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Pioneer survives first crash

By Janet Reinka 
Times Tribune Staff 

STANFORD - The pilot who survived a crash landing last Thursday at the Palo Alto Airport was not just another 78-year old tooling around in the wild blue yonder.
Frank W. Fuller Jr. of Hillsborough, the paint family scion who always had "a wild urge to fly," is a flyer who won two transcontinental races during the late 1930s and brought back a houseful of trophies.
The jolt last week, when his single-engine Centurion apparently conked out near the airport was Fuller's first accident in 50 years of flying.
"I'll be 79 in July," the battered and bruised pilot said from his hospital bed Monday afternoon.  "I'm sure some of my friends will say I'm crazy to keep flying.  But I always pass my physical."  Fuller grinned a wide, warm grin.  "I'll just have to give it some thought when I get well."
Fuller's hours in the air - a shade under his lifetime goal of 10,000 - not doubt came to his rescue when the engine trouble developed.  A "younger" pilot might not have been able to land a plane with no engine as he did, skimming San Fransicquito Creek and thudding over an earthen dike.
"I was lucky," he said.  "If I had another 100 feet of altitude, I would have been okay."
Even so, Fuller's injuries were much less than they might have been: Two broken ankles, a "hair-line" cervical fracture, a shattered knee and cuts and bruises.  He said his doctor thinks he may be able to go home within a few days.
Although he dismissed his remarkable flying career as "just ancient history," Fuller was an aviation pioneer who hobnobbed with such flying greats as Jimmy Doolit-

Please see FULLER,B-2

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Photo courtesy of John

In 1938, Frank Fuller was well into a long aviation career, flying a Seversky.  The career almost ended in disaster last week.