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I recently watched The Great Waldo Pepper for the first time and was curious how crazy the real barnstoming pilots were. Pretty crazy, I guess.

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The Red Baron had a younger brother named Lothar, who experts believe was probably a more formidable pilot than the Baron himself. His kill count was "only" 40, half of his brother's, but Lothar also just did not give a s###. In one engagement, he went flying head-on against a more heavily armed British plane, the two pouring machine gun bullets into one another, trying to see who would die first. (Note: It wasn't Lothar.) The man seemed to be in it just for the insanity. Or, as the Baron himself wrote about Lothar, "If my brother does not have at least one success on every flight he gets tired of the whole thing."

You might wonder how a man could take such continuous insane risks without crashing eventually. To which we reply, who said he never crashed? His biography reads like a documentary of the war's top ten most horrifying fighter crash landings, and he spent much of the war in hospital wards.

Again and again he went down. And again and again, he went up. After every skeleton-pulping plane crash he was subjected to, Lothar von Richthofen jumped straight up, ripped off his casts and got his a## right back into a fighter plane. The real world, as a general rule, doesn't work like the cartoons -- a toon pilot who crashes every episode might be funny, but in reality you can pull that s### maybe twice. But you couldn't tell that to Lothar.

But surely his stunts eventually killed him, right? Of course not. He would outlive his much more careful brother. Lothar did die in a plane crash -- but it was an engine failure in a commercial plane, years after his comfortable retirement as a mail carrier.

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