Test Pilot Part 4

IMAGINATION

A friend of mine got an aerial mapping job last summer. He had to fly at twenty thousand feet to take the pictures. Some pilots can stand more alt.i.tude than others, but my friend didn't know how much he could stand because he had never flown that high. He decided he had better take oxygen with him, just in case.

His mechanic got a cylinder of oxygen for him, and he took off. He felt pretty groggy at eighteen thousand feet, reached down, got the hose, put it in his mouth, turned on the valve, and took a whiff of oxygen. He couldn't hear the hissing of the stuff escaping because the motor noise drowned it out.

He perked up immediately. The sky brightened, everything became clearer to him, and he went on up to twenty thousand feet. Every once in a while he would feel low and reach down and get himself another whiff of oxygen and feel all right again for a while.

He didn't say anything to his mechanic, but his mechanic decided for himself a few days later that the oxygen was probably getting low in that tank and that he would need another soon. He decided to put a new one in ahead of time to forestall the possibility of running completely out in the air.

He brought a new tank out and decided to test it before he put it in the s.h.i.+p. He opened the valve and nothing happened. The tank was empty.

He took it back to the hangar and discovered that the previous tank my friend had been flying on had come out of the same bin and had been empty all along.

He got a good one and put it in the s.h.i.+p and didn't say anything about the incident. My friend said that the next time he took a whiff of oxygen it almost knocked him out of his seat.

I SPIN IN

I had been spin testing a Mercury Chic for several weeks, doing everything at a safe and sane alt.i.tude, being very scientific. I finally spun it in from an alt.i.tude of about three feet. And I mean spun it in too. The s.h.i.+p was a complete washout.

There was a strong wind that day, and a very gusty one. When I taxied out for the take-off the wind was on my tail. There were no brakes on the s.h.i.+p. It was very light, and in addition, a high wing job-always a top-heavy thing in a wind.

The wind kept swinging me around into it, and I wanted to go the other way. I should have called a couple of mechanics from the line to come and hold my wings and help me taxi. But I was proud or stubborn or dumb or something that day.

I adopted a little strategy. I'd get the s.h.i.+p all lined up down wind and when the wind would start swinging me around the other way I'd just let it swing until the nose was headed almost into the wind. Then I would gun it, kick rudder with the swing, thus aggravating it instead of checking it, hoping to get my way by going with it instead of fighting it, and then, when it was headed down wind again, try to hold it there until the next gust started swinging me around again.

It worked fine, and I was making a certain amount of headway down the field until, on one of the swings, a particularly heavy gust of wind picked up my outside wing as I was swinging. The s.h.i.+p tipped up very slowly, and I thought I was going to tip a wing. Then a larger and heavier gust hit it. It picked that s.h.i.+p off the ground, turned it over on its back and literally threw it down on the ground.

It was the worst crack-up I had ever been in. All four longerons were broken, the wings crumpled, the motor mount was twisted, the prop bent, the tail crushed, and the s.h.i.+p looked like it had spun in from at least ten thousand feet.

I crawled out from under it unhurt except for my feelings. I never felt so foolish in my life. I had cracked up a s.h.i.+p without even flying it.

BUSINESS BEFORE FAME

Clyde Pangborne, of Pangborne and Herndon fame, the two flyers who were first to fly non-stop from j.a.pan to America over the Pacific Ocean, and also of Pangborne and Turner fame, the flying team that won third place in the London-Australia Air Derby in 1934, was operations manager for the famous Gate's Flying Circus for many years. He flew into Lewiston, Mont., in October, 1923, with his aerial circus. He had a contract with the fair a.s.sociation of that town, giving him exclusive rights to all the pa.s.senger carrying and flying to be done at the local fair then in progress.

He landed an hour before he was supposed to put on his first performance of stunting, wing-walking and parachute jumping, the preliminary crowd-attracting procedure before the money-making of pa.s.senger carrying, which was one of the attractions the fair had advertised. He found another pilot and plane, with chute jumper, there ahead of him, all set to do business in his place.

Pangborne told the other pilot to get out. The other pilot said, "So what?" Pangborne said: "I got a contract, and I'm going to town to see about it."

He went to town and told the fair a.s.sociation about it. He said he would sue the city if they didn't get that other guy and his chute jumper off the field by the time he was ready to put on his exhibition.

The fair a.s.sociation went out to the field. They got hold of the other pilot and his chute jumper. They reminded the pilot that he had flown out of that field the previous year, and, in departing, had overlooked the small matter of paying a certain amount of rent he had agreed to pay for the field. They told him to get out or go to jail by four o'clock that afternoon.

It was a conclusive argument. The pilot cranked his s.h.i.+p, got in his c.o.c.kpit, called to his chute jumper, a long, slim, gangling kid who was obviously disappointed at the turn affairs had taken, because he had been all set to have some fun jumping that day, and took off.

The chute jumper was Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who had not yet learned to fly.

EVERYTHING WRONG

On my first solo in a Martin bomber, I started to take off and started swinging to the left. I put on right rudder but kept on swinging to the left. I ran out of right rudder and was still swinging to the left into a line of mesquite trees. I eased the right motor off a little, but it didn't help much. I couldn't cut the gun and stop before I hit the trees. I could only hope to get into the air before I got up to them.

Suddenly my left wing started to lift, and it dawned on me like a flash of shame what was wrong. I had had the wheel rolled to the right and my left aileron down. The resistance of that down aileron had swung me to the left at slow speeds, and I had fought it with right rudder, but now at high speeds it was banking me to the right, and I still had on right rudder. I was taking off in a right-hand bank with the controls set fully for it. The left-hand motor was pulling stronger than the right.

I never kicked and pulled so many things so fast before as I did right then. By some miracle I found myself fifty feet in the air instead of in a heap. But I was flying exactly at right angles to the direction I had originally planned.

Everything seemed to be all right, so I went around and landed. I gave it the gun immediately on touching the ground and went around and landed again.

This time I saw a lot of cars coming out toward me. Maybe that take-off had looked pretty good. Maybe they thought I knew what I had been doing.

The two landings had been good. Maybe they were coming out to congratulate me.

My instructor got there first. He ran over and started inspecting the right wing tip. He was looking underneath it. "Hey, you," he shouted at me when he looked up, "don't you ever get out and take a look after you crack up a s.h.i.+p?"

I had dragged the right wing for several hundred feet. The under side of the wing was badly torn up, and the aileron was just barely hanging on.

A SHOWY STUNT

An upside-down landing is one of the showiest maneuvers a stunting pilot can perform. He doesn't really land upside down. He comes all the way in in his glide upside down until he is about ten or twenty feet off the ground. Then he rolls over and lands right side up.

Jack, who had got pretty hot at this maneuver, hit a telephone pole coming in like that one day and woke up in the hospital.

Some time before that I had almost done practically the same thing. I had dived low over the field down wind at the end of a show I had been putting on at a little air meet and had pulled up until I was on my back at about eight hundred feet. I decided I would not only glide in upside down but would make it really fancy and slip both ways in the glide. I started to slip but forgot and did it the same as I would have had I been right side up and produced a bank instead. No, no, I told myself, coordinate, don't cross controls. There. I tried one to the other side.

That's fine, I told myself. I got so absorbed in this little maneuver that I completely forgot the ground until I was almost too low and too slow to turn right side up again. I actually missed the ground by inches as I rolled over, and only some kind fate presiding over absent-minded stunt pilots enabled me to do it then.

I saw Jack in the hospital, when he was well enough.

"Hey, Jack," I started kidding him, "I hear that you practiced upside-down landings for months, and that finally you made one. Is there any truth to that?"

He clamped his jaws but grinned back at me. "That's all right," he said, "but if I remember correctly I saw a pilot by the name of Jimmy Collins just miss landing upside down once."