Part 8

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 under them. Soon they became solid and I couldn't see the stars overhead. I saw lightning ahead of me flashing in the darkness.

Water began to collect on my windshield. The air got very rough. A beacon light that had been flashing up ahead of me disappeared. I noticed the lights of a town beneath me getting dim. For a second I lost sight of them entirely. I nosed down to get out of the clouds.

A brilliant flash of lightning lit the darkness around me. I saw the rain driving in white sheets and caught the flash of a beacon through it. I nosed down toward the beacon and started circling it. I knew by my altimeter that I was down lower than some of the mountain ridges around me. I looked for the next beacon but couldn't see it through the raging thunderstorm. I didn't dare strike out in the general direction of the next beacon in the hope of finding it. I might hit a mountain top.

Another blinding flash of lightning surrounded me with glaring light. I saw the dark bottoms of the clouds and the black top of the next ridge I had to pass over. Then blackness and the slashing rain with only the friendly beacon under me.

I fought my way from beacon to beacon for an hour. The lightning flashes receded farther and farther behind me. I began to see from beacon to beacon. Stars appeared overhead. They were very dim. I was flying in a haze.

I passed over Hadley Field, New Jersey, and saw its boundary lights burning cheerfully. I continued on toward Roosevelt Field. I was almost home now.

I noticed the lights of the towns beneath me getting dimmer. I looked up. The stars were gone. I looked down again. The lights had disappeared! I was flying blind in a thick fog. I began to fly by instruments. I pulled up. At 3,000 feet I saw the stars. I was on top of the fog.

I swung around to go back to Hadley Field. Its lights were covered. I saw the lights of what I figured was New Brunswick. I started circling them. I knew Hadley Field was only a few miles from there. The lights of New Brunswick began to blot out. Hey, what the hell! I said out loud to myself.

I saw a segment of the rotating beam of a beacon break through a hole in the fog and make about a quarter of a turn in the darkness before it disappeared. That's the beam from Hadley beacon! I was saying all my thoughts out loud now. I flew over to where I figured the center of the beam was and started circling. The top of the fog looked pretty bright there. I decided that Hadley had heard me and had turned on its floodlights.

I eased back on my throttle, settled into a spiraling glide, and sank down into the fog, flying by instruments. The opaque white fog got more and more luminous. Individual bright spots, greatly blurred, began to appear. I figured they were the boundary lights of the field. My altimeter read very low. I broke through the bottom of the fog at about two hundred feet. I was over Hadley. I flew low into the blackness back of the field and came around and landed.

"What the hell are you flying in this stuff for?" the Hadley weather man asked me.

"Because I was damned fool enough to take Bellefonte's weather report seriously," I said.

TOO MUCH KNOWLEDGE

When I was in Cleveland at the air races a couple of years ago four so-called flyers asked me to fly with them in their Bellanca to the Sky Harbor airport near Chicago. I agreed. We took off after the last race with just enough gas to make the field nicely. We hit a head wind, but I still figured we were okay. I didn't know where the field was, but one of the girls in the plane had been taking instruction at Sky Harbor and the other three claimed that they had lived in Chicago all their lives and knew Sky Harbor as well as their own mother.

When we got to Chicago it was already dark. I followed instructions. We flew north. Someone yelled I should turn east. I turned east. Someone else shouted that was all wrong, we were already too far east. I turned west. The next fifteen minutes were bedlam. "_East, north, west, and south,"_ they yelled. I lost my temper. "_Do you or do you not know where this field is?"_ I exploded. "_There it is!"_ they chorused. I heaved a sigh of relief and got ready to land. It wasn't the field. I looked at my gas, and my gas was too low. I took matters into my own hands and flew back to the municipal airport and gassed up. We started out again. The situation started to strike me as funny as soon as the tanks were full. I let them have their fun, and eventually they did find the field. I called back to the girl who had been taking instruction and asked if there were any obstructions around the field. "Absolutely not!" she vowed. I looked the field over as carefully as I could. There were no floodlights (they had also told me the field was well lighted). I cut the gun and glided in for a landing. A high-tension post whizzed by my left ear. We had missed the wires by just two inches. And there were no obstructions around the field!

HIDDEN FAULTS

Nearly every time that a big money race comes along a lot of new planes put in an appearance. Some of them haven't been properly tested (you can get a special license for racing), and none of them are the type you would want to give your grandmother a ride in. But they are all fast, and when you are flying in a race for money you want speed, a lot of it.

I pulled up in front of the hangar late one summer afternoon and saw a brand-new, speedy type cantilever monoplane standing on the line. The wing had large L-shaped gashes in it. The plane belonged to Red Devereaux, who was going to fly it in the National Air Race Derby. As I sat there Red came over. He told me that on the way in from the factory in Wichita a terrific wing flutter set in every time he passed through rough air. The oscillations were so bad that the stick would tear itself from Red's hands. He asked me to try it out and see if it were possible to race the plane.

I put on my parachute and climbed in. As I warmed the motor up I decided to have the door taken off the ship. Easier to get out that way. I put the ship in a shallow climb and held it to six thousand feet. Feeling it out, I dived, banked, rolled, looped, and spun it. It seemed to be fine. I landed and told Red that everything was okay.

The next day diving over the Boston airport, in the lead, the wing broke off. The plane plunged into the marsh, killing Red and his bride of a few months.

"DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY"

A friend of mine knew a doctor who had an old skeleton. The skeleton wasn't of any use to the doctor. It had been hanging in a closet for almost a year. I decided to have some fun with it. I wired the head and jaws with fine wire. I attached two strings to the wire in such a way that by pulling one I could make the skeleton's head turn left or right. When I pulled the other the jaws clacked up and down. I tied the skeleton in one of the dual-control seats of a cabin Travelair. I flew the ship from the other seat. By bending way down nobody from the outside could see me. It looked as though the skeleton were doing the flying. Jim Drummond, flying mechanic, lay on the floor of the plane and took charge of the skeleton's behavior.

I knew that Eric Wood and Pete Brooks were flying formation over Floyd Bennett Field that day. They had just joined the army reserve corps and were all steamed up trying to make a success out of it. I decided they would be my first victims of the day. We had no trouble finding the formation. There was Pete just behind the leader, looking very conscientious and pleased with himself. He was doing everything just right. I eased up beside him. He didn't notice me for a second. When he glanced around I gave Jim the signal. The skeleton looked right in his face and jabbered. Horror and amazement flooded Pete's face. He turned back to the formation--he had to unless he wanted to bump into the other planes. But he couldn't stand it for long. He had to look again. Jabber, jabber, went the skeleton. This went on a third and a fourth time, till I finally felt sorry for Pete. He was getting walleyed, one eye on the formation, the other on the skeleton. I gave him one final superb jabber, dipped my wings, and went in search of other game.

CONFESSION

Jimmie Doolittle has demonstrated American airplanes all over the world. He landed on one of his tours at Bandoeng, Java, headquarters of the Dutch East Indian Air Corps. They had some American, Conqueror-powered, Curtiss Hawks there. They asked Jimmie to take one of them up and put on a show for them.

After turning the ship inside out for the better part of an hour, Jimmie really got into the spirit of the thing. He decided to dive straight down from about 6,000 feet and conclude the show by showing them how close he could come to the ground, pulling out of the dive.

He turned over and started down. Straight down, closer and closer to the ground, wide open, he roared. He yanked back on the stick to just clear the ground and discovered there were several little considerations he had overlooked. One was that he had just stepped out f a Cyclone-powered Hawk, much lighter than the Conqueror-powered one he was desperately trying to clear the airport in at that moment. The other was that he was accustomed to flying the lighter ship out of a sea-level airport, much heavier-aired than the 2,500-foot-high airport that he was at that moment trying to avoid. The heavier ship squashed in the thinner air and hit the ground in the pull-out. Just kissed it and skimmed into the air again.

Jimmie wondered if his landing gear had been swiped off, came around, landed, and discovered that it hadn't.

The Dutch officers rushed out to him when he crawled out of his cockpit. "My God, Jimmie," they chorused, slapping him on the back, "that was the most delicate piece of flying we have ever seen!"

"Huh," Jimmie grunted, still thinking how lucky he had been to get away with it, "delicate piece of flying, hell! That was the dumbest piece of flying I ever did in my life!"

They knew it too, of course, despite the polite way they had put it. So from then on Jimmie was ace-high with them, because he had admitted the boner instead of trying to lie out of it.

GONE ARE THE DAYS

George Weiss, one of the boys that kick the _Daily News_ photographic ship around into position for the aerial photographs that appear in New York's picture paper, told me this funny one he experienced with the late Commander Rogers of the navy:

Commander Rogers had flown way back in the early days of Wright pushers. He saw George in Washington several years ago and asked him if he could fly him up to his home at Havre de Grace, Md. He assured George that there was a field there right beside his house that they could land in. He said that he had landed in it himself.

George took him up in his Travelair cabin ship. He arrived over the Commander's house and the Commander pointed out the field. "It's full of cows," George objected. "That's all right," the Commander told him, "just buzz the field a couple of times and somebody will come out and chase the cows away."

George did, and sure enough somebody came out and chased the cows off the field.

"I still can't land there," George remonstrated. "The field is too small."

"Sure you can," the Commander assured him; "I've done it."

George circled the field again. He said it looked like a good-sized pocket handkerchief to him and was surrounded by tall trees.

"Are you sure you've landed there?" George insisted.

"Sure, I have," the Commander reassured him. "Go ahead, you can get in it."

George thought to himself that if the Commander had got in there, by golly, he could too. He said he finally squashed down over the trees, falling more than gliding, and dropped into the field with a smack that should have cracked the ship up but didn't. He stopped fifty feet from the row of trees by standing on his brakes and cutting the switches. He said he didn't know how the hell he was going to get out of the place without dismantling the ship.

That night, in the Commander's house, over a drink, George asked him, "Come, now, Commander, tell me the truth. Did you really land in that field?"

"Certainly I did," the Commander said. "It was back in 1912, and I was flying a Wright pusher." George sneezed into his drink. The Wright pushers land so slow they can be flown off a dining-room table.

"And do you remember those trees around the field?" the Commander asked. George remembered. "Well, they were only bushes in 1912."

"LOOK WHO TAUGHT HER"

I was trying to teach my wife to fly. I thought every flyer's wife should know something about flying. It would be so convenient on cross-country trips if Dee could spell me off on the controls. I was having very little success. In the first place, Dee's eyes weren't good, which is a decided disadvantage, and in the second place she just couldn't seem to catch on. She had no coordination. I sweated and struggled and cursed. "Don't skid on the turns," I moaned. "The rudder and the stick must be used together. If you put the stick to the right, push the right rudder. If you put the stick to the left, use the left rudder." And the ship would grind around on another skid.

Dee didn't take her flying as seriously as I did. She didn't particularly want to learn to fly except to please me. I thought if I could instill in her a sense of shame at her lack of coordination maybe she would improve. I picked a day when she was more than usually bad. The plane had been in every conceivable position but the right one. She had skidded and slipped and wobbled all over the sky. My temper was getting the best of me.

"Dee," I said, "haven't you any pride about learning how to fly? Other women learn how. Look at all the girls who fly, and fly damn well. Look at Anne Lindbergh, for instance. She has been doing a wonderful job on that Bird plane. She solos all over the place, and she only took it up a little while ago."

Dee looked at me a minute and said, "Well, look who taught her."

I gave up teaching my wife how to fly.

A FAULTY RESCUE

Eddie Burgin, one of the oldest pilots on Roosevelt Field, tells me this one about how they used the last remaining outdoor "outbuilding" on Roosevelt Field as a homing device to lead a troubled pilot down into the airport.

Russ Simpson, American flying instructor in the Gosport School in England during the war and at present an airplane broker on Roosevelt Field, took off in one of the old Jennies to fly the first electric sign ever flown over New York City at night. While he was gone a ground fog rolled in over the airport.

Pretty soon the fellows on the ground heard him coming back. They could hear his motor, but they couldn't see his ship. They knew he couldn't see the airport. He was stuck on top of the fog.

They decided to help him. They got cans of gasoline and poured them on the old outbuilding which stood a little way out from the hangars and set fire to the rickety structure. They tore up all the spare motor crates they could find and piled them on top of the blaze. They got the fire so big they were afraid for a while that the hangars were going to catch. They were trying to make a red glow in the fog so Russ could tell where the field was.

Finally they heard Russ's motor cut. They heard the ship glide in and heard it hit. They could tell from the noise it made when it hit that it had cracked up.

They jumped into a car and went rushing all over the airport in the darkness and the fog looking for the wreck. It took them half an hour to find it, so Eddie says.

When they did, they found Russ sitting on top of it, smoking a cigarette. Their almost burning the hangars down had all been in vain. Russ hadn't seen any red glow at all. He had simply mushed down through the stuff and hit the airport by luck.

HELPING THE ARMY

After I was graduated from Brooks and Kelly, the army transferred me to Selfridge Field in Detroit. There was nothing much doing around Selfridge, and I was getting a little bored. I heard they were giving an air show at Akron, right near my home town. I thought it would be fun to go out there to see my old friends and give a stunt exhibition. I got the necessary permission from the higher-ups and started out in a Tommy Morse. The Morse planes were pretty near obsolete by that time, and the service was trying to replace them as fast as possible with newer models. There were only a few of them left.

When I got to Akron there was a lot of excitement going on over the air show. I told myself I was going to give them the works--show them what a local boy could do. The first part of my program went off fine. I looped, barrel-rolled, dove, etc. I had figured out a trick landing as the grand finale that would pull the customers right out of their seats. The landing didn't turn out so well. I misjudged my distance and ended up on one wing. It was pretty humiliating. There was nothing to do but wire Selfridge Field to ship me another wing. They wired back to the effect that there were no more wings available at the moment and that I should crate the ship home. That stumped me. I had no idea how to dismantle a plane. I studied the old Morse from every angle, but I couldn't find the solution. I had to get the plane in a crate, and I had to do it quickly. I used a saw. I sawed off the good wing, the damaged wing, and the tail surfaces. I crammed them into a crate and sent them on their way. The plane of course had to be junked.

I had helped the army to get rid of one more Tommy Morse.

APOLOGY

I was sitting alone in a movie not long ago. The newsreel came on. Jimmie Doolittle's capable but impish face flashed upon the screen. Behind him was the fast, low-wing, all-metal Vultee plane in which he had just failed to better by more than a few minutes the Los Angeles--New York record for transport planes.

"I'm sorry I didn't make faster time," his picture spoke. "I didn't do justice to the ship I flew. I wandered off my course during the night and hit the coast 200 miles south of where I should have hit it. It was just another piece of bum piloting."

I saw Jimmie in Buffalo not long after that.

"What was the matter, Jimmie?" I asked him, referring to the flight he had spoken about in the newsreel. "Were you on top of the stuff for a long time?" I continued, generously implying that of course he had had enough bad weather to force him to fly on top of the clouds and out of sight of land for so much of the trip that naturally he got off his course.

"No," he explained, "I wasn't on top. I was in it for ten and a half hours. I couldn't get on top because I picked up ice above sixteen thousand feet. I couldn't go under for several reasons. I had high mountains to clear. I would have made even slower time and run out of gas before I got to New York if I had flown low, because my supercharged engine required 15,000 feet to develop its full power and its most efficient gas consumption. So I had to fly in it. Also I got mixed up on some radio beams. Some of them are stronger than others. I figured the strongest ones the closest, which wasn't always true. I learned a lot on that trip. I think I could hit it on the nose the next time."

He was talking shop to a fellow professional. I could immediately see that 200 miles off under the conditions he had had to contend with had not been bad at all. I wouldn't have blamed him if he had explained to the public a little more than he did. But when he said to them, without the shadow of an alibi, "It was just another piece of bum piloting," I thought it was pretty swell.

I AM DEAD

_This is the testament of Jimmy Collins, the test pilot._

_It is, as he himself phrased it, "The word of my life and my death. The dream word that breathed into my nostrils the breath of life and destroyed me too."_

_The body of Jimmy Collins was found on Friday in Pinelawn Cemetery, near Farmingdale, L. I., beneath the wreckage of the Grumman ship he had tested for the navy. That body was broken, mangled, twisted, in a 10,000-foot crash._

_His testament, the utterance of a poet who flew, first in search of beauty, then in search of bread, is bravely, lyrically alive, straight and whole, as was the spirit of the man who wrote it._

_He wrote it--laughingly, he said; grimly, we believe--nine months ago. This is how it happened:_

_In October Collins went to Buffalo to test a new Curtiss bomber-fighter for the navy. Before he left he took dinner with his old friend Archer Winsten, who conducts the In the Wake of the News column for the_ Post. _Winsten wrote a column about Collins and his spectacular job, begged the flyer to do a guest column for him on his return, telling of the Buffalo feat._

_What happened after that is best told in Collins's own words._

_He wrote to his sister, out West: "I got to thinking it over and thought maybe I wouldn't come back because it was a dangerous job, and then poor Archer would be out of a column.... So I playfully wrote one for him in case I did get bumped off. Thoughtful of me, don't you think?... I never got bumped off. Too bad, too, because it would have been a scoop for Arch...."_

_Last Friday's job was to have been Jimmy's last as a test pilot. He took it because he needed the money, for his wife and children. Soon he was to have started on a writer's career._

_Jimmy's writing career ends today with his testament. He prefaced it with the following:_

_"The next words you read will be those of James H. Collins, and not 'as told to,' although you might say ghost-written."_

I AM DEAD.

How can I say that?

Do you remember an old, old story? I shall tell you just the beginning of it: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was God...." That's enough for you to see what I mean.

It is by the word that I can say that.

Not by the spoken word. I cannot say to you by the spoken word, "I am dead."

But there is not only the spoken word. There is also the written word. It has different dimensions in space and time.

It is by the written word that I can say to you, "I am dead."

But there is not only the spoken and the written word. There is also the formless, unbreathed word of mood and dream and passion. This is the word that must have been the spirit of God that brooded over the face of the deep in the beginning. It is the word of life and death.

It was the word of my life and my death. The dream word that breathed into my nostrils the breath of life and destroyed me too.

Dreams. And life. And death.

I had a dream. Always I had a dream. I cannot tell you what that dream was. I can only tell you that flying was one of its symbols. Even when I was very young that was true. Even as long as I can remember.

When I became older, it became even more true.

So deep a dream, so great a passion, could not be denied.

Finally I did fly.

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, when the evil days drew not nigh...." Part of the same old story.

I remembered the dream of the days of the youth of my flying, that burst of glory, and how the world and my shining youth itself shone with the radiance of it.

It was my creator. It created life for me, for man shall not live by bread alone. Man cannot. Only his dreams and his vision sustain him.

But the evil days drew nigh. The glow died down, and the colors of the earth showed up. Ambition, money. Love and cares and worry. Curious how strong the strength of weakness is, in women and their children, when you can see your own deep dreams, unworded, shining in their eyes. I grew older too, and troublous times beset the world.

Finally there came a time when I would rather eat than fly, and money was a precious thing.

Yes, money was a precious thing, and they offered me money, and there was still a small glow of the deep, strong dream.