#7: Palmer Faces His Fear of Flying
When Arnold Palmer learned to fly, he was facing his fears.
Lightning had struck a DC3 on which Palmer was traveling and it shook him up. “It scared me,” he told Flying magazine in 2011. “That’s when I really knew that if I was going to continue to fly I needed to know what was happening in the airplane.” So at the age of 28, Palmer signed up for flying lessons with Babe Krinock, who charged $3 an hour. Palmer soon bought his first plane and started flying himself from tournament to tournament, eventually becoming a lauded pilot and racking up nearly 20,000 hours in the cockpit. In 1999, on Arnie’s 70th birthday, the same airport where he'd learned to fly was named after him when Latrobe Airport became Arnold Palmer Regional and a statue of Palmer was installed out front, a great honor, and a testament to facing challenges.
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