Test Pilot Part 3

While I was waiting on the repair I talked with a navy commander who had just flown up from Washington. I told him my worry about the nine _g_.

He said to yell as I horsed back and it would help. I thought he was kidding me. It seemed so silly. But he was serious. He said it would tense the muscles of the abdomen and the neck and preserve sight and consciousness longer.

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 c.o.c.kpit. 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 pa.s.sing 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 h.e.l.l 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 alt.i.tude. 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 c.o.c.kpit and was floating around in s.p.a.ce 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 d.a.m.ned near the finish. Besides, although I am not superst.i.tious, 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 s.p.a.ced 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 cl.u.s.ter around his almost legendary name, live on.

d.i.c.k 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 alt.i.tude. 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 alt.i.tude 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 alt.i.tude 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.