This is damn interesting.

One summer day in 1933, in a brief pocket of time between the two world wars,

a British man named Maurice Wilson clutched the stick of his tiny open-air biplane and watched his

fuel gauge dwindle. He had only learned to fly two months earlier, but inexperience was not his

biggest problem. His lengthy list of troubles included the angry British officials he had just

left behind in Bahrain, the certainty of arrest if he turned left to land in Persia,

the roiling waves of the Persian Gulf below, and the increasing likelihood that his fuel

would run out before he reached a safe landing. But Wilson pushed on, Knuckles White. He would

not turn back, and he had no intention of crashing into the Arabian Sea.

He sought a larger goal, a quest he believed to be his God-given destiny, to crash his plane into Mount Everest.

Maurice Wilson's early life was decidedly unremarkable.

He was born on the 21st of April, 1898, the third of four sons

of a middle-class textile mill owner in Bradford, West Yorkshire. He very likely would have

joined the family textile business if not for the outbreak of the Great War when he was 16.

Instead, he followed his older brother Victor into the British Army, enlisting a month after his

18th birthday. In the army, one boyish face among many, Wilson could have remained lost in the

crowd, but he managed to distinguish himself during training. He began as a private, but soon

received his commission as a second lieutenant through merit rather than class, a temporary gentleman.

He itched to be sent to the front, writing that he was aching to give Jerry a good talking to.

Wilson was finally sent to France in November 1917 to help fill the empty positions left by the enormous

British losses during the third battle of Epre. By the spring of 1918 he celebrated his 20th

birthday by giving Jerry that dressing down at the Western Front in a town called Whitechate in Flanders.

...