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From a very early age Neil Armstrong was fascinated with flight. He was playing with toy airplanes at 3, and by the time he was 5 or 6 Armstrong went on his first airplane ride in a Ford Tri-Motor. By 8 or 9 he said he was building model airplanes out of balsa wood. And by the time he was 15 he had saved enough money working at a drug store to begin taking flying lessons at the small airport near his home in Wapakoneta, Ohio.
Armstrong's first lessons were in an Aeronca Champ, a two-seat airplane with a 65-horsepower engine. His career as a test pilot began at the age of 16, sort of. With his student pilot license in hand, he started flying small airplanes at the airport after the engines had been overhauled by the local mechanic.
"That's the way I built up flight time, by doing slow time after top cylinder overhauls," Armstrong told biographer James Hansen.
After those initial flying experiences, Armstrong would gain experience rapidly, first in the Navy, where he progressed through fighter jets, and then at the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics (NACA), which would become NASA, where he flew numerous propeller-, jet- and rocket-powered aircraft. At the age of 38 in 1969 his flight experience was put to the ultimate test as he manually flew and landed the Eagle spacecraft on the surface of the moon.
Armstrong flew more than 200 different types of aircraft from that simple Aeronca Champ to some of the most advanced experimental aircraft ever built. Walking on the moon was just the culmination of a long career spent as an engineer and test pilot that began at a rural Ohio airport long before he took a giant leap for mankind.
Photo of Neil Armstrong in cockpit of X-15: NASA
