Starting in the May 1932 issue of Flying Aces and running almost 4 years, Eugene Frandzen’s “Lives of the Aces in Pictures” was a staple of the magazine. Each month Frandzen would feature a different Ace that rose to fame during the Great War. This time around we have Belgium’s favorite Ace—Lt. Edmond Thieffry!

Thieffry was Belgium’s daring ace who entered the war as an orderly and worked his way up to being King Albert’s leading sky fighter—preferring to fight alone, crashing at the enemy ships from high above. A strategy that worked well for him leaving him with 10 victories on his balance sheet by the end of the war.

After the war, Thieffry resumed his pre-war job as a lawyer, but kept his hand in aviation—helping to found Sabena (Societé Anonyme Belge d’Exploitation de la Navigation Adrienne) in 1923 which would remain Belgium’s national airline until 2001.

Thieffry was killed in a crash close to Lake Tanganyika during a test flight while trying to set up an internal air service in the Congo on April 11th, 1929. He was 36 years old.

• Download “Lives of the Aces in Pictures – Part 8: Edmond Thieffry” (December 1932, Flying Aces)

(Editor’s Note: These early installments of Frandzen’s “Lives of the Aces in Pictures” that were published in the pulp-sized issues have been reformatted from a two page spread into a one page feature.)