Test Pilot

Every night at dinner he used to propose a toast to me. "Here's to Jimmy Collins," he used to say. "The average life of the aviator is forty hours." He had picked those figures...

I took off in my low-wing Lockheed Sirius at dark and flew along the lighted beacons through the mountains. Half an hour later I ran into broken clouds at 4,000 feet. I flew und...

It is a bright, golden day in Texas. A little Mexican boy is working in a field of sugar cane just back of Kelly Field. The airplanes from the field are droning in the sleepy ai...

I was stationed at Selfridge Field after I graduated from the Advanced Flying School at Kelly. The Army Air Corps' First Pursuit Group was at Selfridge. The officers used to gat...

Somebody during that wait told me about an army pilot who, several years before, in some tests at Wright Field, had accidentally got too much _g_, due to a faulty accelerometer....

He said he had told me that story about the horse in the first place because he thought I was a regular passenger. He said not to tell any of the rest of the passengers, because...

"A dive demonstration," he said. I knew what that meant all right. Ten thousand feet straight down, just to see if it would hang together. I wasn't so sure my luck was changing...

Jimmy Collins used periodically to try to change his name to Jim Collins, but he never could make it stick. There was something about him that made everybody call him Jimmy. He...

Yes, I had grown older. But grim fear now. The fear of daring and courage. But tempered too with some of the strong power of the old dream now too.