Test Pilot Part 18

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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 b.u.m 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 b.u.m 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 s.h.i.+p 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 b.u.mped off. Thoughtful of me, don't you think?... I never got b.u.mped 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 G.o.d...." 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sion. This is the word that must have been the spirit of G.o.d 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.