Jimmie Doolittle has demonstrated American airplanes all over the world.
He landed on one of his tours at Bandoeng, Java, headquarters of the
Dutch East Indian Air Corps. They had some American, Conqueror-powered,
Curtiss Hawks there. They asked Jimmie to take one of them up and put on
a show for them.
After turning the ship inside out for the better part of an hour, Jimmie
really got into the spirit of the thing. He decided to dive straight
down from about 6,000 feet and conclude the show by showing them how
close he could come to the ground, pulling out of the dive.
He turned over and started down. Straight down, closer and closer to the
ground, wide open, he roared. He yanked back on the stick to just clear
the ground and discovered there were several little considerations he
had overlooked. One was that he had just stepped out f a Cyclone-powered
Hawk, much lighter than the Conqueror-powered one he was desperately
trying to clear the airport in at that moment. The other was that he was
accustomed to flying the lighter ship out of a sea-level airport, much
heavier-aired than the 2,500-foot-high airport that he was at that
moment trying to avoid. The heavier ship squashed in the thinner air and
hit the ground in the pull-out. Just kissed it and skimmed into the air
again.
Jimmie wondered if his landing gear had been swiped off, came around,
landed, and discovered that it hadn't.
The Dutch officers rushed out to him when he crawled out of his cockpit.
"My God, Jimmie," they chorused, slapping him on the back, "that was the
most delicate piece of flying we have ever seen!"
"Huh," Jimmie grunted, still thinking how lucky he had been to get away
with it, "delicate piece of flying, hell! That was the dumbest piece of
flying I ever did in my life!"
They knew it too, of course, despite the polite way they had put it. So
from then on Jimmie was ace-high with them, because he had admitted the
boner instead of trying to lie out of it.