If You Want to Suspend Time, Explore the Sky

 Life is a perpetual take off…. Suddenly smashing you into the pilot seat, making your heart beat faster than the propeller outside the porthole. Bringing up your deepest fears mixed with excitement and thrills as the gear and the rubber fades the airstrip. Allowing the faceless pilot to suddenly give up solid ground for unpredictable winds. Letting your soul exit your body a few times as the plane finds its course. Questioning during these few seconds the very meaning of your existence before finding the answer in the clouds. And you never get enough of it.

Remember a time when every innocent human was afraid of heights and speed and embraced the fact, we’ve mastered it. Like a well-made watch, flying is a unique experience that combines technical expertise and the beauty of flight. It involves a great deal of focus, attention to detail, and technical skill, but it also offers a unique perspective on the world and a sense of accomplishment. Today this amazing ability to travel peacefully comes from a past of war. An innovation built brick by brick by the bravery of the first pilots that explored a hostile sky which yet to be conquered.

Enlist with a line of brave sky fighters

A Knight of the Legion of Honor, an African-American born in Georgia, USA in 1895, Eugène James Bullard was described as a “true French hero” by Général de Gaulle himself and through his bravery, earned the nickname… “The Black Sparrow of Death”.

At the young age of 8, Eugène Bullard observed his father, William Bullard’s, intimation that “Europe was a place where individuals were judged solely on their merit”. After running away from home in 1906 to seek a better life in Great Britiain, Eguène Bullard eventually arrived in France and on October 19, 1914, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to participate in the First World War at the young age of 19 where he was immediately sent into the combat zone. Bullard took part in the battles of the Somme and Champagne, serving in the 170th Infantry Regiment before being wounded in the Battle of Verdun in March 1916.

Declared unfit for the infantry, yet undeterred Bullard volunteered for the French Air Force in October 1916 where he officiated first as a artilleryman and then as a pilot. He carried out around twenty aerial combat missions during WW1, during which he shot down at least two enemy aircrafts, and thus became, with the Ottoman Ahmet Ali Çelikten, one of the first two African American fighter pilots in history. Bullard frequently flew with his mascot, a pet Rhesus monkey named Jimmy in his Nieuport 24 fighter jet. The motto inscribed on the fuselage of Eugène Bullard’s plane was “all blood runs red”. In 1959, French President Charles de Gaulle made Bullard a knight of the French Legion of Honour, the nation’s highest ranking order and decoration.