On the Flight Line at 97, He Still Has the Wright Stuff

--Cecil (Sinnie) Sinclair is still flying high at age 97. The Muskegon, Mich., area resident, who may be the world’s oldest active pilot, took to the air for his annual honorary flight check. Accompanying Sinclair, who now lives in a nursing home, was one of his former students, Clair McComb, a certified flight examiner for the Federal Aviation Administration. McComb took his first hour of flight instruction in 1942 from Sinclair, who holds a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records for his 70-year aviation career. Although he’s now confined to a wheelchair much of the time and must be accompanied by a co-pilot, Sinclair takes an annual flight to celebrate his April 15 birthday. Local pilot Jack Brewer said Sinclair’s original pilot’s license--624--was autographed by aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright.

--Princess Michael of Kent, a Czechoslovakian-born aristocrat who married into Britain’s royal family, confirmed that her father was an officer in Adolf Hitler’s SS and said she was “considerably shocked” by the discovery. Buckingham Palace said in a statement that Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, a Silesian nobleman, was part of the elite Nazi force that ran concentration camps during World War II and was responsible for the extermination of 6 million Jews. Princess Michael, 40, learned of her father’s past as a result of investigations by the tabloid Daily Mirror newspaper. Press Assn., Britain’s domestic news agency, said Princess Michael had grown up in Australia believing that her father was a hero. Princess Michael was married in 1978 to Prince Michael of Kent, a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. Her parents were divorced after the war.

--Ten men in tuxedos raised champagne glasses on the banks of the Potomac River and toasted the passengers who went down with the Titanic on a moonless night in the icy Atlantic Ocean 73 years ago. “Men have given their lives on ships before and they will again, but perhaps never again will men give their lives with such style and class as those brave men,” said George Light, a member of the Men’s Titanic Society. Since 1979, the society has made an annual pilgrimage to the site of a little-known memorial on Washington’s 4th Street. The marble statue of a man with arms outstretched symbolizes the self-sacrifice of those who died when the British liner slammed into an iceberg 95 miles south of Newfoundland on its maiden voyage just before midnight on April 14, 1912, and sank. Nearly all the 1,513 victims who died were men, popularizing the phrase, “women and children first.”