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Test Pilot

Chapter 11: A SHOWY STUNT
By James Collins
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About This Book

A former army aviator presents a collection of personal essays and reports recounting his rise from modest origins through flight training to a career as a test and stunt pilot. Chapters mix technical descriptions of dive testing, aerial combat, and cross-country flying with vivid accounts of crashes, near-misses, and efforts to refine aircraft performance. Interwoven are reflections on the physical and psychological demands of flying, the teamwork and rivalry among pilots, and the pull of danger that motivates high-risk testing. The narrative alternates between autobiographical memoir, incident-driven stories, and practical observations about piloting technique, safety, and the culture of early aviation.

A SHOWY STUNT

An upside-down landing is one of the showiest maneuvers a stunting pilot can perform. He doesn’t really land upside down. He comes all the way in in his glide upside down until he is about ten or twenty feet off the ground. Then he rolls over and lands right side up.

Jack, who had got pretty hot at this maneuver, hit a telephone pole coming in like that one day and woke up in the hospital.

Some time before that I had almost done practically the same thing. I had dived low over the field down wind at the end of a show I had been putting on at a little air meet and had pulled up until I was on my back at about eight hundred feet. I decided I would not only glide in upside down but would make it really fancy and slip both ways in the glide. I started to slip but forgot and did it the same as I would have had I been right side up and produced a bank instead. No, no, I told myself, coördinate, don’t cross controls. There. I tried one to the other side. That’s fine, I told myself. I got so absorbed in this little maneuver that I completely forgot the ground until I was almost too low and too slow to turn right side up again. I actually missed the ground by inches as I rolled over, and only some kind fate presiding over absent-minded stunt pilots enabled me to do it then.

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

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

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

“Yeah, Jack,” I said, “but—” I hesitated: this was too good not to emphasize—“but I missed,” I said.

Jack just glared at me. There wasn’t any answer.