Foil: 6 Panel: Distinguished Flying Cross Society Column: 3 Line: 16

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Bette Cope

Even hugging the Florida coast, the gliding silver blimp was not a target lo ignore. The German submarine crew fired their 88 mm cannon, puncturing the blimp's dun skin.
Before safely evacuating the wounded ship the blimp's crew got off depth charges, but didn't harm the sub because the detonators were set to explode under the sea's surface.
As its crew beaded toward shore, the blimp continued to deflate, finally settling on the water—a casualty of war.
The pilot who brought the wounded bird home, and won the first Distinguished Flying Cross ever awarded for a lighter-than-air mission—was Rancho Santa Fc's Al Cope.
In fact, Cope holds two DFCs—both for flying damaged blimps off the sea and safely onto land.
His voyage into a career in the Navy, aerospace and as Rancho Santa Fc Association manager began in a library while he was a junior high school student in Savannah, Ga.
"I looked in a book and saw midshipmen rowing a long boat," he said. Cope said he thought it would he neat to go to Annapolis.
Cope graduated from the Naval Academy in 1932 and a few yean later became a submariner. In 1936. while assigned to Panama, Cope met Esther Arabelle Meyer, the daughter of a Navy chaplain. When he married Esther, her father performed the ceremony.
In 1937, after attending a lighter-than-air class at Lakehurst, NJ_ be qualified as an airship pilot. His dual qualifications make Cope one of the few Naval officers qualified to wear both the aviator’s gold wings and the submariner's dolphins on his uniform.
In 1940 he was assigned to the U.S.S. Blue, based at Pearl Harbor. One morning be was getting his son Al Jr. ready for Sunday School and a neighbor came running over and said to turn on the radio. The Japanese were bombing ships and bases.
In civilian clothing, Cope rushed to the dock to board the Blue but the undamaged vessel had escaped the carnage of the harbor and bad sailed into open seas under live command of ensigns, shooting down five Japanese planes. Cope, as gunnery officer, had trained the gun crews.
During WWII, Cope was a blimp flight instructor and pilot. In 1944, he was operations officer for the first flight of blimps to Africa. After the war, he also qualified to pilot heavier-than-air craft, including jets and helicopters.
The Copes had four children, Alfred, Robin, William and Thomas. Cope retired from the Navy in I960 with the rank of captain and was ready to begin a second
career. He was manager of the Rancho Santa Association from 1961 to 1964. then joined General Dynamics' Convair/ Astronautics division as a test engineer for the Atlas/Titan missile program.
Esther died in early 1986. In December 1987, Cope married Bette, who is active in the RSF Republican Women's Club.
Today, Cope keeps himself busy with his family and his interest in military activities.
He is active in numerous veterans organizations, including the Distinguished
Flying Cross Society. Pearl Harbor Survivors and the American Legion.
His family has carried on a service tradition; two sons served in Vietnam (as Navy and Army helicopter pilot) and another son was a Navy flight surgeon. The Copes are the proud grandparents of 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.