TEST PILOT

TEST PILOT

JIMMY COLLINS

THE SUN DIAL PRESS

Garden City — New York

PRINTED AT THE Country Life Press, GARDEN CITY, N. Y., U. S. A.

COPYRIGHT, 1935

BY DELORES LACY COLLINS

COPYRIGHT, 1935

BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

HAPPY LANDINGS

TO

CAPTAIN JOSEPH MEDILL PATTERSON (The News)

GEORGE HORACE LORIMER (Saturday Evening Post)

J. DAVID STERN (New York Post)

for permissions to reprint such parts of this book

as appeared serially in their newspapers

and periodicals.

—THE PUBLISHERS.

FOREWORD

Jimmy Collins used periodically to try to change his name to Jim Collins, but he never could make it stick. There was something about him that made everybody call him Jimmy. He did sign his wonderful article in the Saturday Evening Post about dive testing “Jim Collins,” but his friends kidded him so much about wanting to be a “he-man” that he went back to Jimmy in his articles for the New York Daily News.

The article from the Saturday Evening Post, “Return to Earth,” which is printed in this book, is the most extraordinary flying story I have ever read, and as a newspaper and former magazine editor I have read hundreds of them, from The Red Knight of Germany down.

Jimmy wrote his own stuff—every word of it. Not one line has been added to or taken from any of the stories that appeared in the Daily News. If a story had any unkindness in it, or reflected on any other pilot’s ability, Jimmy omitted or changed the name of the person under reproach.

Jimmy graduated from the army training schools of Brooks and Kelly fields, in the same class as Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh. Collins and Lindbergh were two of the four selected for the pursuit group, which means they were considered to have the greatest ability in their class. Jimmy afterwards became the youngest instructor at Kelly Field.

I was privileged to receive some instruction from Jimmy. He was a fine teacher, making you know precisely what he wanted and why. He told me promptly that I lacked coördination. He said, “Every student lacks coördination, but you lack more of it than any student I ever saw.” In driving a car, you can go forward or backward, left or right. An airplane cannot go backward. It can go forward, right, left, up, down. The coördination that Collins kept talking about meant that when, for instance, you were going up and to the right, you should do it in one perfect arc between the two desired points, not in a wavering line that sometimes bulged and sometimes flattened itself out.

Pretty near any dub can be taught to fly some if he has patience enough and can afford to pay for two or three times as much instruction as the ordinary man gets. But nobody not born for it can learn to fly like Collins. His rhythm and reflexes were like a good orchestra. He was just a natural aviator. He had the wings of an angel all right, and he was more at home, more comfortable, more at peace with himself and the world in the air than he was on the ground, where he sometimes thought himself to be a misfit.

Jimmy talked as well as he wrote, drank less than most aviators, and that’s not so much, and smoked a considerable number of cigarettes.

Until the last couple of years, when the depression and his trade had deepened the lines in his face, he might almost have been called “pretty,” though it would have been better not to say that to him. He had light wavy hair, blue eyes, fine white teeth, smiled a good deal, and as far as his appearance went he could have been a romantic hero in Hollywood.

He was the most fearless man I ever knew. No, I take that back. I have known other aviators whom I considered to be without fear. Collins was as brave as any of them. Even at best, in spite of what its adherents say, flying is not a particularly safe business, and Collins chose the most dangerous branch of it, that is, dive testing. “Return to Earth,” in this book, explains that. He said he did it for the money, which was partly true, but I don’t think entirely so. I think he liked to pull the whiskers of death and see if he could get away with it. Anyhow, he had made a resolution that the dive that killed him should be his last one. Whether he would have kept that resolution, I doubt. I think he liked the thrill of having everybody on the field say, “Jimmy is dive testing a bomber this afternoon.”

The story, as told by McCory, the photographer, who had a desk near to him, is that he said to Collins, “Jimmy, you are making some money now out of your newspaper articles. Why don’t you stop this test racket?” And Collins answered, “I will. I was under contract to do twelve dives on this navy ship, and I have done eleven. The next one is going to be my last.” Then he paused, smiled his bright smile, and said, “At that, it might be.”

—JOSEPH MEDILL PATTERSON

CONTENTS

[TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN]

I am an American citizen. I was born in Warren, O., U. S. A., on April 25, 1904. I am the youngest of the three remaining children of a family of seven. My paternal grandfather came to this country from Ireland. He was a basket weaver by trade and a Protestant by religion. My father was a bricklayer by trade. He died when I was five. My mother, whose people hailed largely from Pennsylvania, scrubbed floors, took in washings, sewed, baked, made handiwork and sold it, worked in restaurants, and so managed, with the help of charity, relatives, and my older sister when she got old enough to help, to send me to grammar school and through two years of high school. Then she died.

I was sixteen. My sister was unable to carry me further. I went to work in the boot-and-shoe department of the Goodrich Rubber Factory at Akron, O.

I worked there a year and found conditions and my prospects intolerable. I applied for permission to work a part shift at night. It was granted. This reduced my income but allowed me to go to school in the daytime.

For three years I worked at night in the factory and went to school by day. I completed my high schooling and a year of college (Akron, O.) in this manner.

Then I applied for entrance to the United States Army Air Service Primary Flying School, was examined, found qualified, and admitted. One hundred and four others were admitted to this same class. Charles A. Lindbergh was one of them. Our status, as well as that of the other 104, was that of an enlisted man with a flying cadet rating.

A year later, in March, 1925, I was one of eighteen who graduated from the Army Advanced Flying School, Kelly Field, San Antonio, Tex. The rest of the 104 had been disqualified during the course, only the eighteen most apt being kept. Of these eighteen who graduated, four had been chosen to specialize in pursuit flying. Lindbergh and myself were two of these four. Upon graduating from the Advanced Flying School, I was discharged from the army, and commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve Flying Service (now Air Corps).

I went back to Akron after getting my commission as a reserve flyer and discovered that there was no market for my newly acquired ability. I tried to get a job as mail pilot with N. A. T. in Cleveland but was told I didn’t have enough experience. I tried to get a job with Martin Airplane Company in Cleveland and couldn’t. I was almost broke. I decided to return to the rubber factories and go back to school the next fall. I got a job with the Goodyear Company, in the factory.

But I couldn’t take it any more. I quit the job in two months and took my one bag and my eighty dollars and went to Columbus, O., where there was a reserve flying field. I flew a couple of weeks there, sleeping in a deserted clubhouse and eating at the gas station across the street. I was earning no money, of course, the ship being available to me for practice only. So I applied for a two weeks’ tour of active duty at Wright Field and got it. I was paid for that. While there I applied for a six months’ tour of active duty at Selfridge Field, and also got that. I was paid an officer’s (second lieutenant) salary on this duty.

At the expiration of the active duty tour at Selfridge I applied for another six months but couldn’t get it because there was no more money available for that purpose, but I was told that there was some cadet money left over and that if I was willing to reënlist as a cadet they could keep me there in that status for another six months. I decided I would try to get on with Ford first, and if that failed to accept the cadet status.

Ford was just getting under way with his tri-motor aviation venture at that time. He had an airplane factory at Dearborn Airport. Selfridge Field is just outside of Detroit, so I moved into Detroit and applied for a job as pilot at Ford’s Dearborn Airport. I was told that the only way I could get on as pilot was first to get a job in the automobile plant, and that I would later be transferred to the airplane plant, and still later to the airline between Detroit and Chicago as pilot. After standing in long lines every morning for a week I finally got a job in the automobile factory. I was given a badge with a number and told to report to such and such a department the next morning.

Early on the morning I was to start work at the Ford factory I got on a street car and started for the plant. I had on work clothes and my badge. Long lines of workers sat on either side of me. Across the aisle another long line sat facing me. They sat with hunched shoulders and vacant faces, dinner pails on their laps, eyes staring lifelessly at nothing. The car lurched and jolted along, and their bodies lurched and jolted listlessly like corpses in it. A sense of unspeakable horror seized me. I had forgotten the rubber factories. Now I remembered them again, but I didn’t remember anything as horrible as this. These men impressed me as things, not men, horribly identical things, degraded, hopeless, lifeless units of some grotesque machines. I felt my identity and my self-respect oozing out of me. I couldn’t become part of that. I couldn’t. Not even for a short time. Not even long enough to get into the airplane factory and then to become pilot. Not even for that. I wouldn’t. Not for anything. Life was too short. Even cadet status in the army was better. I got off the car at the factory. I watched the men file into the factory. I shuddered across the street. I caught the next car back to town. It was like getting away from a prison I had almost been put into. I went out to Selfridge Field and enlisted as a cadet.

I began to think. What would I do when the six months was up? Go back to Akron, the factories, and school? I couldn’t stand the thought of the factories. A college degree wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, I would drop out of aviation. But how? Stay in aviation? Stay in the army? How? As an enlisted man? I didn’t like that thought. As an officer? It would be difficult to get a regular commission, and even so, where would I get in the army? Go outside and take my chances? The outside was a cold unfriendly place. I was afraid of it by then. Your percentage chance was small outside. The army was warm and secure. O. K. I’d try to get a commission.

Two months after my sudden decision not to work in a factory I passed my army exams and got my commission. But unfortunately I began to read. I had made up my mind to get the equivalent of a liberal college degree by reading. And I accidentally ran across Bernard Shaw. I was twenty-one years old. All my life I had been keenly aware of contradictions in life all around me, and all my life they had worried me and I had wrestled with them, attempting to resolve them in my own way. Shaw opened a whole new world to me which I explored eagerly. I was transferred to Brooks Field, Tex., as an instructor. I had a lot of fine times. I continued to read Shaw. The idea of socialism struck me immediately as eminently just. I agreed with the wrong of capitalism. I had already thrown over religion. But I remember that the whole experience left me unsatisfied. The question of what to do about it kept arising in my mind. And I remember the inadequacy I felt for the only implied answer in Shaw’s works I could find, that to preach was the answer, and hope that the other preachers in other generations would take up the good work, until some hazy future generation, in the dim and distant, the beautiful, and perfect beyond, would benefit from the preaching and start living by it—or maybe it would just happen gradually, evolutionarily, as lungs develop out of gills.

By 1928 I was still in the air corps, instructing, and reading Shaw. Early in that year I was transferred from Brooks Field, San Antonio, Tex., to March Field, Riverside, Calif., and again assigned to work as instructor. I considered myself a Socialist by then. I also considered myself a pacifist. To find one’s self a convinced Socialist and a pacifist and at the same time a professional soldier, at the age of twenty-four, places one, if one is conscientious, as I was, in a considerable dilemma.

In the days when I was instructing army flyers and reading socialism I still had something that I fondly and innocently called morals, an evil left-over from my early and vigorous religious upbringing. So I decided that the only moral thing I could do was to get out of the army. Several other practical considerations supported my “morality” in this decision. One was the fact that I had had four years of military training as an aviator. The other was the fact that Lindbergh had flown to Paris, and, as a result of the stimulus that aviation received from the publicity given Lindbergh upon his return, there existed a commercial market for my flying ability, in which I could at that time sell that ability for a much higher wage than the army was paying me for it.

Accordingly I resigned my commission in the Air Corps in April, 1928, and accepted a job as airplane and engine inspector for the newly found aeronautic branch of the Department of Commerce, and, after a little schooling at Washington on the nature of my new duties, and after flying Secretary McCracken on a long tour around the country, I was assigned the charge of the Metropolitan area and headquartered at Roosevelt Field.

I found the post very uncongenial because I found myself with no assistant, swamped with more work than I could adequately have handled even with a couple of assistants, and because there was too much paper work and office work and too little flying. So, six months later, after receiving a pay raise and a letter of commendation, I resigned from the department and I took a job with Curtiss Flying Service, which I found much more congenial because it was almost purely a flying job.

My work there soon attracted the attention of the Curtiss Airplane and Motor Company, and I was asked to become their chief test pilot, which I did in November, 1928.

I worked for them for six months, mostly on military stuff, and when I resigned to take what I thought was going to be a better job, I was asked to stay on with them.

For almost a year after that I was vice president of a little aviation corporation. The company didn’t do well. The depression was in full swing. I didn’t agree with the company policies. Early in 1930 I resigned.

After my resignation from the vice presidency of the aviation concern I did private flying—flying for private owners of aircraft, rich men—and I experienced wide gaps of unemployment between jobs. But since I left the army I had been reading and thinking about “social” matters. I ran across the “radical” press in New York. I began reading Walter Duranty in the Times. I read books on Russia. I fought against the idea of communism. It seemed stupid and crude to me. But step by step—I stubbornly fought all the way—the beautifully clear logic of communism broke down all my barriers, and I was forced to admit to myself that the Bolsheviks had the only complete and effective answer to the riddle of the world I lived in.

I began to consider myself a Communist. My bourgeois friends, and they ranged from the very elite to the petty, thought I was nuts. I, in turn, thought they were unreasonable and talked myself blue in the face trying to convince them of it. I became quite a parlor pink. It took me a couple of years to realize the futile ridiculousness of my antics, of attempting to turn the bourgeoisie to communism. It took me that long because I didn’t at first grasp the full implications of the class basis of my convictions and did not realize that, like a fish out of water, I was a born and bred proletarian justified by peculiar circumstances with a position of isolation from my class and with contact with an alien class.

And when that realization began to dawn on me—dimly at first—the question of what to do about it again arose in my mind.

I pondered the matter a long time. I was already over the romantic notion that the thing to do was to go to Russia, as I had had a spell of thinking. I sensed that that, in a way, would be running away. It occurred to me to join the party, but I didn’t know exactly how to go about it or even if I could. I furthermore didn’t get a very clear picture of just what good I could do even if I did. I was also, having got married and begun a family in the meantime, pretty much absorbed in personal adjustment and just the plain economic details necessary to existence.

It finally occurred to me that I could do something for the radical cause right where I was, in aviation, instead of going to Russia. But what? And how? I didn’t know. I decided that there were undoubtedly people in the party who did. If you want to build a house, go to an architect. If you want to build an airplane, go to an aeronautical engineer. If you want to build a revolutionary organization, go to a revolutionary leader. It was a naïve but a direct, an honest, and a logical method of reasoning, you must admit. So I found out from the Daily Worker where headquarters was and went down.

I felt a little ridiculous and abashed when I got there. I sensed, rather than reasoned, that I was suspected because of my approach. It didn’t bother me enough to stop me, because I was sincere, but it did embarrass me.

Shortly after that, at Roosevelt, I accidentally ran across a mimeographed four-page paper, the organ of a club of aviation students. I picked it up and idly began reading it. It sat me bolt upright in my chair. It expressed everything that I felt. I had thought I was an exception, that nobody else in the whole game felt as I did about economic, social, and political matters. But this paper indicated that I wasn’t a complete exception. It excited me terrifically. I noted the name of the paper and the name of the club that had issued it. I had never before heard of either one. I ran around madly asking everybody I knew what the club was, where it was, who it was. I couldn’t find out much, but I did find where the club rooms were and when meetings were held. I went down to the next meeting. I joined up.

Out of that organization grew another, on a broader basis, planned to move adequately to meet the needs of the workers as a whole in the industry, which was still small, and of which I was an active member.

Word of my organizing activities with this group got around to my boss, and that, together with other things, was the reason for my being fired from my job of private pilot for a certain very rich man.

After being discharged for radical activity by my rich boss I learned discretion, which, somebody said long ago, is the better part of valor. And I did not lose my valor: I continued to work with the disapproved group. But I was out of a job, and I had a wife and two small children to support. I had also learned a few things, so that I knew them now utterly, and not only intellectually, as I did a while ago. One of them is the class basis of my convictions. I began inquiring, and I learned that I was the only pilot of my training and experience that I knew of who had a working-class background. All others that I knew, and also a good many mechanics, had middle-class background. That accounted for the different way I saw things.

I was now face to face with a peculiar problem. Unemployment was rampant in this industry as in every other. In looking for a job, I discovered that the Chinese government (Nationalist-Nanking and Canton) was looking for a few men. I submitted qualifications to a high-ranking Chinese in this country and was answered by him that owing to my military and testing experience I was eminently qualified, and that he would set machinery in motion immediately to get me a job. China, of course, was very busy building up a Nationalist air force. I would be used as an adviser in their school and factories.

But I was a Communist. Would the Chinese Nationalist Air Force, which I would be helping to build up, be used against the Chinese Soviets? Against the U. S. S. R.? And still I must earn a living. What if several prospects I had for jobs failed to materialize before the Chinese proposition did? Should I or should I not go? If I went, what rôle should I play? How dangerous would my position be? Would I be of more value here, now that our organizational efforts were bearing fruit? And so on did the questions in my mind run.

At that time my wife and two small children were on the farm with my mother-in-law and father-in-law in Oklahoma. What should I do?

[RETURN TO EARTH]

I was sitting around the restaurant at Roosevelt Field Hotel with the rest of the unemployed pilots, smoking, talking, sipping the eternal cup of coffee, hoping that something would turn up, when the phone rang and the girl who answered it called for me.

“It’s long distance,” she added as I brushed past her on my way out to take the call, and I couldn’t help running the rest of the way. I had put in word at a factory some time ago if anything turned up to let me know. Maybe my luck was changing.

“Hello,” I said eagerly as I grabbed the receiver, and before the familiar voice on the other end told me I knew I was talking to the guy who hired the pilots for the company.

“I’ve got a job for you,” he announced, “demonstrating one of our new airplanes for the navy.”

“What kind of a demonstration?” I asked warily.

“A dive demonstration,” he said. I knew what that meant all right. Ten thousand feet straight down, just to see if it would hang together. I wasn’t so sure my luck was changing after all.

“What kind of a ship?” I asked. I hoped it wasn’t too experimental. I had dived airplanes before. The last one, six years before, I had dived to pieces. I still remembered the exploding crack of those wings tearing off. I remember the dazing blow of the instrument board as my head had snapped forward against it from the sudden lurch of the midair failure, and dimly then the slow, limp slumping into unconsciousness. I remembered how I had come to, thousands of feet later, and leaped my way clear, only to be threatened by the falling wreck on top and the rushing-at-me earth beneath. I remembered the tumbling, jerking stop as my chute had opened after the long drop, and how startlingly close the ground had looked. I remembered how white and safe against the blue sky those billowing folds of that chute had looked, and then immediately the awful heart-pound, breath-stop fear that that milling wreck would take a derelict pass at it. I remembered the acute relief of hearing the loud report that told me the wreck had hit the ground, and then the “What if that had clutched me!” when they told me afterward how close it really had come.

“It’s a bomber fighter, second model, first-production job, a single-seater biplane with a seven-hundred-horsepower engine,” the man at the other end said. That was encouraging anyway. It wasn’t the experimental job.

I had heard that another free-lance test pilot like myself had recently jumped out of a ship he had been diving. His prop had broken and torn his motor clear out of his ship. He had got down with his chute all right, but he had hit the fin as he had gone past the tail surfaces getting out of the wreck. He had broken a couple of legs and an arm and was in the hospital at that moment. I knew he had been doing some diving.

I wondered why they didn’t use one of their own men. They had a very fine staff of test pilots right there at the factory. “What’s wrong with your pilots?” I asked.

“Well, to be frank about it,” was the answer, “while we really don’t expect any trouble with this ship, because we have taken every possible precaution that we know about, still, you never can tell. Our chief test pilot now, you know, has done seven of these dive demonstrations. We feel that that is about enough to ask one man to do on a salary, and he feels that he has had about enough anyway. None of the rest of our men have ever done any of this work before. Besides, why should we take a chance on breaking up our organization if we can call a free lance in?” So that was it! After all, why shouldn’t they look at it that way?

I thought of the already long absence of my family. My wife and my year-and-a-half-old son and my half-year-old daughter were still on my father-in-law’s farm in Oklahoma, where I had sent them in the spring to make sure they would be able to eat during the summer. If I could make enough money——

“How much is there in it for me?” I asked.

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” he said. “If the job takes longer than ten days we will pay you an additional thirty-five dollars a day. We will insure your life for fifteen thousand dollars for the duration of the demonstrations and provide for disability compensation. We will also pay your expenses, of course. So, if you are still free, white, and twenty-one—” His voice trailed off, posing the question.

“Well, I’m still free and white,” I answered, “but I am no longer twenty-one. I’m thirty now, you know. Old enough to know better. But I’ll take your job.”

“We will wire you as soon as the ship is ready,” he said and hung up.

I came back to the gang at the table. They were still sipping their coffee, smoking, talking, and undoubtedly hoping for an odd job to come in.

“I’ve got a job,” I announced, beaming.

“What kind of a job?” they all piped up.

“Diving one of the new fighters for the navy,” I replied as casually as I could.

“Boy, you can have it!” they chorused.

“I’ve got it,” I snapped. “And anyway,” I added, “I won’t be dropping dead of starvation around here this winter.”

They razzed me for a while, and I razzed them back. They wanted to know what kind of flowers I wanted. I wanted to know if they were planning on just breakfast or just dinner when they got down to that one meal a day this winter.

After a while, as soon as my elation in contemplation of the fifteen hundred bucks wore off, I didn’t feel so cocky. I really might get bumped off in that crate. Maybe I could have got by without taking the job.

I remembered that dive of six years before. It had been different then. It hadn’t occurred to me at that time that airplanes would fall apart. Oh, I knew they would. I knew they had. It was something, however, that had happened to other test pilots and might happen to some more, but not to me.

I remembered the times I had jumped, startled wide awake from sleep in the nights, not immediately after that failure, but some months later. No special dreams of horror. Just the delayed action of some subterranean mechanism of fright in my subconscious brain. I had been honestly convinced during my waking hours up to that time that that failure had not made much of an impression on me.

I remembered the subconscious fear of just normal excess speed that had grown on me since then. I wouldn’t nose an airplane down very much from level cruising speed and open the throttle coming in from a cross-country, for instance. A couple of times when I had done it without thinking, I had found myself practically bending the throttle backwards to kill the speed when I had suddenly become aware of it.

These things convinced me that that failure had made a deeper impression on me than I had thought. I realized it the more when I contemplated these new dives I was about to do. I knew I was more afraid of them than I would admit.

“Death in the Afternoon, or Reunion in Oklahoma,” I thought. You’ve got to take some chances. I didn’t see how I was going to get the money to bring the family back any other way.

Besides, I thought I could beat the game by being smart. I knew a lot of boys who hadn’t been able to, and I knew they had had good heads on their shoulders.

Two weeks later I stepped out of a taxi in front of the hangar at the airport. Some experimental military airplanes were sitting outside. It was good to see military airplanes again. There is something about military airplanes—something businesslike.

I entered the hangar office. The engineers were waiting for me. I knew most of them from working with them before. They were all still just pink-faced kids. But I knew they were bright kids. They knew their stuff and had all had quite a lot of experience.

They greeted me with a queer sort of smile on their faces, the way you greet somebody you know is being played for a sucker. Maybe they were right. Undoubtedly they were. But I resented that smile in a mild sort of way.

Bill was there. I had known Bill since before he had become their chief test pilot. He had that same queer smile on his face.

“Hey, Bill,” I said to him, greeting him with a quizzical smile answering his own, “why don’t you dive this funny airplane?”

“I got smart and chiseled my way out of this one,” he said.

“It is a sap’s game,” I agreed with him. “But starvation is dangerous too.” He laughed, and we all laughed.

He studied me for a minute. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years. Finally he said soberly, “You’ve grown older, Jim.”

“Yeah, I’ve grown older, Bill,” I answered him banteringly, “and I want to grow a lot older too. I want to have a nice long white beard trailing out in the slip stream some day. So I hope you guys are building good airplanes for diving. By the way, let’s go out in the hangar and take a look at the crate. After all, I’m mildly interested in it, you know.”

We all went out into the hangar. There was the ship, suspended from a chain hoist with its wheels just off the cement in the middle of a large cleared area. It was silver and gleamed even in the somewhat darkened interior. It looked sturdy and squat and bulldoggish, as only a military fighting ship can. I was glad it looked sturdy.

A group of mechanics were swarming around it and over it and under it. They all looked up as we approached the ship. I knew most of them. I was introduced to the others. You could see that they felt toward that ship as a brood hen feels toward her eggs. They didn’t want me to break it. I didn’t want to break it either.

I walked around the ship and looked it over. The engineers pointed out special features and talked metal construction and forged fittings and stress analysis and safety factors, and I asked questions. I was fascinated by the wires that braced the wings. They looked big enough to hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. I liked those wires.

I learned that a pilot had been up there and had gone over the whole stress analysis with them and had recommended only one little change in the ship, which had been made. I learned that he had expressed willingness to dive the ship after that, but that he had been unable to because another job he had contracted to do some time previously was coming up at the same time this one was. I was glad to hear this man had gone over the ship. He was not only one of the most, if not the most, competent test pilots in the country, but also a very good engineer, which I was not.

I crawled into the cockpit. There were more gadgets in it. Something for everything except putting wings back on in the air. The racket had changed, I decided. In the old days, dive demonstrating hadn’t been so accurate a thing. You took a ship up and did a good dive with it and came down and everybody was happy. But now, as I could see, they had developed a lot of recording as well as indicating instruments. You used to be able to get away with something. You couldn’t get away with anything now. They could take a look at all those trick instruments after you had come down and tell just what you had done. They could tell accurately and didn’t have to take your word for it.

There was one instrument there, for instance, that the pilot couldn’t see. It was called a vee-gee recorder. It made a pattern on a smoked glass of about the size of one of those paper packets of matches. This pattern told them, after the pilot had come down, just how fast he had dived, what kind of a dive he had made, and what kind of a pull-out he had done.

There was another instrument there that I had never seen before. It looked something like a speedometer and was called an accelerometer. I was soon to find out what that was for! Oh, they told me what it was for then. They explained everything in the cockpit to me, and I sat there and familiarized myself with it as best I could on the ground before taking the ship out. But I wasn’t really to find out what that accelerometer was for until I used it. And did I find out then!

We rolled the ship out that afternoon, after last-minute adjustments had been made on it—an airplane is like a woman that way: it always has to have last-minute adjustments—and I made a familiarization flight in it. I just took it off and flew it around at first. Then I began feeling it out. I rocked it and horsed it and yanked it and pulled it and watched. I watched the wires, the wings, the tail. Any unusual flexing? Abnormal vibration? Any flutter? I brought the ship down and had it inspected that night.

The next day I did the same thing. But I went a little bit further this time. I built up some speed. I did shallow dives. I listened and felt and watched. I did steeper dives. Anything unusual?

This went on for several days. Some minor changes and adjustments were made. Finally I said I was ready to start the official demonstrations, and the official naval observers were called out to watch.

I did five speed dives first. These were to demonstrate that the ship would dive to terminal velocity. Contrary to popular opinion, a falling object will not go faster and faster and faster and faster. It will go faster and faster only up to a certain point. That point is reached when the object creates by its own passage through the air enough air resistance to that passage to equal in pounds the weight of the object. When that point is reached, the object will not fall any faster, no matter how much longer it falls. It is said to be at terminal velocity. A diving airplane is only a falling object, but it is a highly streamlined one, and therefore capable of a very high terminal velocity. A man falling through the air cannot attain a speed greater than about a hundred and twenty miles an hour. But the terminal velocity of an airplane is a lot more than that.

I led up to it carefully. I went to fifteen thousand feet to start the first dive. The ship dove smooth and steady. I pulled out at three hundred miles an hour and climbed back up to do the next dive. I dove to three hundred and twenty miles an hour this time. Everything was fine. Everything was fine as far as I could tell, but when I had eased out of the dive I brought the ship down for inspection before I did the next two dives.

I did the next two dives to three hundred and forty miles an hour and three hundred and sixty. I lost seven thousand feet in the last one. It had me casting the old fish eye around to see if everything was holding before I got through it. Everything held, but I brought the ship down for inspection again before the final speed dive.

I went to eighteen thousand feet for the final one. It was cold up there, and the sky was very blue. I lined all up facing down wind and found myself checking everything very methodically. Was I in high pitch? Was the mixture rich? Was the landing gear folded tightly? Was the stabilizer rolled? Was the rudder tab adjusted? I was a little extra methodical and extra deliberate. I knew that my mind wasn’t normally clear. I was breathing harder than usual. It was the altitude. There wasn’t enough oxygen. I was a little groggy.

I was a little worried about my ears. I had always had to blow my ears out when just normally losing altitude. I had funny ears like that that wouldn’t adjust themselves. I might break an eardrum.

I eased the throttle back, rolled the ship over in a half roll, and stuck her down. I felt the dead, still drop of the first part of the dive. I saw the air-speed needle race around its dial, heard the roaring of the motor mounting and the whistle of the wires rising, and felt the increasing stress and stiffness of the gathering speed. I saw the altimeter winding up—winding down, rather! Down to twelve thousand feet now. Eleven and a half. Eleven. I saw the air-speed needle slowing down its racing on its second lap around the dial. I heard the roaring motor whining now, and the whistling wires screaming, and felt the awful racking of the terrific speed. I glanced at the air-speed needle. It was barely creeping around the dial. It was almost once and a half around and was just passing the three-eighty mark. I glanced at the altimeter. It was really winding up now! The sensitive needle was going around and around. The other needle read ten thousand, nine and a half, nine. I looked at the air-speed needle. It was standing still. It read three ninety-five. You could feel it was terminal velocity. You could feel the lack of acceleration. You could hear it too. You could hear the motor at a peak whine, holding it. You could hear the wires at a peak scream, holding it. I checked the altimeter. Eight and a half. At eight I would pull out.

Suddenly something shifted on the instrument board and something hit me in the face. I sickeningly remembered that dazing smack on the head of six years before, and the old electric startle shock convulsed me as I remembered the resounding crack of those wings tearing off. I involuntarily took a fear-glazed glance at my wings and instinctively tightened up on the stick and began to ease out of the dive. Through the half-daze pull-out and the dawning ice-cold clearness always aftermathing fright I dimly checked the trouble while I leveled out. When I had got level and got things quieted down and my head had cleared I saw that I was right. Only the glass cover had vibrated off the manifold-pressure instrument, and the needle had popped off the dial. I was thoroughly shaken. And I was mad because I had allowed so little a thing to upset me so much.

I checked my altimeter. It read five thousand feet. I figured I had dived eleven thousand and taken two for recovery.

My ears had a lot of pressure on them. I held both nostrils and blew. The pressure inside popped my ears out easily. They were going to stand the diving all right.

I brought the ship down to be inspected that night and decided to celebrate the successful conclusion of the long dive. Cirrus clouds were forming high up in the blue sky, so I figured maybe I could do it safely. I went up to the weather bureau on the field to check on it.

“How is the weather for tomorrow?” I asked. “Terrible, I hope.”

“I think it will be,” the weather man said. He consulted his charts further. “Yes, it will be,” he assured me.

“Definitely?” I pressed him.

He looked his charts over again. “Yes,” he reassured me, “definitely. You won’t be able to fly tomorrow.”

“Swell!” I exclaimed to the mildly startled man. He didn’t quite get it.

It was lousy the next morning, all right. You couldn’t see across the field. Even the birds were walking. The engineers were dismayed. They wanted to get on with the demonstrations. I was overjoyed. I had a head. I had celebrated a little too much.

Along about the middle of the morning it began to lift. The engineers began to cheer up. I watched with gathering apprehension while it lifted still further and began to break. In an incredibly short time there were only a few clouds in the sky. I was practically sick about it, but the engineers, with beaming faces, were having the ship pushed out.

I went up to the field lunch wagon to get a cup of coffee while the mechanics warmed up the ship.

I went back down to the hangar and crawled into the ship to do the first two of the next set of five dives. These were to demonstrate pull-outs instead of speed. Here was where I found out what the accelerometer was for.

I knew that the accelerometer was to indicate the force of the pull-outs. I knew that it indicated them in terms of g, or gravity. I knew that in level flight it registered one g, which meant, among other things, that I was being pulled into my seat with a force equal to my own weight, or one hundred and fifty pounds. I knew that when I pulled out of a dive, the centrifugal force of the pull-out would push the g reading up in exactly the same proportion that it would pull me down into my seat. I knew that I had to pull out of a ten-thousand-foot dive hard enough to push the g reading up to nine, and pull me down into my seat with a force equal to nine times my own weight, or thirteen hundred and fifty pounds. I knew that that would put a considerable stress on the airplane, and that that was the reason the Navy wanted me to do it; they wanted to see if it could take it. But what I didn’t know was that it would put such a terrific stress on me. I had no idea what a nine g pull-out meant to the pilot.

I decided to start the dives out at three hundred miles an hour and increase each succeeding dive in increments of twenty miles an hour for the first four dives, as I had in the speed dives. I decided to pull out of the first dive to five and a half g, and pull out of each succeedingly faster dive one g harder, until I had pulled out of the fourth dive of three hundred and sixty miles an hour to eight and a half g. Then I would do the grand dive of ten thousand feet to terminal velocity and pull out to nine g.

I took off and went up to fifteen thousand feet and stuck her down to three hundred miles an hour. I horsed back on the stick and watched the accelerometer. Up she went, and down into my seat I went. Centrifugal force, like some huge invisible monster, pushed my head down into my shoulders and squashed me into that seat so that my backbone bent and I groaned with the force of it. It drained the blood from my head and started to blind me. I watched the accelerometer through a deepening haze. I dimly saw it reach five and a half. I eased up on the stick, and the last thing I saw was the needle starting back to one. I was blind as a bat. I was dizzy as a coot. I looked out at my wings on both sides. I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see anything. I watched where the ground ought to be. Pretty soon it began to show up like something looming out of a morning mist. My sight was returning, due to the eased pressure from letting up on the stick. Soon I could see clearly again. I was level, and probably had been for some time. But my head was hot with a queer sort of burning sensation, and my heart was pounding like a water ram.

“How am I going to do a nine-g pull-out if I am passing out on five and a half?” I thought. I decided that I had held it too long and that I would get the next reading quicker and release it sooner, so I wouldn’t be under the pressure so long.

I noticed that my head was completely cleared from the night before. I didn’t know whether it was the altitude or the pull-out. One or the other, or both, I decided, was good for hang-overs.

I climbed back to fifteen thousand feet and stuck her down to three hundred and twenty miles an hour. I horsed back quick on the stick this time. I overshot six and a half and hit seven before I released it. I could feel my guts being sucked down as I fought for sight and consciousness, but the quicker pull and the earlier release worked, and I was able to read the instruments at the higher g.

I brought the ship down for inspection. Everything was all right. I went back up again and did the next two. They sure did flatten me out, but the ship took it fine. I brought it down for a thorough inspection that night.

I felt like I had been beaten. My eyes felt like somebody had taken them out and played with them and put them back in again. I was droopy tired and had sharp shooting pains in my chest. My back ached, and that night I blew my nose and it bled. I was a little worried about that nine-g business.

The next morning was one of those crisp, golden autumn days. The sky was as blue as indigo and as clear as a mountain stream. One of those good days to be alive.

To my surprise, I felt fine. “Those pull-outs must be a tonic,” I thought.

I went out to do the terminal-velocity dive with the nine-g pull-out. I found that the last dive I had done the day before had flattened out the fairing on the belly of the ship. The sudden change of attitude of the ship in the eight-and-a-half g pull-out had pushed the belly up against that pretty solid three-hundred-and-sixty-mile-an-hour blast of air and crushed the metal bracings that held the belly fairing in shape as neatly as if you had gone over it with a steam roller. It was not a structural part of the ship, however, as far as strength went, and could be repaired that day. They decided to beef up the bracings when they repaired it.

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 cockpit. 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 passing 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 clustered 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 hell 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 altitude. 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 cockpit and was floating around in space 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 damned near the finish. Besides, although I am not superstitious, 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 spaced 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 cluster around his almost legendary name, live on.

Dick 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 altitude. 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 altitude 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 altitude 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.

[IMAGINATION]

A friend of mine got an aërial mapping job last summer. He had to fly at twenty thousand feet to take the pictures. Some pilots can stand more altitude 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 ship. 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 ship 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 altitude, being very scientific. I finally spun it in from an altitude of about three feet. And I mean spun it in too. The ship 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 ship. 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 ship 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 ship 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 ship 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 ship 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 ship 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 Japan 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 aërial circus. He had a contract with the fair association of that town, giving him exclusive rights to all the passenger 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 passenger 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 association 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 association 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 ship, got in his cockpit, 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 ship?”

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, coördinate, 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.”

“Yeah, Jack,” I said, “but—” I hesitated: this was too good not to emphasize—“but I missed,” I said.

Jack just glared at me. There wasn’t any answer.

[DEATH ON THE GRIDIRON]

It’s funny how things turn out sometimes. Fate gives you a capricious little tweak, and there you are. I often think of the case of Zep Schock.

Zep and I were fraternity brothers at college. I was crazy about aviation, and Zep was crazy about football. I had been too poor to fly up till then, and Zep had been too little to play football. He weighed only about ninety-five pounds when he came to college. They had even used him as a sort of a mascot on the high-school teams.

Near the end of my freshman year I discovered quite accidentally, through reading an aviation magazine which I had repeatedly promised myself not to read because it took my mind off my work, that the army would teach me to fly for nothing. They would even pay me for it! And Zep suddenly started to grow.

I passed my entrance examinations for the Army Primary Flying School at Brooks Field, San Antonio, Tex., that fall, and prepared to quit school after the mid-term exams—which would mark the end of my freshman year, because I had started college in January instead of March—to go to flying school the following March. Zep had made the freshman football team in the meantime.

There wasn’t much flying outside of the army in those days, and nobody knew much about it except that it was dangerous. None of the fellows could understand why I was doing such a fool thing. They tried to talk me out of it, discovered they couldn’t, decided I was nuts, and started kidding me. Zep was the best of the bunch.

Every night at dinner he used to propose a toast to me. “Here’s to Jimmy Collins,” he used to say. “The average life of the aviator is forty hours.” He had picked those figures up some place reading about war pilots.

That was eleven years ago, and I’m still flying. Poor Zep made the regular team the next year and got killed playing football.

[NOVICE NEAR DEATH]

One flight test I gave, when I was an inspector for the Department of Commerce, was almost my last.

I went up with a guy, saw in three minutes he couldn’t fly, took the controls away from him, landed, and told him to come back some other day. He pleaded with me that I hadn’t given him a chance, that if I would only let him go further through the test without taking the controls away he would show me he could fly.

So I took him up again. I let him slop along without interference until we came to spins. I told him to do a spin, and he started a steep spiral. I took the controls away from him, regained some altitude, told him to do a spin again, and he started a steep spiral again—a lousy spiral, too!

I thought maybe he was afraid to do a spin, so I said the mental equivalent of “Skip it” to myself and told him to do a three-sixty. He should have gone to fifteen hundred feet, cut the gun, turned around once in his glide and landed on a spot under where he had cut the gun. He went to two thousand feet instead, put the ship in a steep, skidding spiral verging on a spin—he was death on steep spirals—and held it there. Round and round we went. I let him go. I wanted to convince him this time.

I had been watching for it, but at two hundred feet the ship beat me to it even so and flipped right over on its back. I made one swift movement, knocking the throttle open with my left hand in passing, and grabbed the stick with both hands. The guy was frantically freezing backward on it, but my sudden, violent attack on it gave me the lead on him and I managed to get the stick just far enough forward to stop the spin we had begun. I was sure we were going to hit the ground swooping out of the resultant dive, but by some miracle we missed it.

I landed immediately and was so mad I started to walk off without saying anything. But the guy followed me, bleating, “Please, Mr. Collins. Please, Mr. Collins,” until I relented and turned to speak.

Before I could say anything he broke in on me with: “Please, Mr. Collins, please don’t grab the controls from me like that just because I make one too many turns. I could bring the ship down all right.”

My mouth opened and closed speechlessly. Bring it down! Bring us both down in a heap! But how could I say it and make myself understood? The guy didn’t even know we had been in a spin. He didn’t know we had almost broken our necks in one. He thought I was impatient!

[HUNGRY’S SHIP BURNED]

Lieutenant Hungry Gates’ ship caught fire in the air. He pulled his throttle and worked carefully but fast. He undid his belt and started to raise himself out of the cockpit. He started to leap but remembered something. That swell bottle of pre-war liquor that a friend had given him just before he took off was in the map case. He’d need that if he got down alive. He made a quick grab back into the cockpit for it and leaped head foremost, clear of the burning wreck.

He missed the tail surfaces and waited a moment, thankful for that much. He didn’t want the ship to fall on him. He didn’t want any of the burning débris to fall on his chute when he opened it.

When he had waited long enough, he started to pull his rip cord to open his chute, but discovered both hands already engaged. He let go of the bottle of liquor with his right hand and hugged the bottle tightly with his left arm. He grabbed his rip-cord ring with his freed right hand, yanked hard, grabbed his bottle to him with both hands again, and waited. The sudden checking of his speed when his chute opened jolted him up short in his harness, but he didn’t drop the bottle.

He thought of the flaming wreck above him. He looked up but saw only his white chute spread safely above him, etched cold against the clear blue sky. He looked around the sky. He saw a long trailing column of black smoke and followed it with his eyes downward until he saw the hurtling ship at the end of it. It was beneath him now and no longer a threat to his chute. He watched it nose violently into a wooded patch off to his left just before he settled down into a pasture. He hit hard, fell down, but held on to his bottle. His chute toppled over into a limp heap in the still air.

He sat up and decided he needed a drink before he even got out of his harness to gather up his chute. He hauled his bottle out from under his arm and gazed at it in consternation, licking his lips.

It wasn’t a bottle at all. It was the fire extinguisher!

[BACK-SEAT PALS]

Back-seat driving is taboo in the ethics of the flying game. But occasionally you get a case of it when you get two pilots together in the same cockpit.

Two pilots were flying a pretty heavily loaded bomber on a cross-country trip, one time. They were both fast friends and both equally good pilots. Maybe that’s why the thing happened as it did.

They landed at Love Field, Tex., gassed up, and taxied out to take off again. Part of the field was torn up. They didn’t have any more field than just enough from where they began their take-off.

Their heavily loaded ship with its two Liberty motors, its acres of wings, and its forest of struts started lumbering down the field. The pilot who was flying the ship used most of the space in front of his obstacles before he got the ship off the ground. He did a nice job after he got it off the ground by not climbing it more than just enough to clear the wires which were in front of him. He figured he was just going to clear them nicely when apparently the other pilot, sitting alongside him in the other cockpit, figured he wasn’t although why the other pilot did what he did at that second I could never figure out, except that it was one of those dumb things that we are all apt to do under duress if we don’t watch ourselves.

Anyway, both motors suddenly quit cold, and the ship smacked into the wires and piled up in a heap on the far side of the road across the airport.

Both pilots came out of the wreck running. The one who had been flying the ship had the wheel, which evidently had broken off in the crash, raised above his head in his right hand. He was brandishing it wildly, running after the other pilot and shouting at the top of his voice, “Cut my switches, will you! Cut my switches just when I was going to make it! If I ever catch you I’ll cut your throat!”

[WATCH YOUR STEP!]

At Anacostia Naval Air Station, the river flows on one side of the hangars, and the airport stretches on the other. They fly boats out of the river side and land planes out of the airport side.

One pilot down there had been flying land planes exclusively for several months. Then one day he flew a boat. One of the enlisted pilots went along with him as co-pilot.

After flying around for a while he started in for a landing. But instead of coming in for a landing on the river he started to land on the airport.

The enlisted pilot with him let him go as long as he thought he dared. Then he nudged him in the ribs, pointed out that he was about to land a boat on land, and suggested that maybe it would be a better idea to go over and land in the river.

The pilot agreed that it certainly would. He gave it the gun and went around again and came in for a landing on the river. He made a good landing and let the ship slow down. When they were idling along he turned around to the enlisted pilot and started to apologize for almost landing him on land. He undid his belt as he talked.

“That was a dumb thing for me to do,” he said. “I’ve been flying land planes for so long that I guess I just started coming in there from habit without thinking. It sure was dumb.” He was obviously humiliated and confused.

“Well,” he said finally, “it sure was dumb,” and got up and climbed out of the cockpit onto the wing.

“So long,” he said, and stepped down off the wing into the water.

[FLYER ENJOYS WORRY]

Gloomy Gus got his name at Brooks Field, the army primary flying school. He was always going to get washed out of the school the next day. When he graduated from Brooks he wasn’t going to last three weeks at Kelly, the advanced school, because he had got through Brooks by luck anyway. When he graduated from Kelly, the hottest pilot in his class, he would never get a job in commercial flying, so he might just as well have been washed out at Kelly.

I saw him several months later in Chicago. He was flying one of the best runs on the western division of the mail. He was sure it wouldn’t be very long before he cracked up, night flying, and disabled himself for life, so what good was his mail job?

I saw him several years after he had been transferred to the eastern run over the Allegheny Mountains. He didn’t know what good the additional money he was making was going to do him when he was dead. Didn’t all the hot pilots get it in those mountains?

He took a vacation from the passenger lines and went on active duty with the army. I saw him at Mitchell Field. He said he was taking his vacation flying because he wanted to fly some army ships for a change and have some fun. “But you know, I shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “I’ve been flying straight and level too long. I almost hit a guy in formation this morning. I probably won’t live long enough to get back to the lines.”

I saw him a few days after he had gone back to the lines.

“How they going, Gloomy?” I greeted him.

“Oh,” he said, “that bit of army flying made me careless. I almost hit a radio tower this morning. Carelessness is what kills all old-timers, you know.”

“Gus,” I said. “You’d be miserable if you didn’t have something to worry about. You will probably live to have a long white beard and worry yourself sick all day long that you are going to trip on it and break your neck.”

Only a faint flicker of humor lit up his gloomy eyes.

[WEATHER AND WHITHER]

Archer Winsten writes that “different” column in the Post, In the Wake of the News. I met Archer for the first time in San Antonio in 1927. He was down there for his health, and I was instructing at Brooks Field for my living. We both had ideas of writing even at that time. We became fast friends before Archer went home to Connecticut and I went to March Field, Riverside, Cal.

I resigned from the army the next year and went with the Department of Commerce. I was assigned to fly Bill McCracken, head of the department, on about a seven-thousand-mile tour of the country. I kept asking Bill if his itinerary was going to take us to Westport, Conn., or anywhere near it, because if it was I wanted to go see my friend Archer Winsten, who lived there. He said he didn’t know where the place was, and I began looking for it on the map. I couldn’t find it and told Bill that. I remarked how strange it was several times later that I couldn’t find Westport on the map. A couple of times Bill asked me if I had found it yet, and I said no.

I was strange to the East at that time, and when we got to Hartford I was sure we were going to go right past Westport without my ever finding out where it was. I complained to Bill about it and we both looked over a map and couldn’t find the place.