Part 4

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 up some place reading about war pilots.

That was eleven years ago, and I'm still flying. Poor Zep made the regular team the next year and got killed playing football.

NOVICE NEAR DEATH

One flight test I gave, when I was an inspector for the Department of Commerce, was almost my last.

I went up with a guy, saw in three minutes he couldn't fly, took the controls away from him, landed, and told him to come back some other day. He pleaded with me that I hadn't given him a chance, that if I would only let him go further through the test without taking the controls away he would show me he could fly.

So I took him up again. I let him slop along without interference until we came to spins. I told him to do a spin, and he started a steep spiral. I took the controls away from him, regained some altitude, told him to do a spin again, and he started a steep spiral again--a lousy spiral, too!

I thought maybe he was afraid to do a spin, so I said the mental equivalent of "Skip it" to myself and told him to do a three-sixty. He should have gone to fifteen hundred feet, cut the gun, turned around once in his glide and landed on a spot under where he had cut the gun. He went to two thousand feet instead, put the ship in a steep, skidding spiral verging on a spin--he was death on steep spirals--and held it there. Round and round we went. I let him go. I wanted to convince him this time.

I had been watching for it, but at two hundred feet the ship beat me to it even so and flipped right over on its back. I made one swift movement, knocking the throttle open with my left hand in passing, and grabbed the stick with both hands. The guy was frantically freezing backward on it, but my sudden, violent attack on it gave me the lead on him and I managed to get the stick just far enough forward to stop the spin we had begun. I was sure we were going to hit the ground swooping out of the resultant dive, but by some miracle we missed it.

I landed immediately and was so mad I started to walk off without saying anything. But the guy followed me, bleating, "Please, Mr. Collins. Please, Mr. Collins," until I relented and turned to speak.

Before I could say anything he broke in on me with: "Please, Mr. Collins, please don't grab the controls from me like that just because I make one too many turns. I could bring the ship down all right."

My mouth opened and closed speechlessly. Bring it down! Bring us both down in a heap! But how could I say it and make myself understood? The guy didn't even know we had been in a spin. He didn't know we had almost broken our necks in one. He thought I was impatient!

HUNGRY'S SHIP BURNED

Lieutenant Hungry Gates' ship caught fire in the air. He pulled his throttle and worked carefully but fast. He undid his belt and started to raise himself out of the cockpit. He started to leap but remembered something. That swell bottle of pre-war liquor that a friend had given him just before he took off was in the map case. He'd need that if he got down alive. He made a quick grab back into the cockpit for it and leaped head foremost, clear of the burning wreck.

He missed the tail surfaces and waited a moment, thankful for that much. He didn't want the ship to fall on him. He didn't want any of the burning debris to fall on his chute when he opened it.

When he had waited long enough, he started to pull his rip cord to open his chute, but discovered both hands already engaged. He let go of the bottle of liquor with his right hand and hugged the bottle tightly with his left arm. He grabbed his rip-cord ring with his freed right hand, yanked hard, grabbed his bottle to him with both hands again, and waited. The sudden checking of his speed when his chute opened jolted him up short in his harness, but he didn't drop the bottle.

He thought of the flaming wreck above him. He looked up but saw only his white chute spread safely above him, etched cold against the clear blue sky. He looked around the sky. He saw a long trailing column of black smoke and followed it with his eyes downward until he saw the hurtling ship at the end of it. It was beneath him now and no longer a threat to his chute. He watched it nose violently into a wooded patch off to his left just before he settled down into a pasture. He hit hard, fell down, but held on to his bottle. His chute toppled over into a limp heap in the still air.

He sat up and decided he needed a drink before he even got out of his harness to gather up his chute. He hauled his bottle out from under his arm and gazed at it in consternation, licking his lips.

It wasn't a bottle at all. It was the fire extinguisher!

BACK-SEAT PALS

Back-seat driving is taboo in the ethics of the flying game. But occasionally you get a case of it when you get two pilots together in the same cockpit.

Two pilots were flying a pretty heavily loaded bomber on a cross-country trip, one time. They were both fast friends and both equally good pilots. Maybe that's why the thing happened as it did.

They landed at Love Field, Tex., gassed up, and taxied out to take off again. Part of the field was torn up. They didn't have any more field than just enough from where they began their take-off.

Their heavily loaded ship with its two Liberty motors, its acres of wings, and its forest of struts started lumbering down the field. The pilot who was flying the ship used most of the space in front of his obstacles before he got the ship off the ground. He did a nice job after he got it off the ground by not climbing it more than just enough to clear the wires which were in front of him. He figured he was just going to clear them nicely when apparently the other pilot, sitting alongside him in the other cockpit, figured he wasn't although why the other pilot did what he did at that second I could never figure out, except that it was one of those dumb things that we are all apt to do under duress if we don't watch ourselves.

Anyway, both motors suddenly quit cold, and the ship smacked into the wires and piled up in a heap on the far side of the road across the airport.

Both pilots came out of the wreck running. The one who had been flying the ship had the wheel, which evidently had broken off in the crash, raised above his head in his right hand. He was brandishing it wildly, running after the other pilot and shouting at the top of his voice, "Cut my switches, will you! Cut my switches just when I was going to make it! If I ever catch you I'll cut your throat!"

WATCH YOUR STEP!

At Anacostia Naval Air Station, the river flows on one side of the hangars, and the airport stretches on the other. They fly boats out of the river side and land planes out of the airport side.

One pilot down there had been flying land planes exclusively for several months. Then one day he flew a boat. One of the enlisted pilots went along with him as co-pilot.

After flying around for a while he started in for a landing. But instead of coming in for a landing on the river he started to land on the airport.

The enlisted pilot with him let him go as long as he thought he dared. Then he nudged him in the ribs, pointed out that he was about to land a boat on land, and suggested that maybe it would be a better idea to go over and land in the river.

The pilot agreed that it certainly would. He gave it the gun and went around again and came in for a landing on the river. He made a good landing and let the ship slow down. When they were idling along he turned around to the enlisted pilot and started to apologize for almost landing him on land. He undid his belt as he talked.

"That was a dumb thing for me to do," he said. "I've been flying land planes for so long that I guess I just started coming in there from habit without thinking. It sure was dumb." He was obviously humiliated and confused.

"Well," he said finally, "it sure was dumb," and got up and climbed out of the cockpit onto the wing.

"So long," he said, and stepped down off the wing into the water.

FLYER ENJOYS WORRY

Gloomy Gus got his name at Brooks Field, the army primary flying school. He was always going to get washed out of the school the next day. When he graduated from Brooks he wasn't going to last three weeks at Kelly, the advanced school, because he had got through Brooks by luck anyway. When he graduated from Kelly, the hottest pilot in his class, he would never get a job in commercial flying, so he might just as well have been washed out at Kelly.

I saw him several months later in Chicago. He was flying one of the best runs on the western division of the mail. He was sure it wouldn't be very long before he cracked up, night flying, and disabled himself for life, so what good was his mail job?

I saw him several years after he had been transferred to the eastern run over the Allegheny Mountains. He didn't know what good the additional money he was making was going to do him when he was dead. Didn't all the hot pilots get it in those mountains?

He took a vacation from the passenger lines and went on active duty with the army. I saw him at Mitchell Field. He said he was taking his vacation flying because he wanted to fly some army ships for a change and have some fun. "But you know, I shouldn't have done it," he said. "I've been flying straight and level too long. I almost hit a guy in formation this morning. I probably won't live long enough to get back to the lines."

I saw him a few days after he had gone back to the lines.

"How they going, Gloomy?" I greeted him.

"Oh," he said, "that bit of army flying made me careless. I almost hit a radio tower this morning. Carelessness is what kills all old-timers, you know."

"Gus," I said. "You'd be miserable if you didn't have something to worry about. You will probably live to have a long white beard and worry yourself sick all day long that you are going to trip on it and break your neck."

Only a faint flicker of humor lit up his gloomy eyes.

WEATHER AND WHITHER

Archer Winsten writes that "different" column in the _Post_, In the Wake of the News. I met Archer for the first time in San Antonio in 1927. He was down there for his health, and I was instructing at Brooks Field for my living. We both had ideas of writing even at that time. We became fast friends before Archer went home to Connecticut and I went to March Field, Riverside, Cal.

I resigned from the army the next year and went with the Department of Commerce. I was assigned to fly Bill McCracken, head of the department, on about a seven-thousand-mile tour of the country. I kept asking Bill if his itinerary was going to take us to Westport, Conn., or anywhere near it, because if it was I wanted to go see my friend Archer Winsten, who lived there. He said he didn't know where the place was, and I began looking for it on the map. I couldn't find it and told Bill that. I remarked how strange it was several times later that I couldn't find Westport on the map. A couple of times Bill asked me if I had found it yet, and I said no.

I was strange to the East at that time, and when we got to Hartford I was sure we were going to go right past Westport without my ever finding out where it was. I complained to Bill about it and we both looked over a map and couldn't find the place.

The next day we started down to New York from Hartford and ran into lousy weather. It got so low finally that, although I was following railroads and valleys, I decided that I couldn't go any farther. I milled around, dodging trees and hills for about ten minutes before I found a place to sit down.

I landed in a small field surrounded with stone fences. A man came wading through the wet grass toward us after we had stopped rolling. Bill asked me where we were, and I said I had only a vague idea after all that milling around but would ask the man. The man said Westport.

Bill howled with delight. Part of his delight undoubtedly was relief at getting down out of that soup without breaking his neck, but I was never able to convince him that I didn't know I was landing at Westport.

I SEE

A man came up to me for flight test once when I was an inspector for the Department of Commerce. He flew terribly, so I sent him away and told him to come back in a couple of weeks, after he had practiced a little more. He came back a couple of weeks later, and I turned him down again.

The third time he came in he said, "I think we'll get along all right this time. Can I take the test today?"

"I'm too busy today," I told him. But he pleaded so hard that I finally said, "All right, I'll squeeze you in this afternoon. Come at three o'clock."

"Thank you, thank you," he said, and held out his hand.

I reached out my hand to grip his and felt something in my palm. I pulled my hand away and found a piece of paper in it. I unfolded it and discovered a ten-dollar bill.

I stood there and looked at it, puzzled and amazed for a few seconds. Then the full import of it dawned on me. He thought I had been holding out for something. He thought he would fix me up. He didn't know he could never fix me up if I put my stamp of approval on him when he was unfit and he should then go out and kill some passenger because of my leniency.

It started at the top of my head, that raging anger. It burned like flaming coals and raced through my veins like fire. I began to tremble violently, and when I looked up the man was a red flame in a red room.

I hurled the paper bill at him as though it were a javelin and shouted, "Get out! Get out and don't ever come back!"

Have you ever thrown a piece of paper at anybody?

The bill fluttered ineffectually down to the floor halfway between us. I rushed at it and kicked at it until it was out of the door. I kicked him out too.

I wondered, sitting at my desk afterward, why I had got so mad. It wasn't honesty. I hadn't had time to think of honesty. I wondered if it was because he had implied that I was worth ten dollars. I wondered what I would have done if he had offered me ten thousand dollars. I began to understand graft.

WON ARGUMENT LOST

"That student is dangerous. You're crazy if you fly with him again," I harangued my friend, Brooks Wilson.

"Don't be that way," Brooks answered. "He's not dangerous. He's goofy."

"That's why he's dangerous," I countered. "You tell me that he froze the controls in a panic today and you lost a thousand feet of altitude before you were able to get the ship away from him. The next time you may not have a thousand feet."

"I won't need a thousand feet the next time," Brooks argued. "I wrestled the controls away from him today, but the next time he grabs them like that, I'll just beat him over the head with the fire extinguisher and knock him out."

"If you are high enough to do that, you won't be in any danger," I pointed out. "And if you are low enough to be in danger when he freezes, you won't have time to knock him out."

Brooks and I were both very young army instructors, and Brooks was stubborn with the confidence of youth. He only growled, "Don't be a sissy all your life. I can handle this guy."

The next day a solo student spun in, in a field of corn beside the airport. Brooks had just landed with his goofy student and was crawling out of his cockpit when he saw the ship hit. He jumped back into his cockpit, gave his still idling motor the gun and took off, his goofy student still in the rear seat.

He flew over the wreck, circled it, dove on it, pulled up, wing-it, dove on it, pulled up, wing-overed, and dove on it again. He was a beautiful pilot. He was pointing out to the ambulance where the wreck was in the tall corn. He pulled up and started another wing-over, flipped suddenly over on his back, and spun in right beside the wreck.

When they pulled Brooks out of his wreck he was unconscious but was muttering over and over again in his Southern vernacular, "Turn 'em loose. Turn 'em loose. Turn 'em loose before we crash."

The goofy student was hardly even scratched. Brooks died that night.

MONK HUNTER

Monk Hunter was a dashing aviator, the only really dashing aviator I have ever known. There was dash to the cut and fit of his uniforms, dash to the shine and the fit of his boots, dash to the twirl and flip of the cane he carried. There was dash to the set of his magnificently erect and darkly handsome head, dash in the flare of his nostrils and the gleam of his flashing black eyes, dash in his violently dynamic gestures and in his torrential, staccatoed, highly inflected speech which he aimed at you as he had aimed machine guns at enemy flyers during the war when he had shot down nine of them.

There was especial dash to Monk's mustache. Only Monk could have worn that mustache. I saw him once without it, and something seemed to have gone out of him as it went out of Samson when they clipped his hair. He looked naked and helpless.

It was a big mustache, the kind you see in tintypes of swains of long ago. It bristled, and Monk had a way about him in twirling it that you should have seen.

Poor Monk took off at Selfridge one day in an army pursuit ship. He even did that with dash. He held it low after the take-off and then started a clean, left, sweeping climb into the blue sky.

We all saw the white smoke start trailing out behind his ship. Then with bated breath we watched the ship slump slowly over from its gestured climbing and nose straight down inexorably toward the ice of Lake St. Clair. Monk's chute blossomed out behind the diving ship just before it disappeared behind the trees.

We all jumped into cars and rushed madly over to where we thought it had hit. We found Monk, unhurt, except for the jar from landing on the ice, waving his arms, wildly shouting that the ship had caught fire and to look what the damned thing had done. We looked at the ship, but Monk was still gesticulating excitedly, so we looked at him. He meant to look what it had done to him.

We all started laughing like hell. We were really laughing with Monk, not at him. He appreciated it, too.

His mustache had been burnt clear off on one side.

COULDN'T TAKE IT

I was testing an airplane one day. Its wings came off, and I jumped out in my chute. I am convinced that the people on the ground watching me got a bigger thrill out of it than I did. I was too busy.

For one thing, Admiral Moffett, who was later killed in the _Akron_, rushed home to his office in an emotional fit and wrote me a very nice letter about what a hero I was. I wasn't any hero. I had just been saving my neck.

And for another, my mechanic came up to see me in the hospital right afterward. I wasn't in the hospital because I was hurt, but because the military doctor on the post made me go there. After I had got into the hospital I discovered that my heart was beating so violently that I couldn't sleep, so when Eddie, my mechanic, came up they let him in.

He didn't say anything at all for a while. He just sat on the bed opposite mine and twirled his cap, looking down at the floor. Finally he said, "When your chute opened, I fell down."

I pictured him running madly across the field, watching me falling before I had opened my chute, and then stumbling just as my chute opened. "Why didn't you watch where you were going?" I said banteringly.

He kept looking at the floor, twirling his cap, his face expressionless. "I wasn't going any place," he said.

The conversation wasn't making much sense to me. "Didn't you say that when my chute opened, you fell down?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, as if he were talking to the floor. He was in a sort of trance.

"Well," I said, puzzled, "then you must have been running across the field watching me. You must have stumbled and fallen."

"No," he said, like a man in a dream, "I didn't stumble on anything. I was just standing there looking up, watching you."

I was getting frantic. "Well, how in the hell did you fall down, then?" I asked.

"My knees collapsed," he said.

GOOD LUCK

Soon now, he would be flying out over the ocean. Soon he would be famous and rich. Lindbergh had made it. Why shouldn't he?

His ship was almost ready. Its belly bulged with new tanks. Its wings stretched with new width to take the added gas load. Its motor emitted a perfect sound that his trained ears could find no fault with.

Only the final adjusting of his instruments remained. Lindbergh had taken great pains with his instruments. He would too. When the ground crew had finished with them, he flew his ship on a short cross-country trip to check the instruments in flight. They worked fine.

He brought his ship down to put it in the hangar until he got his break in weather. He lingered in the cockpit for a few moments, contemplating his instruments in anticipation of the weary hours he would have to watch them during the long flight.

A thought occurred to him. Lindbergh had been lucky. He would be too. His girl (sweet kid--maybe when he came back ... but he would do the job first) had already wished him luck. She had given him a token of her wish. It was only a cheap thing she had picked up in some novelty shop, but he treasured it. He took it out of his pocket. He tied it to the instrument board and fashioned its bright red ribbon into a neat bow knot that reminded him of the way she fastened her apron when she made coffee for him in her kitchen late at night. There. Yes, he too would have luck now.

Several days later his break in the weather hadn't come yet. He got worried about his instruments. There were no landmarks in the ocean. Maybe he had better check his compass again.

He went out to the field and flew his ship. The compass was off! It was way off! When the ground crew checked it again it was off twenty degrees on the first reading.

They soon found the trouble. As everybody knows, metal near a compass will throw it off. They found a metal imitation of a rabbit's foot suspended on a red ribbon tied to the bottom of the compass case.

WILL ROGERS IN THE AIR

I was flying as a passenger on one of the airlines once, going out to Wichita to take delivery of a ship I had sold. Will Rogers was a passenger on the same ship.

When we stopped at Columbus, I managed to engage Rogers in conversation. I had always been curious about whether he talked in private life as he does on the stage and radio, and if the poor grammar in his writing was deliberate or natural. He talked to me exactly as he does on the stage and radio, and his grammar was just as bad as it is in his writing. So I decided that, if it was an act, he was carrying it pretty far.

I noticed that he made certain movements with difficulty. He seemed to be crippled up a little. I asked him what was the matter. He said he had fallen off his horse before he left California and had broken a couple of ribs. I thought that was kind of funny, because I had always supposed he was a good horseman. I told him that, and he said it was a new horse and he wasn't used to it. I still thought it was kind of funny, but I let it pass.

I managed to bring out a little later in the conversation that I was a professional pilot myself and that being a passenger was a rare experience for me. He said he could tell me the truth then. He said he really had had an airplane accident the day before. An airliner he had been riding in had made a forced landing, had nosed over pretty hard, and had banged him up a little. That's how he had broken his ribs.

He said it hadn't been the pilot's fault that they had cracked up, that the motor had quit, and that the pilot had done a good job considering the country he had to sit down in. He said that only a good pilot could have kept from killing everybody in the ship, and that he was the only one who had been hurt.