Test Pilot Part 10

MEXICAN WHOOPEE!

I hadn't seen Darr Alkire since I had resigned from the army several years before, so when I dropped into March Field, Calif., to say h.e.l.lo and he told me that he and a couple of the other officers were flying three s.h.i.+ps down to Mexacali on the Mexican border that afternoon to return the next and asked me to go along, I said yes.

I flew down in the rear seat of Darr's s.h.i.+p, and when we landed and crossed the border everybody proceeded to get drunk. Everybody but Yours Truly. I had been on a party the night before I had dropped in to see Darr and didn't feel up to it.

The next morning we met a Mexican captain, and everybody had to drink a lot of drinks to each other. I still threw mine over my shoulder.

That afternoon the Mexican captain had to escort us to the airport, just to say good-bye to us. The leader of our formation then, no sooner had we taken off, had to lead us in some diving pa.s.ses at the Mexican captain, just to say good-bye to him.

They were having a lot of fun dusting their wings on the airport, saluting the captain, but I wasn't! Darr was sticking his wing in too close to the leader's for comfort. I had a set of dual controls in the rear c.o.c.kpit and couldn't resist just a little pressure on them to ease his wing away from the leader's in some of the pa.s.ses or to pull him up just a little sooner in some of the dives. It was a heluva breach of flying ethics, but after all I was sober!

We got back to March, and Darr, sobered by then, began telling me what a swell guy I had been to sit back there and take it. He said he would have taken the controls away from me, had I been flying drunk, and he sitting back there sober. I thought he was razzing me for a moment, but saw that he really meant it. My pressure on the controls had been so subtle that he hadn't noticed it.

I didn't bother to tell him the truth. I liked the idea that he thought I had had enough sand to sit there and not interfere with him. I didn't have enough nerve to set him straight on the matter.

IT'S A TOUGH RACKET

The hazards of a pilot's life are sometimes different than some people suppose.

For instance, I flew some people to a ranch in Mexico once. I fought bad weather most of the way from New York to Eagle Pa.s.s on the Border, skimming mountains and swamps, and then flew eighty miles of barren mountain and desert country to the ranch house.

They insisted the next day that I go out hunting with them. That meant that I had to ride a horse. I had ridden a horse once before in my life and remembered it as the most uncomfortable means of transportation ever invented by man.

But I went with them. I even began to like it after we had been out a while. I discovered that you could wheel the horse around in a running turn and that it was almost like banking an airplane around. I was having pretty good fun experimenting until I noticed that a certain portion of my anatomy was getting very warm, and then, soon, that it was getting very tender. Pretty soon I began to think that we would never get back to the ranch house. When we finally did, my pants and my anatomy were brilliantly discolored. And when I went to take the pants off, I noticed that quite a bond had developed between me and them, quite an attachment indeed! They were stuck fast and could be persuaded away from me only with their pound of flesh.

I decided that I would stick to my airplane after that. But the next day, I discovered that my airplane was uncomfortable too-and I had to make a five-hour flight to Mexico City.

When I got to Mexico City everything was uncomfortable, and I had to eat my dinner off the mantelpiece that night. There was an additional humiliation. The doctor had to undress me. He had to use plenty of hot oil and go very easy.

ALMOST

Bunny had trusted me on the outward trip, so now, returning to March Field, Calif., I comforted myself in the rear c.o.c.kpit of our army DH with the thought that Bunny could fly as well as I.

San Francisco lay behind us. The Diablo Mountains were beneath. Snug around us, familiar and friendly, was our s.h.i.+p.

But beyond, strange and ominous by now to Bunny and me because we had hardly ever flown in it before, and never for so long, stretched like a white, opaque, and directionless night the fog.

The s.h.i.+p felt as if it were flying straight, but when I peeked over Bunny's shoulder I saw the needle on his bank and turn indicator leaning halfway over to the right. I watched it start back then-Bunny was all right-to the center. But slowly then, inexorably-Bunny! Bunny!-the needle leaned over to the left. The ball was centered, so the turns were good. But that was not enough. Where were we going? Were we weaving?

Circling? Which way were we turning mostly? The ocean was not far off to our right.

Then something else-ice! Its white hands gripped the front of wings, the leading edge of struts and wires. The prop got rough. The motor beat and strained. Once the s.h.i.+p s.h.i.+vered. I saw one aileron go down. Bunny was trying to hold a wing up. I saw the needle straighten. He had held it.

But I saw something else too! I saw the altimeter losing. No hope for blue sky now. No hope to ride on top until we found a hole, as our weather report had indicated that we would. How far were the mountain tops beneath us? Would the ice melt off before we sank too far?

I saw the throttle moving backward, heard the motor taper off its friendly roar, heard Bunny's voice sound out like thunder in white doom.

"Let's jump," he shouted, turning his head halfway.

Were there mountains to land on and walk on in the depths of that white down there? Or had we circled out over the ocean?

"Let's not. Let's wait. Let's try once more," I shouted back.

Then I shouted again, sc.r.a.ped my fingers on the winds.h.i.+eld, reaching, grabbed Bunny's shoulder, but too late. Even as I shouted, reached, and grabbed, the s.h.i.+p banked on its ear, wheeled over, and dove safely through a brown pa.s.sage tunnel to the earth. Bunny had seen it too-a hole in the fog, and through it, ground.

The warmer lower air flowed over us. The ice dripped from our wings in glistening drops. We came out in the San Joaquin Valley with plenty of ceiling, and it was plain sailing from there on.

RUN! RUN! RUN!

It is a bright, golden day in Texas. A little Mexican boy is working in a field of sugar cane just back of Kelly Field. The airplanes from the field are droning in the sleepy air above his head. Occasionally he pauses in his work to glance half curiously at one of them. He is not much interested in them. They are like the automobiles swis.h.i.+ng endlessly past on the highway near by. He is accustomed to them. And besides, they are not of his world.

Sometimes the long motor roar of a s.h.i.+p coming out of a dive attracts his half-hearted attention. Occasionally an intricate formation maneuver over his head warrants his momentary gaze. Often he stares, half abstractedly, skyward while he works. Like a shoe cobbler in a window watching the crowds pa.s.sing in the street.

This time, however, a curious interruption in the steady beating drone of a three-s.h.i.+p formation of DHs pa.s.sing over him makes him involuntarily raise his head from his work. It is a strange sound, somehow ominous to him. He is accustomed to hearing the motors run. Even their tapering off for a landing is a different noise than this one. His unknowingly trained ears and maybe some strange premonition tell him that.

He sees two of the three s.h.i.+ps locked together in collision. He sees them, startlingly silent and arrested in their flight, falling in their own debris. He sees two black objects leave the wrecks. He sees a white streamer trail out behind each of them and then blossom open into two swinging, slowly floating parachutes. He stands with his head thrown back, his Indian eyes rapt in his Asiatic face.

Suddenly he is alarmed, then full of fear. The two milling wrecks, black harbingers of doom by now, are going to fall on him. He begins to run.

Any way, any direction at all. He runs as fast as his little brown legs will carry him. He covers a considerable distance from where he was standing by the time the wrecks. .h.i.t.

The spot he runs from, unruffled, undisturbed, lies warming, sleeping in the sun. The wrecks don't hit that spot. They hit him, running.

The world that was not his has folded darkened crumpled wings of death around him.

HIGH FIGHT

One of the briefest and most amusing family fights I have ever listened in on occurred in an airplane. I was flying its owner and his wife to the coast.

We came in over the Mohave Desert, crossed the mountains at the desert's western edge, and started out over the valley, where I knew Los Angeles lay thirteen thousand feet beneath us. The valley and the ocean beyond were covered with fog, and I could see nothing but the white, billowed stretch of it and the tawny mountains rising out of it behind us.

I spiraled down and went through a hole in the fog near the foot of the mountains. It was lower and thicker underneath than I had hoped. I picked up a railroad and started weaving my way along it into the airport.