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Test Pilot

Chapter 42: ORCHIDS TO ME!
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.

ORCHIDS TO ME!

The late Lya de Putti, German screen actress, paid me the nicest compliment of all.

She was up front in the two-place passenger compartment of a Lockheed Sirius. The owner of that plane was in the pilot’s open cockpit just back of her. And I was behind him in the rear cockpit.

He had insisted, against my better judgment, upon getting into that pilot’s cockpit in the first place. But, after all, he owned the ship, I was only his pilot, and there was a set of dual controls in the rear cockpit.

The motor quit cold over Whitehall, N. Y., because we ran out of gas in one of the six tanks in the ship. I shouted back and forth with the ship’s owner, halfway to the ground, trying to tell him how to turn on one of the other five tanks. There was a complicated system of gas valves in the ship, and I couldn’t make him understand what to do, and I couldn’t reach the valves myself.

Finally I shouted, “You play with them. I’ll land,” and stuck my head out and looked around. We were already low. I picked a small plowed field, the only likely-looking one in the mountainous country, and started into it.

I was coming around my last turn into the field when I discovered high-tension wires stretching right across the edge of it. I was too low to pick another field. The field was too small to go over the wires. I had to go through a gap in the trees to get under them.

I kicked the ship around sidewise. The trees flashed past me on either side, and I hit the ground. The wires flashed past over my head. I used my brakes and stopped the fast ship very quickly in the soft ground. If we had rolled fifty feet farther we would have hit an embankment that rose sharply at the far end of the field.

I crawled out of my cockpit and started to help Lya out of her cabin. She was already emerging, fanning herself with a handkerchief. She spoke with a German accent.

“Oh, Jeemy,” she said, “all the way down I pray to God. But I thank you, Jeemy. I thank you.”