RETURN TO EARTHI 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 ofg, or gravity. I knew that in level flight it registered oneg, 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 thegreading 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 thegreading 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 ninegpull-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 halfg, and pull out of each succeedingly faster dive onegharder, until I had pulled out of the fourth dive of three hundred and sixty miles an hour to eight and a halfg. Then I would do the grand dive of ten thousand feet to terminal velocity and pull out to nineg.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-gpull-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 higherg.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-gbusiness.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-gpull-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-halfgpull-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 nineg. 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 muchg, 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 ninegif 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-gpull-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 halfgon the accelerometer, something had gone wrong with it, because the pull-out turned out to be only seven and a halfgon 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!
RETURN TO EARTHI 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 ofg, or gravity. I knew that in level flight it registered oneg, 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 thegreading 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 thegreading 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 ninegpull-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 halfg, and pull out of each succeedingly faster dive onegharder, until I had pulled out of the fourth dive of three hundred and sixty miles an hour to eight and a halfg. Then I would do the grand dive of ten thousand feet to terminal velocity and pull out to nineg.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-gpull-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 higherg.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-gbusiness.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-gpull-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-halfgpull-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 nineg. 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 muchg, 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 ninegif 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-gpull-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 halfgon the accelerometer, something had gone wrong with it, because the pull-out turned out to be only seven and a halfgon 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!
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 ofg, or gravity. I knew that in level flight it registered oneg, 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 thegreading 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 thegreading 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 ninegpull-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 halfg, and pull out of each succeedingly faster dive onegharder, until I had pulled out of the fourth dive of three hundred and sixty miles an hour to eight and a halfg. Then I would do the grand dive of ten thousand feet to terminal velocity and pull out to nineg.
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-gpull-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 higherg.
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-gbusiness.
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-gpull-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-halfgpull-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 nineg. 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 muchg, 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 ninegif 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-gpull-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 halfgon the accelerometer, something had gone wrong with it, because the pull-out turned out to be only seven and a halfgon 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!