Test Pilot Part 5

"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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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.

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 alt.i.tude, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+P BURNED

Lieutenant Hungry Gates' s.h.i.+p 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 c.o.c.kpit. 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 c.o.c.kpit 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 c.o.c.kpit.

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., ga.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p used most of the s.p.a.ce in front of his obstacles before he got the s.h.i.+p 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 c.o.c.kpit, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p had the wheel, which evidently had broken off in the crash, raised above his head in his right hand. He was brandis.h.i.+ng 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.