Test Pilot Part 9

The drunk was evidently too drunk to get out of the c.o.c.kpit because he cracked up with his s.h.i.+p. My friend managed to get his s.h.i.+p down without jumping. It was only a wonder, plus some neat flying on my friend's part, that he wasn't killed too.

BUILDING THROUGH

A pilot should never be too stubborn with an airplane. I learned that early, fortunately, without coming to grief in the process.

Another pilot criticized my flying once. He criticized the way I was making my take-offs. Kidlike and c.o.c.ky, just out of flying school, I took a foolish way of proving he was wrong. But he had me so riled by his caustic and nasty remarks about how I was going to kill myself if I kept that up that I flung out a challenge to him and felt I had to keep my att.i.tude even when I saw I was overdoing the thing and thought I was going to crack up.

"If you think my take-offs are so dangerous," I told him, "I'll just go out there and cut my gun in the most dangerous spot of this dangerous take-off and land safely back in the airport." And I stalked out, fuming, and got in the s.h.i.+p.

I took off toward the high trees at the end of the field, didn't let the s.h.i.+p climb very steeply approaching the trees, and banked just before I got to them-exactly like I had been doing on the take-offs he had been criticizing. But I also pulled up sharply, just to make it worse. I didn't want him to have any comeback. I cut the gun and started dropping back in over the trees into the airport. I should have put the nose down a little to cus.h.i.+on the drop, but I was mad. I'd show him the worse way.

I wanted to gun it because I was dropping hard, but I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

I hit like a ton of bricks. The s.h.i.+p groaned and bounced as high as a hangar. Luckily, it was a square hit and a square bounce. That's the only reason I didn't spread the s.h.i.+p all over the field. It hit and bounced again and rolled to a very short stop for a down-wind landing.

"All right," I told the guy when I crawled out of the s.h.i.+p, "you go out now and cut your gun just over the trees on one of your safe, straight take-offs. You won't have a turn started and already pretty well developed, and you won't have room enough to start one. You'll pile into the trees in a heap, and if that's safer than landing on the airport in one piece, then I'll admit that your take-offs are safer than mine."

He didn't dare and he knew it. So he just glared at me, knowing d.a.m.ned well, as I knew myself, that I should by all rights have cracked up on that landing. But I had him, and he shut up and didn't make any more cracks about me.

MUCH!

Somebody asked me one day what kind of an airplane I flew. I told him any kind anybody was willing to pay me for flying.

"But don't you own an airplane?" the man asked.

"No," I answered. "And furthermore," I added, "I have never owned an airplane, although I have been a professional pilot for eleven years."

Why?

Well, I can best explain that as I explained it to a little boy once out in California.

I was at the Lockheed factory. I had been there several months, supervising the construction of an airplane I had sold to a rich sportsman pilot in the East. It was a Lockheed Sirius plane and at that time a s.h.i.+p which was taking everybody's eyes as the latest and sleekest thing yet developed by the engineers. Lindbergh had just popularized it by flying himself and his wife across the country in it and establis.h.i.+ng a new transcontinental record.

They rolled my s.h.i.+p out on the line one bright, sunny day and I must say that in its s.h.i.+ny new red-and-white paint job and its clean, sweeping lines it certainly was a beautiful sight sitting there glistening in that California suns.h.i.+ne.

A little boy who had crawled over the factory fence despite the "No Trespa.s.sing" sign evidently thought so too, for he was standing there gazing raptly at it with eyes as big as silver dollars when I stalked out toward the s.h.i.+p to make a first test hop in it. He intercepted me neatly as I rounded the wing tip and approached the c.o.c.kpit.

"Ooh, mister," he said, "do you own that s.h.i.+p?"

"No, sonny," I answered. "I merely fly it. I find that that is less expensive and more fun."

CROSS-COUNTRY SNAPSHOTS

I take off from March Field, Calif., head north and climb steeply. At ten thousand feet on the altimeter I see the green fir trees skimming only a couple of hundred feet beneath me. I see the deep snow between their trunks, brilliant in the sun. I am clearing the San Bernardino range.

I come out at ten thousand feet over the Mohave Desert, my altimeter still reading ten thousand feet. The floor of the Mohave is high.

I look ahead to the railroad, thirty miles away. I look behind. The green-sloped, snow-capped Bernardinoes form a backdrop for the desert underneath.

On beyond the railroad, beyond Barstow, into the Granite Mountains, low, rolling, black, barren, lava-formed.

Into the Painted Hills. They are not named that on the map. They are not named at all, and at first I can't believe them. But there they are beneath me. No atmospheric trick. No effect of distance. No subtle color either. They are really painted. There is one over there. It sweeps out of the desert upward into green and ends in a peak of white. There is another, sweeping through purple to red. Others through red to yellow.

It is as if G.o.d had been playing with colored chalks, picking up purple, perhaps, powdering it through his fingers to drop in a purple heap, picking up another color then to drop on top of that in powdered brilliance, powdering then on top of that another color still to form a brilliant, pointed tip. Fantastic, unreal, true!

For a long time now I have seen no life. The brilliant land is barren. I look back. I can still make out where the railroad runs. Far, far behind, the white Bernardinoes rise, low on the horizon now in the distance. It is not a long flight back to the railroad, or even a very long one back to the mountains and over them into the green San Bernardino Valley and March Field. But it is a long walk. It is a long walk back even to the railroad. What if my motor quits? I had intended to go on to Death Valley, just to see it, circle, and return.

I bank reluctantly around and a.s.sume a reverse compa.s.s course for home.

I have seen enough for an afternoon's jaunt, anyway.

REMINISCENCE

I taxi out and turn my s.h.i.+p into the wind at the end of the snow-plowed runway at Hagerstown Airport, Maryland. The white hangar looms too close. Deep snow on the rest of the field prohibits its use. Can I get over the hangar? I give it the gun and try. Just miss the hangar. Too close!

Head off on a compa.s.s course for New York. Strong drift to the right from northwest wind. Head a little more to left.

Blue Ridge Mountains pa.s.s under me. On into the friendly undulating valley country beyond, snow covered.

Gettysburg under my left wing. They were fighting down there once. Hard to believe, looking down on the peaceful fields now. Wonder what they would have done if they could have looked up and seen me and my airplane?

Low hills before the Susquehanna River. Their brown contours reach like dusky fingers out into the snow-filled valleys.

Over the river, and Lancaster off to my left. Reform school there.

That's where they were always going to send me when I was a bad little boy.

More valley country. Ridge-like hills. The Schuylkill River and Norristown. Philadelphia, blue laws, and no movies on Sundays far off to my right.

More valley. The Delaware River. Was.h.i.+ngton crossed the Delaware. I cross it in half a minute.

The Sourland Mountains and Lindbergh's sad white house. I see Flemington and know the trial is going on down there. I remember walking with Lindbergh, ten years ago, from San Antonio, Tex., to Kelly Field, where we were both advanced flying students. "What are you going to do when you graduate?" he asked. "What are you going to do?" I asked him. Yes, what were we going to do? And now he was down there in that courtroom, and the world stretching out around him as far as I could see and much, much farther was a c.o.c.ked ear listening again to his tragedy. And I was circling above in the clean blue sky, remembering many things and thinking.

I shuddered a last long unbelieving look at Lindbergh's empty, lonely house, perched up on its hill, circled and flew on. Half an hour later, on Long Island, I kissed the chubby cheek of my own first-born son in greeting and pitied Lindbergh somewhat for his fame.