Pilots often play jokes on each other when they fly together.
Two pilots I knew at Kelly Field had been up to Dallas on a week-end
cross-country trip. They started back on a very rough day and were
bouncing all around the sky.
About fifty miles out of San Antonio, the pilot who was flying the ship
turned around to ask the other one in the rear seat for some matches. He
couldn't see him, so he figured he was slumped down in the cockpit,
napping. He looked back under his arm inside the fuselage. The rear
cockpit was empty!
He was only flying at about five hundred feet, hadn't been flying any
higher than that on the whole trip, and at times had been flying even
lower.
Scared to death that his passenger had loosened his belt to stretch out
and sleep and had been thrown out of the cockpit in a bump, perhaps even
failing to recognize his predicament in time to open his chute, the
pilot swung back on his course and started searching the route he had
covered for signs of a body. He searched back over as much of it as he
dared and still have enough gas left to turn around again and go on into
Kelly Field.
He found nothing and was worried sick all the way back to Kelly. But
when he landed, there was the other pilot, grinning a greeting at him.
The pilot who had been in the rear seat explained that he had undone his
belt to stretch out and sleep and that the next thing he knew he felt a
bump and woke up with a start to discover the cockpit about four feet
beneath him and off to one side. He said he reached, but only grabbed
thin air. The tail surfaces passed by under him, and he saw the airplane
flying off without him.
He was too astounded at first, but quickly realized he ought to do
something, sitting out there in space with no airplane or anything, so
he pulled his rip cord. His chute opened just in time.
He walked over to the main road he had been flying over so recently and
thumbed himself a ride to Kelly Field. He said he had seen the ship turn
around and start back looking for him.
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.