Test Pilot Part 8

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 pa.s.s.

I managed to bring out a little later in the conversation that I was a professional pilot myself and that being a pa.s.senger 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.

He said he had told me that story about the horse in the first place because he thought I was a regular pa.s.senger. He said not to tell any of the rest of the pa.s.sengers, because it might scare them and spoil their trip.

HE NEVER KNEW

Pilots often play jokes on each other when they fly together.

Two pilots I knew at Kelly Field had been up to Dallas on a week-end cross-country trip. They started back on a very rough day and were bouncing all around the sky.

About fifty miles out of San Antonio, the pilot who was flying the ship turned around to ask the other one in the rear seat for some matches. He couldn't see him, so he figured he was slumped down in the c.o.c.kpit, napping. He looked back under his arm inside the fuselage. The rear c.o.c.kpit was empty!

He was only flying at about five hundred feet, hadn't been flying any higher than that on the whole trip, and at times had been flying even lower.

Scared to death that his pa.s.senger had loosened his belt to stretch out and sleep and had been thrown out of the c.o.c.kpit in a b.u.mp, perhaps even failing to recognize his predicament in time to open his chute, the pilot swung back on his course and started searching the route he had covered for signs of a body. He searched back over as much of it as he dared and still have enough gas left to turn around again and go on into Kelly Field.

He found nothing and was worried sick all the way back to Kelly. But when he landed, there was the other pilot, grinning a greeting at him.

The pilot who had been in the rear seat explained that he had undone his belt to stretch out and sleep and that the next thing he knew he felt a b.u.mp and woke up with a start to discover the c.o.c.kpit about four feet beneath him and off to one side. He said he reached, but only grabbed thin air. The tail surfaces pa.s.sed by under him, and he saw the airplane flying off without him.

He was too astounded at first, but quickly realized he ought to do something, sitting out there in s.p.a.ce with no airplane or anything, so he pulled his rip cord. His chute opened just in time.

He walked over to the main road he had been flying over so recently and thumbed himself a ride to Kelly Field. He said he had seen the ship turn around and start back looking for him.

The pilot who had been flying the ship never knew if the other one had really fallen out of the ship, or if he had jumped out as a joke.

BONNY'S DREAM

Bonny had a dream. His inventor's eyes gleamed with the light of it. His days lived with the hope of it. His nights moved with its vision.

Because of his dream we called him Bonny Gull. He dreamed of building an airplane with metal, wood and fabric to emulate the sinewed, feathered grace of a soaring gull.

He studied gulls. He studied them dead and alive. He studied their wonderful soaring flight alive. He killed them and studied their lifeless wings. He wanted their secret. He wanted to recreate it for man.

He might have asked G.o.d. He might have asked G.o.d and heard a still small voice answer: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto G.o.d what is G.o.d's. Render unto man his own flight and leave to the gulls their own.

Man's flight is different because his destiny is different. He doesn't need the gulls' flight."

But Bonny envied the gulls. He killed hundreds of them, yes, thousands, and buried them in the field. He built an airplane from what he thought he had learned from their dead bodies.

He built an airplane and took it out to fly. Engineers, who had never studied gulls but who had studied man's flight, told him he shouldn't do it. They pointed out to him how the center of pressure would shift on his wings. But Bonny glared his glittering faith at them, snuggled his dream in close, and flew.

He took off all right. He roared across the field, and if he didn't sound quite like a gull, he looked the part. He rose into the air for all the world like a giant gull. He pulled off in a steep climb, and the wise men wondered if again they were proved wrong by an ignorant fanatic.

Their wonder didn't last long. When Bonny tried to level out, he nosed over and dove straight into the ground, like a gull diving into the ocean for a fish. We rushed out to the wreck. Bonny was quite dead.

There was scattered around him not only the remains of his own gull wings, but thousands of the feathered remains of other gull wings. He had dived straight into the shallow grave of all the gulls he had killed.

COB-PIPE HAZARDS

Silly little things are apt to crack you up sometimes.

I did an outside loop at Akron once. I came up over the top of the loop and started right down into another. I didn't want to do another, so I pulled back on the stick to stop it. It wouldn't come all the way back.

It was jammed some way.

The ship was nosing steeper and steeper into the dive. I rolled the stabilizer, and that enabled me to pull the nose up. I couldn't keep it up if I cut the gun more than halfway. I knew I would have a tough time landing like that. Besides, although I had a chute, I knew that when I got down low to make a landing the stick might jam even farther forward and nose me in before I had a chance to jump. Or the engine might quit down low and do the same thing. It wasn't my ship, however, and I didn't want to jump and throw it away if I didn't absolutely have to.

I tried the stick a few more times. Each time I yanked it back hard it came up against the same obstacle at the same point. I decided to take a chance that it would stay jammed where it was.

I came in low 'way back of the field with almost all of the back travel of the stick taken up, holding the nose up with the gun. I had to land with the tail up high, going fast. I bounced wildly, used all the field, but made it all right.

I made an immediate inspection to find out what had jammed the stick. I couldn't imagine what it was because I had taken all the loose gadgets out of the ship before I had gone up.

I found a corncob pipe that the ship's owner had been looking for for weeks. He had left it in the baggage compartment and had never been able to find it. It had slipped through a small opening at the top of the rear wall of the compartment and had evidently been floating around in the tail of the fuselage all that time.

When I did the outside loop it had been flung upward by centrifugal force and wedged into the wedge ending of the upper longerons at the end of the fuselage. The flipper horn was. .h.i.tting it every time I pulled the stick back, preventing me from getting the full backward movement.

Only the bowl of the pipe was left. It was lodged sidewise. Had it lodged endwise it would have jammed the stick even farther forward, and I would have had to jump or dive in with the ship. I would have had to jump quickly, too, because I didn't have much alt.i.tude when I started that second involuntary outside loop.

WHOOPEE!

A friend of mine was once chased and rammed in midair by a drunken pilot. If you have ever been approached on the road by a drunken driver you have some idea of the predicament he found himself in when this drunk started chasing him. Of course, he didn't know this guy was drunk, but he knew he was either drunk or crazy.

My friend was an army pilot. He was flying an army pursuit ship from Selfridge Field, Mich., to Chicago and was circling the field at Chicago preparatory to landing when he was set upon by the drunk, who, evidently still living in the memory of his war days, was trying to egg my friend on to a sham battle, trying to get him to dogfight.

He saw the DH, which was a mail ship of those days, approach him first from above and head on. He had to kick out of the way at the last moment, or he would have been hit on that first pa.s.s the guy took at him. The guy pulled up and took another pa.s.s at him. He kicked out of the way again and started wondering since when had they turned lunatics loose in the sky. He didn't have much time for wondering, because the guy kept taking pa.s.ses at him. Finally, the guy took to diving down under him and pulling up in front of him. He seemed to think that was more fun than just diving on my friend, and he kept it up.

My friend saw him disappear under the tail of his ship this time, and he didn't know what to do about it. He didn't know which way to turn, because he didn't know which way the goof was going to pull up.

Suddenly he saw the nose of the other ship. It came up directly in front of his own nose. He knew the guy had overdone it this time and come too close. He pulled back on his stick, but felt the jar of the collision just as he did. It threw him up into a stall, and when he came out his motor was so rough he had to cut his switches. He had raked the tail of the other ship with his propeller, and it was bent all out of shape. He had also cut the tail off the drunk's ship.