Daily News/1940/Cheated Death In Air Battles, Dies In Crash

Cheated Death In Air Battles, Dies In Crash. By Jack Turcott. A 28-year-old flying instructor, who, as pilot for the Spanish Loyalist forces and transcontinental speed record breaker, defied death scores of times, was killed yesterday in a routine one-hour flight with a student near Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The instructor, Edward Schneider [sic], and his pupil, 37-year-old George W. Herzog, were drowned in Deep Creek, a small inlet off Jamaica Bay, at 1:30 P.M., a few seconds after their Piper Cub monoplane collided with a Navy biplane trainer 600 feet in the air. Witnesses said the left wing of Schneider's plane apparently struck the Navy ship's landing gear as both planes were coming down, from different directions, for a landing. Wing Falls Off. The collision forced Schneider's ship into a tailspin and, as he fought to straighten his plane, the damaged wing fell off. The craft then plummeted into the creek an sank almost instantly. The Navy plane, piloted by Ensign Kenneth A. Kuehner, of Minster, Ohio, with Second Class Seaman Franklin Newcomer, his passenger, landed safely. Screaming sirens reported the crash immediately and a Coast Guard plane took off to find the wreckage. A Coast Guard cutter began grappling and soon lifted the monoplane to the surface. Both Schneider and Herzog were still in their seats. Schneider, who began flying at 16, was one of the nation's most adventuresome pilots. On August 18, 1930, when he was 18, he set a new junior speed record of 20 hours, 41 minutes for a flight from Westfield, New Jersey, to Los Angeles. A week later he broke two more records for the eastward flight across the country. Notes: His legal name was "Eddie Schneider" but some sources incorrectly formalized it to "Edward Schneider". He wrote in Look Out, Lindbergh - Here I Come in 1931: "because people are always asking me, my name is really Eddie: I was christened that way. It isn't very dressy, but it serves the purpose."