Daily News Leader/1940/Schneider Killed During a Routine Training Flight



Schneider Killed During a Routine Training Flight. New York City, New York; December 23, 1940 (Associated Press) Edward Schneider [sic], twenty-eight, a flying instructor who had challenged death scores of times as a trans-continental speed record-breaker and as a flying soldier of fortune in the Spanish civil war, was killed today in a routine training flight with a pupil. Schneider and the student, George W. Herzog, thirty-seven. were drowned in an inlet of Jamaica bay near Floyd Bennett Field when their plane. went into a spin after a collision with a navy trainer 600 feet above the field. Ensign Kenneth A. Kuehner, twenty-five, of Minster, Ohio, pilot of the navy plane, landed with little damage. Neither Kuhener nor his passenger, Second Class Seaman Franklin Newcomer, twenty-five, of Rochester, Ohio, was injured. Schneider, who learned to fly at sixteen, set a new Junior speed record of twenty-nine hours and forty-one minutes from Westfleld, New Jersey to Los Angeles in 1930. A week later he smashed two other records with eastward flights. He was one of four American "suicide pilots," leaders of the Yankee squadron, who fought for Loyalist Spain 1937.