of them are a lot more work to fly than others. But they’ve got their own personality.”
