Part 3

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 got some enormously high reading like twelve or fourteen. He ruptured his intestines and broke blood vessels in his brain. He was in the hospital about a year and finally got out. He would never be right again, they told me. He was a little bit goofy. I thought to myself that anybody doing this kind of work was a little bit goofy to begin with. I decided not to get any more than nine _g_ if I could help it.

That afternoon I went up to eighteen thousand feet again and rolled her over and stuck her down. Again the dead, still drop and the mounting roar. Again the flickering needles on the instruments and the job of reading them. You never see the ground in one of those dives. You are too busy watching things in the cockpit. Again the tensing fear for thirty whining, screaming seconds while your life is a held breath and the fear of your death is a crouching shadow in a dark corner. Again the mounting racking of the ship until it seems no humanly built thing can stand the stress of that speed much longer.

At eight thousand feet on the altimeter I shifted my gaze to the accelerometer and horsed. I used both hands. I wanted to get the reading as quickly as possible. That unseen violence, punishing this time, fairly crunched me into my seat, so that I only darkly saw the needle passing nine. I realized somehow that I was overshooting and let up on the stick. As my head unwound and my eyes cleared up I noticed that I was level already and that the recording needle on the accelerometer read nine and a half. I checked my altimeter. It read six and a half thousand feet.

When I got back on the ground the commander, who had seen a lot of those dives, said, "Boy, I thought you were never going to pull that out. You had me shouting out loud, 'Pull it out! Pull it out!' And when you did pull it out, did you wrap it!"

I felt I had. I felt all torn down inside. I had forgotten to yell. My back ached like somebody had kicked me. I was really woozy. I was glad I didn't have to do those every day.

I wasn't through yet. During the rest of the afternoon, under a variety of load conditions, I looped, snap-rolled, slow-rolled, spun, did true Immelmanns, and flew upside down.

I still wasn't through. I flew the ship to Washington the next day. The work at the factory had been only the preliminary demonstration!

At Washington I had to do three take-offs and landings, all the maneuvers over again under the different load conditions, and two more terminal-velocity, nine-_g_ pull-out dives by way of final demonstration.

Just as I was getting ready to go out and do the three take-offs and landings, the navy squadron that was going to use these ships if the navy bought any of them showed up in a flock of fighters. About twenty-seven of them. They landed, lined up in a neat row beside my ship, got out and clustered around to watch me. I got stage fright. Here was a group of the hottest experts in the country. I had paid little attention to my landings at the factory, being too intent on the other work. What if I bungled those landings right there in front of that gang?

Three simple little take-offs and landings really had me buffaloed, but I worked hard on them, and they turned out all right. Doing the maneuvers under the different load conditions during the rest of the day was practically fun after that.

The next day I came out to do the final two dives. I had to go to Dahlgren to do them. So many airplanes had fallen apart over Anacostia and gone through houses and started fires and raised hell in general that the District of Columbia had prohibited diving in that vicinity. Dahlgren was only about thirty miles south and just nicely took up the climbing time.

The first dive went fine, and I had one more to go. I hated that one more. Everything had been so all right so far, and I hated to think that something might happen in that last dive.

I thought of the wife and kids as I climbed for altitude. It was a swell day. I checked everything carefully. I rolled over into the dive and started down. I caught a glimpse of the blue earth far beneath, so remote. Then to the instruments while I crouched and hated the mounting stress of the terrific speed. About mid-dive I saw something in front of my face. It took me a second to recognize it. It was the Very pistol, used for shooting flare signals at sea. It had come out of its holster at the right side of the cockpit and was floating around in space between my face and my knees. I grabbed it with my throttle hand and started to throw it over my left shoulder to get rid of it, but quickly decided that that wouldn't be such a smart thing to do. A three or four hundred mile an hour slip stream was lurking just outside there. It would have grabbed that pistol and dashed it into the tail surfaces, and it would have been good-bye airplane. I fumbled it from one hand to the other and finally kept it in my throttle hand. I noticed that I had allowed the ship to nose up out of the dive ever so slightly during that wrestling match, and I spent the rest of the dive nosing it ever so slightly back in. That nose-back-in showed up as negative acceleration on the vee-gee recorder. And in addition to that, although I pulled out to nine and a half _g_ on the accelerometer, something had gone wrong with it, because the pull-out turned out to be only seven and a half _g_ on the vee-gee recorder.

The navy threw that dive out, so I still had one more to do. Still one more, and by then one more was a mental hazard difficult to overcome. I have a morbid imagination anyway. I knew that the motor and prop had taken a severe beating so far. Maybe one more would be just too much. Maybe something--something that had eluded inspection, perhaps--was just about ready to let go, and I was so damned near the finish. Besides, although I am not superstitious, the rejected dive made that last one the thirteenth.

They gave me a check for fifteen hundred dollars the next day and canceled my insurance. My old car wouldn't have got as far as Oklahoma, and wasn't big enough anyway, so I had to break a new one in on the way down. I was back with the family in good shape, but they still had to eat, and fifteen hundred dollars wouldn't last forever, so I was looking for another job. I thought I had one coming up ... a diving job!

COLLISION, ALMOST

I took off from Newark with about a seven-thousand-foot ceiling after dark. The ceiling came down as I went farther and farther into the mountains toward Bellefonte, but it didn't come down too much. I got to Sunbury, about fifty miles from Bellefonte, and started into the worst part of the mountains. Then I hit snow.

I went over the first big ridge on the blinkers, closely spaced red lights between beacons in bad spots. It was thick in the valley beyond, but I could just make out the beacon on the next ridge.

I flew up to it, couldn't see the next beacon, went on past from that beacon as far as I dared, but couldn't find the next beacon without losing that one. So I went back to it.

I made several excursions out toward the next beacon before I could find it without losing the one I had. Then I couldn't find the next one.

I circled and circled about fifty feet over that beacon on the mountain top in the driving snow. I couldn't go backward toward the last one. I couldn't go forward toward the next. I was quite sure the next was the field beacon at Bellefonte, but I didn't dare go out far enough to find it.

I knew I couldn't sit there and circle all night. The snow was not abating. I had to do something. Finally I pulled off the beacon in a climbing spiral, headed off blind in what I thought was the direction of the next beacon--what I hoped it was!--and hoped to see it under me through the snow if I flew over it, and if not, to keep on going, blind, until I flew out of the mountains, the snow, or both.

I was lucky, flew right over it, saw dimly down beneath me through the driving snow the Bellefonte Airport boundary lights, spiraled down and landed.

Not five minutes later an air-mail ship came in from the same direction and landed. I asked the pilot how close he had come to the beacon I had been circling. He said he had flown right over it. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had still been sitting there circling that beacon when he came barging along through the snow right over it? He said he was flying on his instruments for the most part. He undoubtedly wouldn't have seen me. I wouldn't have seen him. Our meeting probably wouldn't have been so pleasant!

HE HAD WHAT IT TOOK

Eddie Stinson, that colorful and beloved figure of American aviation, has gone West. But the many stories that cluster around his almost legendary name, live on.

Dick Blythe, the man who handled Lindbergh's publicity just after Lindbergh's return from Paris, tells me this one about Eddie. Eddie told it to him.

Eddie was working with a crowd that was representing the German Junkers plane in America. One of the things they were trying to do was sell it to the Post Office Department for use on the air-mail lines.

To attract attention to the superior performance of the ship Eddie decided to make a non-stop flight from Chicago to New York. He decided to fly straight over the Alleghanies.

Flying the Alleghanies is common nowadays, what with modern equipment, lighted airways, blind flying instruments and radio. But in those days it was a feat.

Eddie was delayed in taking off and didn't get over the mountains until after dark. Then his imagination began to work overtime.

That happens to a great many of us many times. A motor can be running along perfectly until you get over a spot where you can't afford to have it quit. Then you begin worrying about it and can invariably find something wrong. If all the motors quit under the conditions that all pilots fear, there would be as many wrecked ships scattered over the country as there are signboards.

Anyway, Eddie got to thinking his motor was rough. But he was prepared for the situation. He reached down under his seat and pulled out a bottle of gin. He took a long swig and listened to his motor again. It had smoothed right out.

Every once in a while the motor would get rough again, and Eddie would reach down and take another swig. He said it took him the whole quart of gin to smooth that motor out and get the ship over the mountains and onto Curtiss Field.

DRY MOTOR

One of the customs in the army, if you were out on a cross-country flight, was not to look at the weather map to see if the weather was all right to go home, and not to look at your ship to see if it was in good enough shape to make the trip, but to look in your pocket and see if you had enough money to stay any longer.

I didn't have, so I piled into my old wing-radiatored PW-8 and took off from Washington for Selfridge Field. I knew I was going to have trouble with the radiators.

I climbed slowly on reduced throttle, reaching for the cold air of altitude. I watched the water temperature indicator, but before it registered boiling I was surprised to see steam coming from the radiators. I remembered then. Water boils at a lower and lower temperature the higher you go. I still thought the lower temperatures of altitude would offset that, so I throttled my motor to the minimum necessary for level flight until the radiator stopped steaming, then opened it a little and tried to sneak a little more altitude before it steamed again.

I worked myself up to six thousand feet like that. I was watching for steam for the umpteenth time, hoping to make Pittsburgh before I ran out of water, when I saw white smoke coming out of the exhausts. I was out of water and was burning the oil off the cylinder walls.

I cut the switches. The speed of my glide kept the prop turning over like a windmill. I picked a field in the country and started talking to myself: "Take it easy--Slow her down--Come around--Don't undershoot whatever you do--Hold it now, you're overshooting--Slip it--Not too much--You're undershooting again--Kick those switches on--Gun it--All right, kick him off--Watch those trees--The fence now--You're slow--Let 'er drop, the field's small--Wham!--Watch your roll--Ground loop at the end if you have--You don't--You made it." I always talk to myself like that in a forced landing.

I don't remember how much water I put in the thing. I do remember that there was only a pint in it when I had landed. And I had kept from burning up the motor!

I took off again and made Pittsburgh, Akron, Cleveland, and Toledo, steaming, but without running clear dry. I probably had a few more gray hairs when I finally landed at Selfridge, but everything else was all right.

IMAGINATION

A friend of mine got an aerial mapping job last summer. He had to fly at twenty thousand feet to take the pictures. Some pilots can stand more altitude than others, but my friend didn't know how much he could stand because he had never flown that high. He decided he had better take oxygen with him, just in case.

His mechanic got a cylinder of oxygen for him, and he took off. He felt pretty groggy at eighteen thousand feet, reached down, got the hose, put it in his mouth, turned on the valve, and took a whiff of oxygen. He couldn't hear the hissing of the stuff escaping because the motor noise drowned it out.

He perked up immediately. The sky brightened, everything became clearer to him, and he went on up to twenty thousand feet. Every once in a while he would feel low and reach down and get himself another whiff of oxygen and feel all right again for a while.

He didn't say anything to his mechanic, but his mechanic decided for himself a few days later that the oxygen was probably getting low in that tank and that he would need another soon. He decided to put a new one in ahead of time to forestall the possibility of running completely out in the air.

He brought a new tank out and decided to test it before he put it in the ship. He opened the valve and nothing happened. The tank was empty.

He took it back to the hangar and discovered that the previous tank my friend had been flying on had come out of the same bin and had been empty all along.

He got a good one and put it in the ship and didn't say anything about the incident. My friend said that the next time he took a whiff of oxygen it almost knocked him out of his seat.

I SPIN IN

I had been spin testing a Mercury Chic for several weeks, doing everything at a safe and sane altitude, being very scientific. I finally spun it in from an altitude of about three feet. And I mean spun it in too. The ship was a complete washout.

There was a strong wind that day, and a very gusty one. When I taxied out for the take-off the wind was on my tail. There were no brakes on the ship. It was very light, and in addition, a high wing job--always a top-heavy thing in a wind.

The wind kept swinging me around into it, and I wanted to go the other way. I should have called a couple of mechanics from the line to come and hold my wings and help me taxi. But I was proud or stubborn or dumb or something that day.

I adopted a little strategy. I'd get the ship all lined up down wind and when the wind would start swinging me around the other way I'd just let it swing until the nose was headed almost into the wind. Then I would gun it, kick rudder with the swing, thus aggravating it instead of checking it, hoping to get my way by going with it instead of fighting it, and then, when it was headed down wind again, try to hold it there until the next gust started swinging me around again.

It worked fine, and I was making a certain amount of headway down the field until, on one of the swings, a particularly heavy gust of wind picked up my outside wing as I was swinging. The ship tipped up very slowly, and I thought I was going to tip a wing. Then a larger and heavier gust hit it. It picked that ship off the ground, turned it over on its back and literally threw it down on the ground.

It was the worst crack-up I had ever been in. All four longerons were broken, the wings crumpled, the motor mount was twisted, the prop bent, the tail crushed, and the ship looked like it had spun in from at least ten thousand feet.

I crawled out from under it unhurt except for my feelings. I never felt so foolish in my life. I had cracked up a ship without even flying it.

BUSINESS BEFORE FAME

Clyde Pangborne, of Pangborne and Herndon fame, the two flyers who were first to fly non-stop from Japan to America over the Pacific Ocean, and also of Pangborne and Turner fame, the flying team that won third place in the London-Australia Air Derby in 1934, was operations manager for the famous Gate's Flying Circus for many years. He flew into Lewiston, Mont., in October, 1923, with his aerial circus. He had a contract with the fair association of that town, giving him exclusive rights to all the passenger carrying and flying to be done at the local fair then in progress.

He landed an hour before he was supposed to put on his first performance of stunting, wing-walking and parachute jumping, the preliminary crowd-attracting procedure before the money-making of passenger carrying, which was one of the attractions the fair had advertised. He found another pilot and plane, with chute jumper, there ahead of him, all set to do business in his place.

Pangborne told the other pilot to get out. The other pilot said, "So what?" Pangborne said: "I got a contract, and I'm going to town to see about it."

He went to town and told the fair association about it. He said he would sue the city if they didn't get that other guy and his chute jumper off the field by the time he was ready to put on his exhibition.

The fair association went out to the field. They got hold of the other pilot and his chute jumper. They reminded the pilot that he had flown out of that field the previous year, and, in departing, had overlooked the small matter of paying a certain amount of rent he had agreed to pay for the field. They told him to get out or go to jail by four o'clock that afternoon.

It was a conclusive argument. The pilot cranked his ship, got in his cockpit, called to his chute jumper, a long, slim, gangling kid who was obviously disappointed at the turn affairs had taken, because he had been all set to have some fun jumping that day, and took off.

The chute jumper was Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who had not yet learned to fly.

EVERYTHING WRONG

On my first solo in a Martin bomber, I started to take off and started swinging to the left. I put on right rudder but kept on swinging to the left. I ran out of right rudder and was still swinging to the left into a line of mesquite trees. I eased the right motor off a little, but it didn't help much. I couldn't cut the gun and stop before I hit the trees. I could only hope to get into the air before I got up to them.

Suddenly my left wing started to lift, and it dawned on me like a flash of shame what was wrong. I had had the wheel rolled to the right and my left aileron down. The resistance of that down aileron had swung me to the left at slow speeds, and I had fought it with right rudder, but now at high speeds it was banking me to the right, and I still had on right rudder. I was taking off in a right-hand bank with the controls set fully for it. The left-hand motor was pulling stronger than the right.

I never kicked and pulled so many things so fast before as I did right then. By some miracle I found myself fifty feet in the air instead of in a heap. But I was flying exactly at right angles to the direction I had originally planned.

Everything seemed to be all right, so I went around and landed. I gave it the gun immediately on touching the ground and went around and landed again.

This time I saw a lot of cars coming out toward me. Maybe that take-off had looked pretty good. Maybe they thought I knew what I had been doing. The two landings had been good. Maybe they were coming out to congratulate me.

My instructor got there first. He ran over and started inspecting the right wing tip. He was looking underneath it. "Hey, you," he shouted at me when he looked up, "don't you ever get out and take a look after you crack up a ship?"

I had dragged the right wing for several hundred feet. The under side of the wing was badly torn up, and the aileron was just barely hanging on.

A SHOWY STUNT

An upside-down landing is one of the showiest maneuvers a stunting pilot can perform. He doesn't really land upside down. He comes all the way in in his glide upside down until he is about ten or twenty feet off the ground. Then he rolls over and lands right side up.

Jack, who had got pretty hot at this maneuver, hit a telephone pole coming in like that one day and woke up in the hospital.

Some time before that I had almost done practically the same thing. I had dived low over the field down wind at the end of a show I had been putting on at a little air meet and had pulled up until I was on my back at about eight hundred feet. I decided I would not only glide in upside down but would make it really fancy and slip both ways in the glide. I started to slip but forgot and did it the same as I would have had I been right side up and produced a bank instead. No, no, I told myself, coordinate, don't cross controls. There. I tried one to the other side. That's fine, I told myself. I got so absorbed in this little maneuver that I completely forgot the ground until I was almost too low and too slow to turn right side up again. I actually missed the ground by inches as I rolled over, and only some kind fate presiding over absent-minded stunt pilots enabled me to do it then.

I saw Jack in the hospital, when he was well enough.

"Hey, Jack," I started kidding him, "I hear that you practiced upside-down landings for months, and that finally you made one. Is there any truth to that?"

He clamped his jaws but grinned back at me. "That's all right," he said, "but if I remember correctly I saw a pilot by the name of Jimmy Collins just miss landing upside down once."

"Yeah, Jack," I said, "but--" I hesitated: this was too good not to emphasize--"but I missed," I said.

Jack just glared at me. There wasn't any answer.

DEATH ON THE GRIDIRON

It's funny how things turn out sometimes. Fate gives you a capricious little tweak, and there you are. I often think of the case of Zep Schock.

Zep and I were fraternity brothers at college. I was crazy about aviation, and Zep was crazy about football. I had been too poor to fly up till then, and Zep had been too little to play football. He weighed only about ninety-five pounds when he came to college. They had even used him as a sort of a mascot on the high-school teams.

Near the end of my freshman year I discovered quite accidentally, through reading an aviation magazine which I had repeatedly promised myself not to read because it took my mind off my work, that the army would teach me to fly for nothing. They would even pay me for it! And Zep suddenly started to grow.

I passed my entrance examinations for the Army Primary Flying School at Brooks Field, San Antonio, Tex., that fall, and prepared to quit school after the mid-term exams--which would mark the end of my freshman year, because I had started college in January instead of March--to go to flying school the following March. Zep had made the freshman football team in the meantime.

There wasn't much flying outside of the army in those days, and nobody knew much about it except that it was dangerous. None of the fellows could understand why I was doing such a fool thing. They tried to talk me out of it, discovered they couldn't, decided I was nuts, and started kidding me. Zep was the best of the bunch.