The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (29 page)

It was after three a.m. before Ambassador Herrick, having himself been caught up in the wild traffic jams outside the airport, returned to his residence. He arrived to find Lindbergh munching on a fine nocturnal repast, courtesy of his kitchen staff. At the ambassador’s suggestion, Captain Charles Lindbergh took a few minutes to speak with reporters, and then, in pajamas borrowed from the ambassador, he turned in for the night.

*
The Jenny is the plane featured on the famous 1918 “inverted Jenny” airmail stamp, in which a printing error caused the plane to appear upside down. Only a handful of these stamps exist today and an example brings near $1 million.

†
Fortunately, the Air Service had recently adopted parachutes as standard equipment for its fliers; in fact, the class of 1925, Lindbergh’s class, was the first to use them.

‡
The club was formed in 1922 by a parachute maker. To date it can claim an estimated one hundred thousand current or former members.

§
Roughly $200,000 today.

‖
René Fonck was an Allied Ace of Aces in World War I with seventy-five victories. Fonck’s attempt at the Orteig Prize ended on September 21, 1926, in a fiery crash that killed two crew members, though he survived.

a
Including the weight of the tank.

b
In 1919 the U.S. Navy attempted an Atlantic crossing from New York City to the Azores using three seaplanes and stationing destroyers every sixty miles along the proposed route. Two planes crashed or gave out, one made the Azores.

c
A chart that shows all the circle lines on a globe as imaginary straight lines.

C
HAPTER
7

MAN’S GREATEST ENEMY
IN THE AIR

Man’s greatest enemy in the air, fog, was conquered yesterday …

—N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES

S
EPTEMBER
25, 1929

I
N THE AUTUMN OF
1928 Jimmy Doolittle was entirely in his element when he went to work for Harry Guggenheim at the Full Flight Laboratory at Mitchel Field, Long Island, New York. He lived with Joe and the boys—Jim, eight, and John, six—in “a long termite-ridden building built in World War I,” and Doolittle enjoyed every moment of it. At the age of thirty-one, the man and the hour had met. Doolittle’s outstanding qualities as a pilot and his professional knowledge as a Phd in aeronautical engineering would now be put to use in tandem to solve the dilemma his friend Slim Lindbergh had alluded to when he declared before his famous Atlantic flight that “aviation will never amount to much until we learn to free ourselves from mist.”
¹

It was too true. Since the inception of flight, aviation had been used for war, to carry mail, and for barnstorming performances and sport racing. But for ordinary civilians airplanes remained, basically, a novelty. Even though airplane cockpits were beginning to be enclosed to make more comfortable cabins, mass transportation was left to ships, trains, and automobiles, because without the ability to fly in fog, blizzards, and other heavy weather—flying “blind” was the expression—airlines could guarantee no regular schedules, and without dependable schedules, as Lindbergh pointed out, they were not attractive for either freight or passengers.

Lindbergh found out the hard way during one of his mail runs to Chicago. Both St. Louis and Springfield were fogged in and night had closed around him and his de Havilland mail plane. He’d been trying to find a hole in the cloud ceiling when suddenly he saw a blur of treetops less than a hundred feet below and jerked up hard on the stick, forced to rely on his “untrusted” instruments in the black nothingness. He went up too fast, however, lost control, and began dropping down, but he caught the plane and leveled it out. Then the controls went loose, the engine lost power, the wings began to tremble, and the nose dropped again. He was in a stall because he had failed to keep the turn indicator centered and the airspeed needle high. Instead, he’d been flying seat-of-the-pants—controlling the plane the way he
thought
it ought to be controlled, instead of relying on his instruments to warn him of danger. Lindbergh fought the stall with stick, pedals, and throttle and was preparing to jump but luckily he reclaimed control after the second whip. As the plane slowly climbed, he vowed to teach himself to fly by instruments in the future.

Many other pilots weren’t so lucky. Too many tried to tough it out against the weather; through some sort of misguided machismo they actually held the weather in contempt. Thousands of accidents and deaths and injuries could be directly attributed to pilots who either couldn’t fly by instruments or refused to believe them.

The way Doolittle saw the problem, if scientific advances in airplane design, navigation instruments, and radio communication “could be merged, I thought flying in weather could be mastered.” That was a big, bold statement but, like Lindbergh and Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle thought big and bold. He was not a boaster. He was a serious, competent pilot and scientist, and he set about his quest for supremacy over the weather with persistence and ferocity.

With the help of U.S. Navy Captain Emory “Jerry” Land, the vice president of the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, as well as Slim Lindbergh’s first cousin, Doolittle procured two modern planes with which to conduct experiments. One was a Consolidated NY-2 Husky, a sturdy two-seater with a Wright J-5 Whirlwind engine, that was to be used in instruments testing for blind flying. To that end, a special canvas hood was put over the pilot’s cockpit so he saw nothing before him of the outside world—only his instrument panel. The second plane was a navy Vought O2U-1 Corsair, a fast-flying aircraft that the team used for cross-country flying and transportation to locations they might need to visit in the course of the project. Doolittle, the famous aviation racer, was quite fond of the Corsair, but he had little use for the Husky, whose slowness he complained of in a letter to the president of Consolidated Aircraft, saying, among other things, “On one occasion, while we were flying low over a road and into a head wind, a green automobile overtook and passed us. It hurt my pride.”

The first thing Doolittle realized as he studied the problem was that the instruments fliers were presently using—the magnetic compass, earth inductor compass, altimeter, airspeed indicator, turn-and-bank indicator, and artificial horizon—were too crude to be trusted in a blind landing when a pilot had to know his exact position, speed, altitude, attitude, and distance from the ground. Doolittle cast about for ways to refine these mechanisms’ accuracy down to the linear foot, if possible, so that a pilot could comfortably guide his plane onto a runway and put it safely on the ground, even in a dense fog.

At Doolittle’s request the Sperry Gyroscope Company, led by the renowned scientist and engineer Elmer A. Sperry Sr. and his son Elmer Jr., devised a new, highly improved directional gyroscope and artificial horizon,
^*
which gave the pilot both a precisely accurate compass and a leveling indicator from which today’s space-age electronic aviation instruments were originated.

Next Doolittle needed an altimeter that gave more than a rough approximation of the plane’s height over the ground. Present altimeters gauged the pressure based at sea level, which was fine if you were flying along an ocean beach, but pilots needed a more accurate reading in all types of terrain. Fortunately, word had gotten out about the Guggenheim project, and inventors from far and wide began submitting various gadgets and apparatuses to the U.S. Bureau of Standards, which gave them over to Captain Jerry Land, who in turn passed them along to Doolittle if they seemed to have any merit.

A German-born American named Paul Kollsman turned up with an idea for an altimeter. He had worked for the venerable Pioneer Instrument Company until he was fired for saying the altimeter the company produced was no good. Kollsman decided the only way to prove his bosses wrong was to build a better altimeter. In this endeavor he sought the help of a Swiss watchmaker in New York, whom he induced to cut the tiny gears “more accurate than the best watch ever made.”
²
Meanwhile, Kollsman, working out of his garage in Brooklyn, set about crafting a diaphragm and barometric pressure device that would allow the altimeter to adjust for precise changes in atmospheric pressure, solving one of the major problems of altitude gauging. Soon, Doolittle’s instrument panel included the finest and most accurate altimeter ever constructed.
³

None of this was as easy as it sounds. Doolittle spent many long hours in tedious flight with Elmer Sperry Jr., Paul Kollsman, and others, testing, adjusting, and refining these instruments until they were as exact as possible. Similar tweaking was done with the airspeed indicator. As well, during the better part of a year that Doolittle had spent with the Full Flight Laboratory, many other ideas and inventions had been tried and discarded.

Not only that, but Doolittle himself came extremely close to losing his life while experimenting in bad-weather flying.

On March 15, 1929, he took off at night from Buffalo for Mitchel Field, about a four-hundred-mile flight, in the O2U-1 Corsair, which was the utility plane and not equipped with any blind-flying instruments. Doolittle knew in advance that the weather would be bad the farther south he flew, but he justified the attempt by reasoning that he could always return to Buffalo if the situation got dicey. By the time he reached Albany the weather had deteriorated; the ceiling closed in and visibility was minimal. That was also when he reached the point of no return—when he had used up too much fuel to fly back.

Doolittle dropped through the soup and managed to catch the lights of a southbound passenger train along the Hudson. He hovered above it for a while until it disappeared into a tunnel or a cut bank and he was on his own. This was the sort of weather in which pilots needed to get on the ground as quickly as possible. Doolittle thought of landing on the parade field at West Point but abandoned the idea and followed the river into New York City, which was thoroughly socked in—halfway to the tops of the skyscrapers. The fog blanket was so vast that reaching Mitchel Field was impossible. He considered landing on Governors Island but the fog was right on the ground. He turned back to the Yonker’s golf course and found it similarly cloaked. He tried Battery Park but that didn’t work either. And he thought about ditching in the river but the idea of water gave him chills. He tried instead to get to Newark Airport … to no avail; the fog was all-enveloping.

Discouraged and running out of gas, Doolittle climbed above the fog and headed west out of the populated area. A parachute landing of some kind seemed inevitable. He had flown about twenty miles into New Jersey, past Newark, when he saw through a hole in the fog what he took for an aircraft beacon and popped down to take a look. Immediately he scraped a treetop that tore his wing but he was able to maintain enough control to crash-land—deliberately, so he said—wrapping the left wing around a tree to slow the crash and break the impact. The Corsair was a total wreck, and it is nothing short of amazing that Doolittle walked away from it alive, without a bruise or a scratch.

T
HERE WAS ONE FINAL DEVICE
needed to finish the job. Despite the remarkable refinements in the plane’s instrument panel, there was nothing to tell the pilot where the airfield was, let alone the runway. Only a radio beam could do that. The team had been experimenting with beams for some time, but now they would have to perfect it so the airplane could always make contact with an accurate radio beacon that could guide the pilot in and down.

They settled on an aural beacon for long-range contact. It would direct the plane on a radio path to the airfield, where a lower-powered beacon system would take over and guide the plane in with vertical and horizontal markers, which were read in the plane itself by two vibrating reeds in loop antennae, a homing range indicator and a vibrating reed beacon-marker indicator. The beacons gave off radio signals from the reed, similar to that found in woodwind instruments. The pilot could hear it vibrate in his earphones; if it sounded
dit-dah-dit
, for example, he was too far to the left and if it sounded
dah-dit-dah-dit
he was too far to the right. It hummed when the plane was vectored in on course. As well, the plane would have two-way radio contact with the airfield.

While all these developments were taking place, an unconventional solution came Doolittle’s way via a man who ran a gravel pit in Cleveland, Ohio. This man, Harry Reader, maintained a gigantic blowtorch-type of heater to dry the gravel and sand in his pit, and he had noticed, over time, that when he turned on the torch in a fog, the fog over the pit dissipated. Reader thought this information might be useful to the Full Flight Laboratory, and in due time he reported to Mitchel Field, as requested by the team, along with the giant blowtorch, which he installed along the runway where it sat for months awaiting a foggy day.