Chapter 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 aerial 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, coordinate, don't cross controls. There. I tried one to the other side. That's fine, I told myself. I got so absorbed in this little maneuver that I completely forgot the ground until I was almost too low and too slow to turn right side up again. I actually missed the ground by inches as I rolled over, and only some kind fate presiding over absent-minded stunt pilots enabled me to do it then.

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

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

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

"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 debris 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.

The next day we started down to New York from Hartford and ran into lousy weather. It got so low finally that, although I was following railroads and valleys, I decided that I couldn't go any farther. I milled around, dodging trees and hills for about ten minutes before I found a place to sit down.

I landed in a small field surrounded with stone fences. A man came wading through the wet grass toward us after we had stopped rolling. Bill asked me where we were, and I said I had only a vague idea after all that milling around but would ask the man. The man said Westport.

Bill howled with delight. Part of his delight undoubtedly was relief at getting down out of that soup without breaking his neck, but I was never able to convince him that I didn't know I was landing at Westport.