One flight test I gave, when I was an inspector for the Department of
Commerce, was almost my last.
I went up with a guy, saw in three minutes he couldn't fly, took the
controls away from him, landed, and told him to come back some other
day. He pleaded with me that I hadn't given him a chance, that if I
would only let him go further through the test without taking the
controls away he would show me he could fly.
So I took him up again. I let him slop along without interference until
we came to spins. I told him to do a spin, and he started a steep
spiral. I took the controls away from him, regained some altitude, told
him to do a spin again, and he started a steep spiral again--a lousy
spiral, too!
I thought maybe he was afraid to do a spin, so I said the mental
equivalent of "Skip it" to myself and told him to do a three-sixty. He
should have gone to fifteen hundred feet, cut the gun, turned around
once in his glide and landed on a spot under where he had cut the gun.
He went to two thousand feet instead, put the ship in a steep, skidding
spiral verging on a spin--he was death on steep spirals--and held it
there. Round and round we went. I let him go. I wanted to convince him
this time.
I had been watching for it, but at two hundred feet the ship beat me to
it even so and flipped right over on its back. I made one swift
movement, knocking the throttle open with my left hand in passing, and
grabbed the stick with both hands. The guy was frantically freezing
backward on it, but my sudden, violent attack on it gave me the lead on
him and I managed to get the stick just far enough forward to stop the
spin we had begun. I was sure we were going to hit the ground swooping
out of the resultant dive, but by some miracle we missed it.
I landed immediately and was so mad I started to walk off without saying
anything. But the guy followed me, bleating, "Please, Mr. Collins.
Please, Mr. Collins," until I relented and turned to speak.
Before I could say anything he broke in on me with: "Please, Mr.
Collins, please don't grab the controls from me like that just because I
make one too many turns. I could bring the ship down all right."
My mouth opened and closed speechlessly. Bring it down! Bring us both
down in a heap! But how could I say it and make myself understood? The
guy didn't even know we had been in a spin. He didn't know we had almost
broken our necks in one. He thought I was impatient!