>Or, well, her real life counterpart, Ilmari Juutilainen, was an
>absolute bad-ass. Actively flying well into his 80s,his last flight
>happened at age 83...in a Finnish airforce F-18. Complete Rockstar.
>That's really all, just wanted to note it.

Indeed!

In a similar vein, Erich Hartmann survived being handed over to the Russians at the end of the war, and being held long past the expiration of any valid prisoner-of-war terms under the Yalta Agreement on war crimes charges the prosecutors acknowledged were bogus during the show trial. The Soviets tried to force him to confess to these "crimes" anyway; he wouldn't. They sentenced him to 25 years' hard labor; he refused to work, declaring he would do nothing to benefit those unlawfully detaining him in any way. They threatened to send the KGB to murder his family in West Germany if he wouldn't inform on fellow prisoners; he told them to go pound sand. They told him they'd let him go if he agreed to take a leadership position in the new East German air force; he told them make me a proper grown-up job offer after I get home and I'll consider it, but you'd better have a good dental plan; in the meantime take the asshole train to the end. (I may have made that part after the comma up.)

At one point early in his captivity, a KGB officer trying to get information about the Me 262 out of him got tired of being stonewalled* and hit Hartmann across the face with a cane. Hartmann's response to this—keep in mind that this was in an interrogation room being guarded by armed goons—was to pick up his chair and knock the interrogator clean the fuck out with it. The guards were too impressed to think of shooting him. Probably they didn't like the guy either.

His fellow prisoners thought so highly of him that, when the Soviets threw him in solitary for refusing to work, they took over the camp and let him out. Not out of the camp; that would probably have gotten everybody killed. Just out of solitary. The Russians seem to have respected that for some weird reason.

There's more, but it would just be piling on at this stage. Point is, Erich Hartmann was also a badass. He didn't make his last flight at 83, true, in large part because he only lived to be 71.

--G.
* On top of his determination not to help the Soviets with absolutely anything, Hartmann probably didn't know much about the Me 262; he declined two transfers to squadrons that used them and never flew one operationally, and besides, he was a pilot, not an engineer.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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