Deaths
- 6 October – Richard Heyser, 81, American U-2 pilot during the Cuban missile crisis.
- 3 October – Edsel Dunford, 73, American aerospace engineer, cancer.
- 16 September – John Fancy, 95, British World War II RAF airman.
- 28 July – Margaret Ringenberg, 87, an American aviator, who had logged more than 40,000 hours, natural causes.
- 23 July – Dick Johnson (glider pilot), 85, American glider pilot, aeronautical engineer, plane crash.
- 8 June – Gene Damschroder, 86, American politician, WWII pilot, plane crash.
- 20 March – Ann Baumgartner, 89, first American woman to fly a jet.
- 15 March – Vicki Van Meter, 26, American pilot, youngest-pilot distance-flying record setter, suicide.
- 11 February – Frank Piasecki, creater and pilot of America's second successful helicopter the PV-2 and creater of the tandem rotor design.
- Diana Barnato Walker
- Donald Blakeslee
- Donald S. Lopez, Sr.
- Tadeusz Kotz
- Wally Phillips
- Joe Shell
- Bert Shepard
- Frank Blackmore (traffic engineer)
- Jimmy Dell
- Bertram James
- Norman Smith (record producer)
- Albert William Baker
- Andrzej Andrzejewski
- Harry Goonatilake
- Frank Piasecki
Read more about this topic: 2008 In Aviation
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)