Nashville News Blog

Remember when James Bond launched himself from the roof of a French chateau with a rocket pack in Thunderball? Almost 50 years ago, a Middle Tennessee man named Hal Graham did it for real. Graham actually made the first free-flight rocket-belt test for Bell Aerospace, thrilling Pentagon officials and President John F. Kennedy with his soaring demonstrations, bounding over H-21 helicopters and across a lake at Fort Bragg.

When he retired, Graham became a charter pilot, a man at home in the sky. But when age and illness began chipping away at the flying skills he'd sharpened over nearly half a century, the Federal Aviation Administration revoked his pilot's license in October. Two weeks later, Graham strode into the ground floor of the Briley Parkway office building occupied by the FAA and shot himself. Brantley Hargrove tells his story in the Scene's cover article this week.

Above is archival footage from the first Pentagon test referred to in the story, with Graham himself introducing the clip in 2008. Below is an excerpt from a History Channel documentary that shows some of the events described in the story. In both cases, your jaw will drop every time the pilots' feet leave the ground.