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Test Pilot

Chapter 27: COB-PIPE HAZARDS
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.

COB-PIPE HAZARDS

Silly little things are apt to crack you up sometimes.

I did an outside loop at Akron once. I came up over the top of the loop and started right down into another. I didn’t want to do another, so I pulled back on the stick to stop it. It wouldn’t come all the way back. It was jammed some way.

The ship was nosing steeper and steeper into the dive. I rolled the stabilizer, and that enabled me to pull the nose up. I couldn’t keep it up if I cut the gun more than halfway. I knew I would have a tough time landing like that. Besides, although I had a chute, I knew that when I got down low to make a landing the stick might jam even farther forward and nose me in before I had a chance to jump. Or the engine might quit down low and do the same thing. It wasn’t my ship, however, and I didn’t want to jump and throw it away if I didn’t absolutely have to.

I tried the stick a few more times. Each time I yanked it back hard it came up against the same obstacle at the same point. I decided to take a chance that it would stay jammed where it was.

I came in low ’way back of the field with almost all of the back travel of the stick taken up, holding the nose up with the gun. I had to land with the tail up high, going fast. I bounced wildly, used all the field, but made it all right.

I made an immediate inspection to find out what had jammed the stick. I couldn’t imagine what it was because I had taken all the loose gadgets out of the ship before I had gone up.

I found a corncob pipe that the ship’s owner had been looking for for weeks. He had left it in the baggage compartment and had never been able to find it. It had slipped through a small opening at the top of the rear wall of the compartment and had evidently been floating around in the tail of the fuselage all that time.

When I did the outside loop it had been flung upward by centrifugal force and wedged into the wedge ending of the upper longerons at the end of the fuselage. The flipper horn was hitting it every time I pulled the stick back, preventing me from getting the full backward movement.

Only the bowl of the pipe was left. It was lodged sidewise. Had it lodged endwise it would have jammed the stick even farther forward, and I would have had to jump or dive in with the ship. I would have had to jump quickly, too, because I didn’t have much altitude when I started that second involuntary outside loop.