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Test Pilot

Chapter 25: HE NEVER KNEW
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.

HE NEVER KNEW

Pilots often play jokes on each other when they fly together.

Two pilots I knew at Kelly Field had been up to Dallas on a week-end cross-country trip. They started back on a very rough day and were bouncing all around the sky.

About fifty miles out of San Antonio, the pilot who was flying the ship turned around to ask the other one in the rear seat for some matches. He couldn’t see him, so he figured he was slumped down in the cockpit, napping. He looked back under his arm inside the fuselage. The rear cockpit was empty!

He was only flying at about five hundred feet, hadn’t been flying any higher than that on the whole trip, and at times had been flying even lower.

Scared to death that his passenger had loosened his belt to stretch out and sleep and had been thrown out of the cockpit in a bump, perhaps even failing to recognize his predicament in time to open his chute, the pilot swung back on his course and started searching the route he had covered for signs of a body. He searched back over as much of it as he dared and still have enough gas left to turn around again and go on into Kelly Field.

He found nothing and was worried sick all the way back to Kelly. But when he landed, there was the other pilot, grinning a greeting at him.

The pilot who had been in the rear seat explained that he had undone his belt to stretch out and sleep and that the next thing he knew he felt a bump and woke up with a start to discover the cockpit about four feet beneath him and off to one side. He said he reached, but only grabbed thin air. The tail surfaces passed by under him, and he saw the airplane flying off without him.

He was too astounded at first, but quickly realized he ought to do something, sitting out there in space with no airplane or anything, so he pulled his rip cord. His chute opened just in time.

He walked over to the main road he had been flying over so recently and thumbed himself a ride to Kelly Field. He said he had seen the ship turn around and start back looking for him.

The pilot who had been flying the ship never knew if the other one had really fallen out of the ship, or if he had jumped out as a joke.