Above the Thunder (14 page)

Meanwhile, back in the classrooms, ground school opened some new doors for most of us. The school introduced us to the theory of flight, pilot-age, dead reckoning, flying rules and regulations, and aviation weath er. Basic though this education was, it still was rather thick for some of us farm boys, few of whom had more than a high school diploma.

A teaching trick used by one instructor, a middle-aged man, impressed me. I think he must have used some kind of hypnotic spell to get his points across to us. He taught theory of flight, and he explained each principle to us just once, no more. His explanation would at first leave many of us students totally in the dark. But then he would stand up there in front of the twenty students, his bald head glistening, round face beaming with good humor, and fix his mild blue eyes on each of us in turn, raising his eyebrows and saying to each, “See? See?” I never knew it to fail.

Physical training was a minor part of our schooling there, and as far as I was concerned, totally unnecessary. Having never had a muscle to my name, I hated calisthenics, and at Denton they made it worse by using the PT period almost exclusively for tumbling practice. The instructors laid out long mats on the floor and expected us to do all sorts of utterly impossible things. But I tried, and they didn't press me too much. To be perfectly honest, I envied those superior SOBs who could lie on their backs and flip up to their feet without using their arms.

Don't let me be too modest about my achievements as a student pilot at Denton. Perhaps I should say no more than that I was probably not the hottest student in my class, but I had no trouble with either flying
or the related ground school. The first few hours were a repetition of the instruction I had received in Hawaii more than a year before, so I breezed through it easily and soon came to the point at which, when I had seven hours and forty-four minutes of government dual instruction in my log (yes, we did log time to the minute then), Tommy, with no advance notice, had me stop the plane in midfield on a landing roll, and he got out. He fastened the belt over the empty front seat of the Piper L-4 and said, “Shoot me three three-point touch-and-go landings unless I wave you in. OK, go!”

I refuse to become poetic about my first solo. Millions have done it and it requires no superman to achieve it—just great courage and supreme self-confidence with a modicum of aviating skill. However, without Tommy's bulk in the front seat ahead of me the plane looked much longer. This was partially compensated for by the fact that now, for the first time in flight, I could see the instrument panel, albeit something like five feet away. As I accelerated over the sod I could feel the unusual lightness of the plane, especially the nose. I remembered that Tommy had rolled the elevator trim forward a bit when he fastened the seat belt, but I hit it another turn or so. Then I flew three very easy patterns and good landings, and that was my solo.

The condition of the airplanes we were using left much to be desired. They were not very old, but they were much used and little protected from the elements. Their fabric was weathered, Plexiglas yellowed, crazed, and warped so you had to pick the best spots to see through. Aging transparent tube fuel gauges in the wing roots of the Aeroncas were often so coated with fuel residue inside that they were useless. Some of the engines were weak from many hard hours of flying. The tires were thin, bungees soft. Props were nicked and flaking off varnish, sometimes with reinforcing fabric starting to fray. Cowlings were battered and loose fitting. On one of my first flights with Tommy, the cabin door came off our Aeronca and bounced off the tail surfaces. It might have discouraged a pilot, but as a student pilot I thought little of it.

It was such a plane that I was flying on one of the first occasions when I was permitted to go solo out of sight of the field. I was going along at about four hundred feet above the North Texas plains when I suddenly
remembered something Tommy had done during one of our dual flights. It seemed to me he had suddenly thrown the stick over and back and shoved in a rudder pedal, and the plane had flip ped quickly around in a neat horizontal spin—a snap roll. He did it a couple of times. Then he looked around at me and grinned and said, “Don't ever try that when you're out here solo.”

And so, without taking even one second to consider my altitude and my very doubtful ability to accomplish a snap roll, I tried to do what Tommy had told me not to do. What I did—I think—was a hori zontal half-roll followed immediately by a diving half-roll and a wing-straining pullout about ten feet above a cow pasture. If there'd been even a bush at that point, I'd have hit it. A tall cow would have been endangered. If anyone outside the plane had seen it, I'm sure they'd have covered their eyes.

I did an equally stupid thing—after Tommy Calvert had told me not to—one day when I was practicing stalls at what we called high altitude, about forty-five hundred feet. I throttled back to do a power-off stall, and just as the stall broke, the engine died. In that plane, a dead engine meant a motionless prop, and there was no starter. I had once asked Tommy about the possibility of diving one of these little planes to a speed that would turn the six-foot wooden prop and start the Continental engine. He was horrified at the idea. In those old planes, he said, you'd tear apart in midair and kill yourself before you ever got one started. He told all his students, most emphatically, “Don't try it!”

But I had forty-five hundred feet and was close to the field, so naturally I decided to try it. It's hard to hold the nose of an L-4 straight down, but I did my best. The airspeed, normally about 65 miles per hour in those tired ships, passed 100, 110, and then the redline speed at 120. It was shuddering and fluttering somewhere well above that when the prop finally ticked over and the engine caught. I pulled out carefully to level flight at two thousand feet, feeling a bit proud of myself. Tommy would never have known it happened had it not been that someone saw my long dive and reported it. Tommy suspected it was me, and I couldn't lie to him. He gave me hell about it.

One day when I came in from a solo period and parked an old
Aeronca, I noted that the fuel truck was coming down the line, servicing planes as it came. I went into operations, where Tommy told me that Everett Kelley, who was scheduled up next in that plane, was sick. He told me to go back out and get some more time if I wanted to. When I got back to the plane, the fuel truck had already passed, so I got someone to pull the prop for me and off I went.

After another hour of tooling around solo, I was ready to quit, so I headed in, like a good student, on my forty-five-degree entry to the downwind leg of the pattern, flying at exactly five hundred feet above a big patch of woods below. I was over the middle of the woods when the engine quit. No warning, no stuttering, it just flat quit. In accordance with my training, I immediately established the best glide speed and then considered my situation. It was apparent that my only hope to get out of the woods was to go straight ahead, downwind, and pray for the wind to blow harder.

I barely cleared the last trees and sat down with no trouble in a field where several cows looked at me with mild interest and then resumed their grazing. I knew I was out of gas, although you couldn't prove it by that old glass tube in the wing root. I got out and sat down to await developments. We had no radio, but I knew that one of the pilots passing over in the same entry pattern would report me down. Soon a Harte pickup truck stopped on a nearby farm road and Mr. Cates, the senior civilian instructor, came sauntering over.

“What's the trouble?”

“Out of gas, sir.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I . . .”

“Did you check it?”

“Well, no, sir, I didn't . . .”

“Then how do you know you're out of gas?”

“Well, sir, I just assumed . . .”

“You don't make assumptions about airplanes, Lieutenant, you check. Do you know what Form 1 is for?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you check it before you took off in this plane?”

“No, sir, I had just flown the plane in and . . .”

Standing on the left wheel, he had removed the wing-top fuel filler cap and stuck a dry weed into the tank.

“But you're right, you're out of gas. If you'd checked the Form 1 before takeoff you'd have known the plane had not been fueled. You're lucky it didn't turn out worse.”

He flew the plane back to the field on gas he had brought in the truck, and I rode the pickup. Tommy was unhappy that I hadn't checked the Form 1, but he was pleased that I'd successfully handled a forced landing and learned a lesson.

Toward the end of our Denton training we had to get in our night landings. For that, three highway pot flares were placed in a line down the middle of one lobe of the heart-shaped field and a big bonfire was lighted about fifty yards off to one flank. These were our only visible points of reference on the moonless, overcast nights when we flew. Around the bonfire the instructors and the waiting students gathered to keep warm, roast hot dogs, and talk while the others were flying.

It was kind of scary, crawling into that little airplane in the flickering light of the bonfire and taxiing out to take off all alone into pitch blackness. Our planes had no lights of any kind, inside or out, except the built-in phosphorescent glow of the meager instrument array, like a Mickey Mouse watch. Our instruments were an altimeter graduated in intervals of two hundred feet, an airspeed indicator, a tachometer, and a magnetic compass. There were gauges for oil and cylinder head temperatures, too—and that was all. No attitude instruments.

The approved technique for night landing involved lining up parallel to the flares and flying the plane down toward the unseen surface of the field until the main gear touched the sod and bounced away. At that point, the pilot cut the power and placed the plane into a three-point landing attitude. Then he waited and hoped that the next touchdown would be on the three wheels and soft enough to stick without bouncing again.

Since pilots in the pattern could not see each other or communicate, one of the instructors was detailed to keep them safely separated by waving one over to the fire if he seemed out of time with the plane ahead. Then it usually would be necessary to wave all three of them in before the spacing could be reestablished.

Harte's contract required him to have given each graduating student at least sixty hours of flying time. One out of our class of twenty did not graduate. “Der Vroeg,” Lt. Arend Vroegindewey, was a little, scrubbed-looking guy with a thin, sharp face and pleasant blue eyes. I don't think he was ever enthusiastic about flying, but he was such a very nice fellow that he was quite popular among the students. One day when his instructor gave him a simulated forced landing, the engine failed to pick up for the recovery and they ended up in the top of a tree. Neither was badly hurt, but Der Vroeg quit the course. I think he was our only loss at Denton.

A Lieutenant Blondelle gave me my last check ride at Denton while I still had a few hours' time to fly. And I well recall the day Tommy sent three of his students out solo to simply put in enough time to complete the contract. There was a low, ragged, indefinite overcast. Tommy told us to practice high air maneuvers if we could get to sixteen hundred feet; if not, we were to come down to five hundred and fly ground patterns.

When I taxied out to take off, Everett Kelley was in front of me and Gordon Lilly behind. I followed Kelley until, at a thousand feet, he vanished into the clouds. I leveled off just below the ceiling, and within five seconds he dropped out very close to my right wing. I banked violently to the left to get away from him. As I rolled away, I saw for the first time a plane that had come up close on my left. To avoid turning into him, I continued rolling until I was inverted, then pulled the nose toward the ground as if completing a loop, thus reversing my direction. I came right on back up until the altitude and airspeed were right and then I kicked around in a wingover, expecting to see the two planes ahead. But there was only Kelley, and I discovered that the other plane had followed me through my maneuver and was close on my tail.

“Aha!” I thought, “Old Lilly thinks he's pretty sharp, following me like that. Well, let's see how sharp he is.” And so I proceeded to try to shake him off my tail. But there was no way. It was as if I were towing him, the way he hung on. I finally had to admit that he could outfly me, and I flew along straight and level to let him come alongside. But when the plane pulled up again on my left, it was the bald head and red face of Mr. Cates that I recognized in the cabin. He had the door open, and as he glared at me across the rushing air he jabbed a finger toward the ground. I headed for home.

It turned out that Mr. Cates was chasing in solo students because the weather was rapidly lowering. He had nabbed three of us. Besides Kelley and me, he also had Billy McPhail on the carpet before Lieutenant Bechtel, executive officer to Captain Marrs. When Bechtel asked what the trouble was, Mr. Cates told him with anger that seemed quite sincere.

“McPhail was doing loop after loop, right in the traffic pattern. Kelley was playing leapfrog in and out of the clouds. Kerns—well, I'm not sure what he was trying to do. It looked like an amateur dogfight.”

Nice, easygoing Lieutenant Bechtel told us all we should know better than that, and fined us five stars each. Mr. Cates snorted in disgust but said nothing. A star cost only one nickel donated to the class's graduation party fund, and we felt greatly relieved. But at that most unpropitious moment, Captain Marrs walked in.

“Well, what's all this about?” he asked Bechtel. Bechtel told him.

“What punishment have you given them?” asked Captain Marrs. Bechtel told him.

“Five stars! Five stars! A hundred stars!” quoth Captain Marrs. “And you are all restricted to quarters except for duty—for the remainder of your time at this post. Let me see the records of these three.”