James Collins

“ I remembered how white and safe against the blue sky those billowing folds of that chute had looked, and then immediately the awful heart-pound, breath-stop fear that that milling wreck would take a derelict pass at it. I remembered the acute relief of hearing the loud report that told me the wreck had hit the ground, and then the “What if that had clutched me!” when they told me afterward how close it really had come.
“It’s a bomber fighter, second model, first-production job, a single-seater biplane with a seven-hundred-horsepower engine,” the man at the other end said. ”

“ It finally occurred to me that I could do something for the radical cause right where I was, in aviation, instead of going to Russia. But what? And how? I didn’t know. I decided that there were undoubtedly people in the party who did. If you want to build a house, go to an architect. If you want to build an airplane, go to an aeronautical engineer. If you want to build a revolutionary organization, go to a revolutionary leader. It was a naïve but a direct, an honest, and a logical method of reasoning, you must admit. So I found out from the Daily Worker where headquarters was and went down. ”

“ I knew that when I pulled out of a dive, the centrifugal force of the pull-out would push the g reading up in exactly the same proportion that it would pull me down into my seat. I knew that I had to pull out of a ten-thousand-foot dive hard enough to push the g reading up to nine, and pull me down into my seat with a force equal to nine times my own weight, or thirteen hundred and fifty pounds. I knew that that would put a considerable stress on the airplane, and that that was the reason the Navy wanted me to do it; they wanted to see if it could take it. ”

“ The speed of my glide kept the prop turning over like a windmill. I picked a field in the country and started talking to myself: “Take it easy—Slow her down—Come around—Don’t undershoot whatever you do—Hold it now, you’re overshooting—Slip it—Not too much—You’re undershooting again—Kick those switches on—Gun it—All right, kick him off—Watch those trees—The fence now—You’re slow—Let ’er drop, the field’s small—Wham!—Watch your roll—Ground loop at the end if you have—You don’t—You made it.” I always talk to myself like that in a forced landing. ”

“ I picked up a railroad and started weaving my way along it into the airport.
The owner of the ship, sitting on my right, was helping me with my map, holding it for me. His wife, sitting behind me, was squirming anxiously in her seat and peering tensely out of the windows through the low mists.
Soon she tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Aren’t we flying awfully low?”
I half turned my head and shouted, “Yes, the ceiling is awfully low.” I wanted to add, “You fool,” but didn’t dare.
“Isn’t it dangerous?” she whined.
“We’re all right,” I shouted. “I’ve flown stuff like this before. ”

“ Sometimes the long motor roar of a ship coming out of a dive attracts his half-hearted attention. Occasionally an intricate formation maneuver over his head warrants his momentary gaze. Often he stares, half abstractedly, skyward while he works. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I was crazy about aviation, and Zep was crazy about football. I had been too poor to fly up till then, and Zep had been too little to play football. He weighed only about ninety-five pounds when he came to college. They had even used him as a sort of a mascot on the high-school teams.
Near the end of my freshman year I discovered quite accidentally, through reading an aviation magazine which I had repeatedly promised myself not to read because it took my mind off my work, that the army would teach me to fly for nothing. They would even pay me for it! And Zep suddenly started to grow. ”

“ She had no coördination. I sweated and struggled and cursed. “Don’t skid on the turns,” I moaned. “The rudder and the stick must be used together. If you put the stick to the right, push the right rudder. If you put the stick to the left, use the left rudder.” And the ship would grind around on another skid.
Dee didn’t take her flying as seriously as I did. She didn’t particularly want to learn to fly except to please me. I thought if I could instill in her a sense of shame at her lack of coördination maybe she would improve. ”

“ I almost hit a guy in formation this morning. I probably won’t live long enough to get back to the lines.”
I saw him a few days after he had gone back to the lines.
“How they going, Gloomy?” I greeted him.
“Oh,” he said, “that bit of army flying made me careless. I almost hit a radio tower this morning. Carelessness is what kills all old-timers, you know.”
“Gus,” I said. “You’d be miserable if you didn’t have something to worry about. You will probably live to have a long white beard and worry yourself sick all day long that you are going to trip on it and break your neck.” ”

“ The hazards of a pilot’s life are sometimes different than some people suppose.
For instance, I flew some people to a ranch in Mexico once. I fought bad weather most of the way from New York to Eagle Pass on the Border, skimming mountains and swamps, and then flew eighty miles of barren mountain and desert country to the ranch house.
They insisted the next day that I go out hunting with them. That meant that I had to ride a horse. I had ridden a horse once before in my life and remembered it as the most uncomfortable means of transportation ever invented by man. ”

“ I would have a hell of a time locating the field. Finally I distinguished Roosevelt Field lights from the fireworks, and dove low over the field. The flood lights came on. My red-and-white low-wing Lockheed Sirius glided out of the darkness, low over the edge of the field, brilliantly into the floodlight glare, landed and rolled to a stop.
There was a crowd at the field. Roosevelt was giving a night demonstration. People ran out of the crowd toward me. George jumped up on the wing and leaned over the edge of my cockpit. I was taxiing toward the hangar. ”

“ 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.
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. ”

“ Go back to Akron, the factories, and school? I couldn’t stand the thought of the factories. A college degree wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, I would drop out of aviation. But how? Stay in aviation? Stay in the army? How? As an enlisted man? I didn’t like that thought. As an officer? It would be difficult to get a regular commission, and even so, where would I get in the army? Go outside and take my chances? The outside was a cold unfriendly place. ”

“ By 1928 I was still in the air corps, instructing, and reading Shaw. Early in that year I was transferred from Brooks Field, San Antonio, Tex., to March Field, Riverside, Calif., and again assigned to work as instructor. I considered myself a Socialist by then. I also considered myself a pacifist. To find one’s self a convinced Socialist and a pacifist and at the same time a professional soldier, at the age of twenty-four, places one, if one is conscientious, as I was, in a considerable dilemma. ”

“ I told the guy when I crawled out of the ship, “you go out now and cut your gun just over the trees on one of your safe, straight take-offs. You won’t have a turn started and already pretty well developed, and you won’t have room enough to start one. You’ll pile into the trees in a heap, and if that’s safer than landing on the airport in one piece, then I’ll admit that your take-offs are safer than mine.” ”

“ He was also an instructor during the war, after the Air Service had been created.
It was while he was instructing at Wilbur Wright Field during the war that he met up with this guy. The guy had come down there to learn to fly and then go to France and shoot Germans—or get shot by them. For some reason or other he couldn’t pick the stuff up. Some people are like that. They simply can’t get going when they first start to learn to fly. Most of them actually have no flying ability and ought to quit trying. It’s not in their blood. ”

“ But step by step—I stubbornly fought all the way—the beautifully clear logic of communism broke down all my barriers, and I was forced to admit to myself that the Bolsheviks had the only complete and effective answer to the riddle of the world I lived in. ”

“ I decided I would try to get on with Ford first, and if that failed to accept the cadet status.
Ford was just getting under way with his tri-motor aviation venture at that time. He had an airplane factory at Dearborn Airport. Selfridge Field is just outside of Detroit, so I moved into Detroit and applied for a job as pilot at Ford’s Dearborn Airport. I was told that the only way I could get on as pilot was first to get a job in the automobile plant, and that I would later be transferred to the airplane plant, and still later to the airline between Detroit and Chicago as pilot. ”

“ After my resignation from the vice presidency of the aviation concern I did private flying—flying for private owners of aircraft, rich men—and I experienced wide gaps of unemployment between jobs. But since I left the army I had been reading and thinking about “social” matters. I ran across the “radical” press in New York. I began reading Walter Duranty in the Times. I read books on Russia. I fought against the idea of communism. ”

“ Finally I said I was ready to start the official demonstrations, and the official naval observers were called out to watch.
I did five speed dives first. These were to demonstrate that the ship would dive to terminal velocity. Contrary to popular opinion, a falling object will not go faster and faster and faster and faster. It will go faster and faster only up to a certain point. That point is reached when the object creates by its own passage through the air enough air resistance to that passage to equal in pounds the weight of the object. ”

“ The ship was beautiful. Its silver wings glistened in the sun. Its motor was a strong song that lifted it to high heights.
And then...
Down.
Down out of the blue heights we hurtled. Straight down. Faster. Faster and faster. Testing our strength by diving. ”

“ I was sitting alone in a movie not long ago. The newsreel came on. Jimmie Doolittle’s capable but impish face flashed upon the screen. Behind him was the fast, low-wing, all-metal Vultee plane in which he had just failed to better by more than a few minutes the Los Angeles—New York record for transport planes.
“I’m sorry I didn’t make faster time,” his picture spoke. “I didn’t do justice to the ship I flew. I wandered off my course during the night and hit the coast 200 miles south of where I should have hit it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is said to be at terminal velocity. A diving airplane is only a falling object, but it is a highly streamlined one, and therefore capable of a very high terminal velocity. A man falling through the air cannot attain a speed greater than about a hundred and twenty miles an hour. But the terminal velocity of an airplane is a lot more than that.
I led up to it carefully. I went to fifteen thousand feet to start the first dive. The ship dove smooth and steady. I pulled out at three hundred miles an hour and climbed back up to do the next dive. ”

“ CO-PILOT
Dick Blythe, who handled Lindbergh’s publicity not only after Lindbergh came back from Paris but also, as Dick stated to me, just before Lindbergh went to Paris, is a bit of aviation folklore in himself.
I just ran into Dick over at the Roosevelt Field restaurant, and he told me this one about Dean Smith. Dean is one of the oldest air-mail pilots. He started flying the mail ’way back in the postoffice days, just after the war. He is a lean six-foot-two, easy-going guy who would never talk much about his flying. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Flying the Alleghanies is common nowadays, what with modern equipment, lighted airways, blind flying instruments and radio. But in those days it was a feat.
Eddie was delayed in taking off and didn’t get over the mountains until after dark. Then his imagination began to work overtime.
That happens to a great many of us many times. A motor can be running along perfectly until you get over a spot where you can’t afford to have it quit. Then you begin worrying about it and can invariably find something wrong. ”

“ My friend said that the next time he took a whiff of oxygen it almost knocked him out of his seat.
I SPIN IN
I had been spin testing a Mercury Chic for several weeks, doing everything at a safe and sane altitude, being very scientific. I finally spun it in from an altitude of about three feet. And I mean spun it in too. The ship was a complete washout.
There was a strong wind that day, and a very gusty one. When I taxied out for the take-off the wind was on my tail. There were no brakes on the ship. It was very light, and in addition, a high wing job—always a top-heavy thing in a wind. ”