High Flight (Northrop T-38 Talon Version) 1972 US Air Force

more at http://quickfound.net/

'A tribute to the miracle of flight, with a reading of an inspirational poem by John Magee, against background music by the Air Force band and aerial photography...'

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gillespie_Magee_Jr.#High_Flight

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

John Gillespie Magee Jr. (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941) was a World War II Anglo-American Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot and poet, who wrote the poem High Flight. He was killed in an accidental mid-air collision over England in 1941...

John Gillespie Magee was born in Shanghai, China, to an American father and a British mother...

Magee's posthumous fame rests mainly on his sonnet High Flight, which he started on 18 August 1941, just a few months before his death, whilst he was based at No. 53 OTU. In his seventh flight in a Spitfire Mk I, he had flown up to 33,000 feet. As he climbed upward, he was struck by words he had read in another poem — "To touch the face of God." He completed his verse soon after landing.

Purportedly, the first person to read Magee's poem later that same day in the officers' mess, was his fellow Pilot Officer Michael Henry Le Bas (later Air Vice-Marshal M. H. Le Bas, CB CBE DSO AFC, Air Officer Commanding No. 1 Group RAF), with whom Magee had trained.

Magee enclosed the poem in a letter to his parents, dated 3 September 1941. His father, then curate of Saint John's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, reprinted it in church publications. The poem became more widely known through the efforts of Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, who included it in an exhibition of poems called "Faith and Freedom" at the Library of Congress in February 1942. The manuscript copy of the poem remains at the Library of Congress...

During April and May 1942, Hollywood stars such as Laurel and Hardy, Cary Grant, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope joined the Hollywood Victory Caravan as it toured the United States on a mission to raise war bonds. Actress Merle Oberon recited High Flight as part of this show. During the performance on April 30, 1942, at the Loew's Capitol Theatre in Washington, D.C., and before her recitation of High Flight, Oberon acknowledged the attendance of his father, John Magee, and brother Christopher Magee.

Orson Welles read the poem on an episode of The Radio Reader's Digest (October 11, 1942), Command Performance (December 21, 1943), and The Orson Welles Almanac (May 31, 1944).

High Flight has been a favourite poem amongst both aviators and astronauts. It is the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air Force and has to be recited from memory by fourth class cadets at the United States Air Force Academy, where it can be seen on display in the Cadet Field House. Portions of the poem appear on many of the headstones in the Arlington National Cemetery,[20] and it is inscribed in full on the back of the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial. It is displayed on panels at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, the National Air Force Museum of Canada, in Trenton, Ontario. It is the subject of a permanent display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, in Dayton, Ohio. General Robert Lee Scott Jr. included it in his book God is My Co-Pilot.

Astronaut Michael Collins brought an index card with the poem typed on it on his Gemini 10 flight and included the poem in his autobiography Carrying The Fire. Former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz quoted the first line of the poem in his book Failure Is Not An Option. U.S. President Ronald Reagan used part of High Flight in a speech written by Peggy Noonan on the night after the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986...

Many U.S. television viewers were introduced to High Flight when some TV stations ended (and sometimes also began) their programming day with short films based on it...