A pilot should never be too stubborn with an airplane. I learned that
early, fortunately, without coming to grief in the process.
Another pilot criticized my flying once. He criticized the way I was
making my take-offs. Kidlike and cocky, just out of flying school, I
took a foolish way of proving he was wrong. But he had me so riled by
his caustic and nasty remarks about how I was going to kill myself if I
kept that up that I flung out a challenge to him and felt I had to keep
my attitude even when I saw I was overdoing the thing and thought I was
going to crack up.
"If you think my take-offs are so dangerous," I told him, "I'll just go
out there and cut my gun in the most dangerous spot of this dangerous
take-off and land safely back in the airport." And I stalked out,
fuming, and got in the ship.
I took off toward the high trees at the end of the field, didn't let the
ship climb very steeply approaching the trees, and banked just before I
got to them--exactly like I had been doing on the take-offs he had been
criticizing. But I also pulled up sharply, just to make it worse. I
didn't want him to have any comeback. I cut the gun and started dropping
back in over the trees into the airport. I should have put the nose down
a little to cushion the drop, but I was mad. I'd show him the worse way.
I wanted to gun it because I was dropping hard, but I wouldn't give him
the satisfaction.
I hit like a ton of bricks. The ship groaned and bounced as high as a
hangar. Luckily, it was a square hit and a square bounce. That's the
only reason I didn't spread the ship all over the field. It hit and
bounced again and rolled to a very short stop for a down-wind landing.
"All right," 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 didn't dare and he knew it. So he just glared at me, knowing damned
well, as I knew myself, that I should by all rights have cracked up on
that landing. But I had him, and he shut up and didn't make any more
cracks about me.