Last Flight

At 34, grey-haired Lieut. Colonel Walter K. Selenger was still one of the hottest pilots in the U.S. Air Force. A middle-aged man as jet fighter pilots go, "Lefty" Selenger could fly with the best of the Air Force's youngsters and, with 2,041 jet hours in his logbook, he outranked them all in flying time.

Before he entered the Air Force in 1941, California-born Lefty Selenger was a professional minor-league baseball pitcher and a schoolteacher. He was a crack pilot in World War II, racked up 51 combat missions, switched to jets. In 1948 Airman Selenger and three other wartime pilots formed the Air Force's famous "Acrojets," flew in 100 air shows across the U.S. While his wife and two children watched from the ground, Lefty would roar through the sky at upwards of 500 m.p.h., with the nose of his F-80 Shooting Star just 18 inches from the tailpipe of the lead plane.

Shortly before the outbreak of the Korean war the Acrojets were disbanded, and Selenger volunteered for overseas duty. In Korea, Lefty ignored friends' pleas that he stay on the ground, in less than ten months racked up 223 missions.

At dawn one May day Selenger and Lieut. Colonel Leland P. Molland, 32, of Fargo, N.Dak. volunteered to fly a weather reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines. A World War II ace, Molland himself had flown 167 missions in Europe, bagged eleven German planes, collected a Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses and 29 Air Medals.

As Selenger and Molland streaked northward in a T-33 jet, the sky was murky, the air turbulent. They did not return. Last week the Air Force announced the fate of two of its most spectacular airmen. They had been found dead in the wreckage of their plane on a cloud-shrouded mountain top just north of Taegu.

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