Test Pilot Part 1

Test Pilot.

by Jimmy Collins.

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 _Sat.u.r.day 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 _Sat.u.r.day 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. 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 coordination. He said, "Every student lacks coordination, 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 coordination 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 n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+p, 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

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 was.h.i.+ngs, 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 cla.s.s. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 reenlist 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 ident.i.ty 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.signed 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 Was.h.i.+ngton on the nature of my new duties, and after flying Secretary McCracken on a long tour around the country, I was a.s.signed the charge of the Metropolitan area and headquartered at Roosevelt Field.

I found the post very uncongenial because I found myself with no a.s.sistant, swamped with more work than I could adequately have handled even with a couple of a.s.sistants, 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 cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances with a position of isolation from my cla.s.s and with contact with an alien cla.s.s.

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 nave 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 embarra.s.s me.

Shortly after that, at Roosevelt, I accidentally ran across a mimeographed four-page paper, the organ of a club of aviation students.