Pilots

At 81, Dr. Forrest M. Bird has made an important concession to age: He won't do snap rolls. Other than that, Bird remains one of the world's youngest minds in aviation and medicine, a seamless continuum he calls "aeromedicine." While Bird gained global fame by inventing and refining the medical respirator in the 1950s, he also holds about 50 supplemental type certificates on airplanes as diverse as the docile two-seat Ercoupe and the stately PBY Catalina amphibian.

Today, from his "Air Lodge" in Northern Idaho, Bird regularly flies his collection of 18 aircraft, everything from a Bell 212 turbine helicopter to a specially modified Cessna 421C. He works 14-hour days, often in his laboratory that shares space with the 212, a 206, a Bell 47 Soloy conversion, and a Piper Cub on floats that hangs suspended from the rafters. (He keeps the other aircraft in a nearby hangar complex at his private airstrip.)

A walk through Bird's home confirms the central part that aviation plays in his life. One room contains three flight simulators outfitted with Elite systems. A computer bench covered with laptops and other devices sits nearby. Bird picks up his color personal digital assistant and marvels over the Control Vision AnywhereMap GPS navigation software he has just installed. "It's mental gymnastics for me. I love computers."

Bird soloed at 14 and quickly developed a fascination for how airplanes worked, tearing down and rebuilding his father's Waco GXE as part of the process of earning his A&P certificate. At Boston's Northeastern University, Bird earned undergraduate and master's degrees in aeronautical engineering. While enrolled in the university's ROTC program, he was sent to Eastern Airlines in Atlanta to learn the workings of the Douglas DC-3, the civilian variant of the Army Air Corps' (AAC) C-47 transport. As a technical training officer in the AAC's Education and Training Command, Bird wrote all the technical orders on new airplanes.

During a military career that spanned 40 years of active reserve duty, Bird flew everything from North American T-6s to F-4 Phantom jets. While serving in the AAC during World War II, Bird began work on a device that would change medicine forever: the Bird Universal Medical Respirator. Bird designed the respirator after working on early breathing devices for the crews of high-flying B-17 bombers, whose supercharged engines and unpressurized airframes could far outclimb the capacity of the human lung. The military took note of his work and sent him to medical school.

By the 1950s, Bird was flying himself to hospitals around the world, demonstrating his new device. By the early 1960s, Bird's respirators became so famous that Fidel Castro included 100 of them in a $50 million laundry list of merchandise and cash exacted for the release of prisoners he captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Bird continued to work on the device and the "Baby Bird" pediatric respirator, introduced in 1970. Thanks in part to the Baby Bird, infant mortality for children born in the United States with respiratory problems dropped from 70 percent to 10 percent. Bird was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1995.

Bird's flying classroom — which he used to train doctors on his respirators — and primary mode of transport was a surplus Navy PBY amphibian, which was modified under his direction. "I had that airplane for 28 years and it took me around the world," he said. Other flying classrooms followed, including a Convair 440. "I could not have done my medical work if I hadn't had my airplanes," Bird says.

In his hangars, he points to a few of his aircraft, describing the changes he made to them: a Republic SeaBee, modified with a 340-horsepower engine and a reversible prop; a Chipmunk refitted with a Lycoming O-360 in place of the original Gypsy engine; a 1943 Stearman with a bubble canopy; and a Cessna 421C fitted with a pair of PT-6 turboprop engines, which allows him to use his 2,100-foot airstrip with ease, even with a full load on the hottest days. Bird calls the 421 "an honest, easy airplane to fly."

Bird pauses in front of a white 1938 J-3 Piper Cub. Of all the aircraft in his collection, this is his favorite. "This was my Daddy's airplane." Bird has owned it for almost as long as he has been flying. "There aren't many things you can keep for 60 years and still enjoy," he says.