Bevo Howard

Beverly "Bevo" Howard (11 August 1914 to 17 October 1971) was an American aerobatic pilot and aviation businessman born in Bath, South Carolina. He learned to fly in 1930 before the age of sixteen by working as a lineboy for Hawthorne Flying Services in Augusta, Georgia, then bought the struggling company and flew for Delta Air Lines and Eastern Airlines to support it. During the Second World War his flight school at Orangeburg trained over 6000 pilots, and he showed the Army Air Corps how Piper Cubs could serve as forward artillery observer aircraft. He began airshow flying in 1933, became the first pilot to fly an outside loop in a light plane in 1938, and won the National Lightplane Aerobatic Championships three years running from 1939 to 1941. Flying airshows was an avocation beside running Hawthorne Aviation. He was killed on 17 October 1971 at an airshow in Greenville, North Carolina, when his Bücker Bü 133 Jungmeister struck a tree. His biplane is preserved at the National Air and Space Museum.