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Test Pilot

Chapter 31: CROSS-COUNTRY SNAPSHOTS
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.

CROSS-COUNTRY SNAPSHOTS

I take off from March Field, Calif., head north and climb steeply. At ten thousand feet on the altimeter I see the green fir trees skimming only a couple of hundred feet beneath me. I see the deep snow between their trunks, brilliant in the sun. I am clearing the San Bernardino range.

I come out at ten thousand feet over the Mohave Desert, my altimeter still reading ten thousand feet. The floor of the Mohave is high.

I look ahead to the railroad, thirty miles away. I look behind. The green-sloped, snow-capped Bernardinoes form a backdrop for the desert underneath.

On beyond the railroad, beyond Barstow, into the Granite Mountains, low, rolling, black, barren, lava-formed.

Into the Painted Hills. They are not named that on the map. They are not named at all, and at first I can’t believe them. But there they are beneath me. No atmospheric trick. No effect of distance. No subtle color either. They are really painted. There is one over there. It sweeps out of the desert upward into green and ends in a peak of white. There is another, sweeping through purple to red. Others through red to yellow. It is as if God had been playing with colored chalks, picking up purple, perhaps, powdering it through his fingers to drop in a purple heap, picking up another color then to drop on top of that in powdered brilliance, powdering then on top of that another color still to form a brilliant, pointed tip. Fantastic, unreal, true!

For a long time now I have seen no life. The brilliant land is barren. I look back. I can still make out where the railroad runs. Far, far behind, the white Bernardinoes rise, low on the horizon now in the distance. It is not a long flight back to the railroad, or even a very long one back to the mountains and over them into the green San Bernardino Valley and March Field. But it is a long walk. It is a long walk back even to the railroad. What if my motor quits? I had intended to go on to Death Valley, just to see it, circle, and return.

I bank reluctantly around and assume a reverse compass course for home. I have seen enough for an afternoon’s jaunt, anyway.