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Test Pilot

Chapter 26: BONNY’S DREAM
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.

BONNY’S DREAM

Bonny had a dream. His inventor’s eyes gleamed with the light of it. His days lived with the hope of it. His nights moved with its vision.

Because of his dream we called him Bonny Gull. He dreamed of building an airplane with metal, wood and fabric to emulate the sinewed, feathered grace of a soaring gull.

He studied gulls. He studied them dead and alive. He studied their wonderful soaring flight alive. He killed them and studied their lifeless wings. He wanted their secret. He wanted to recreate it for man.

He might have asked God. He might have asked God and heard a still small voice answer: “Render unto Cæsar what is Cæsar’s and unto God what is God’s. Render unto man his own flight and leave to the gulls their own. Man’s flight is different because his destiny is different. He doesn’t need the gulls’ flight.”

But Bonny envied the gulls. He killed hundreds of them, yes, thousands, and buried them in the field. He built an airplane from what he thought he had learned from their dead bodies.

He built an airplane and took it out to fly. Engineers, who had never studied gulls but who had studied man’s flight, told him he shouldn’t do it. They pointed out to him how the center of pressure would shift on his wings. But Bonny glared his glittering faith at them, snuggled his dream in close, and flew.

He took off all right. He roared across the field, and if he didn’t sound quite like a gull, he looked the part. He rose into the air for all the world like a giant gull. He pulled off in a steep climb, and the wise men wondered if again they were proved wrong by an ignorant fanatic.

Their wonder didn’t last long. When Bonny tried to level out, he nosed over and dove straight into the ground, like a gull diving into the ocean for a fish. We rushed out to the wreck. Bonny was quite dead. There was scattered around him not only the remains of his own gull wings, but thousands of the feathered remains of other gull wings. He had dived straight into the shallow grave of all the gulls he had killed.