_How Dark the Clouds_
During my four years at the University of Washington in Seattle after
World War II, I kept strong ties with Naval aviation. In early 1946 I
helped organize a reserve squadron, VF-74, a group of mature “Weekend
Warriors.” The pilots were experienced aviators, mostly married men
and veterans of the war. Under Navy supervision we trained hard to
achieve a high degree of readiness, prepared for instant mobilization
in the event the nation went to war again. We flew drills two days
a month and spent two weeks on active Navy duty every year. Our
squadron was consistently among the leaders in Naval reserve gunnery
scores, but we could never claim a trophy because our maverick pilots
were indifferent to paperwork. For me personally, my tour with this
hard-flying outfit provided not only the most rewarding moments in
the air but also in one instance the most humiliating.
The rewarding moments came during the months and months of weekend
flights around Seattle. Our squadron was furnished a mixed bag of
F6F and F4U Corsair airplanes, leftovers from World War II requiring
constant maintenance. After the Navy demobilized, funds were scarce
for reserve squadrons and thus our operations were run on a
tight-fisted basis. One result was that we pilots could not shift
around, checking out in different airplanes. I was an F6F pilot,
restricted to that type of airplane. This annoyed me. The Corsair was
considered something of a flying challenge, a fairly unstable plane,
quick to stall and difficult to recover from a spin, but none the
less a superior gun platform. I longed to master that beast and at
the same time possibly improve my gunnery score.
One day while I was waiting in the operations office for my airplane
assignment, the officer detailing the airplanes piped up: “Hey, I
need a Corsair pilot.” It happened that at that moment there were
none around.
“Put me down,” I called. I had been waiting for just such a chance.
It never occurred to this officer to ask me if I were checked out
in the plane. He neatly printed “Crossfield” on the blackboard in a
space alongside the number of the airplane.
In a way, airplanes are like women, that is to say impossible to
understand fully, and often ticklish to handle. It takes a little
time to get to know them, to find out how and to what they respond.
Some must be manipulated by fingertips, with infinite finesse, others
must be pushed around like trucks. Some forgive the pilot’s sins;
some don’t. The Corsair was very nearly inscrutable. She was hard
to figure, slightly forgiving, and she required a great deal of
attention.
I found this out under extraordinary circumstances. Soon after my
name appeared on the board, I took off with five other planes. The
flight had moved out so quickly I had time only to glance briefly
at the airplane handbook in the cockpit. The flight leader was in a
frisky mood. When we reached altitude he whipped the formation into
the damnedest tail chase I have ever been in. I found myself in that
totally strange airplane doing Cuban Eights, loops, barrel rolls,
chandelles, and the Lord knows what else. Only a pilot can fully
appreciate this situation, I suppose. Locked in that crazy ride, with
one plane twenty feet ahead of me and another twenty feet behind,
I really sweated. I thought to myself: “You damned fool. How’d you
ever get into this?” But I wasn’t about to pull out, to admit that I
couldn’t hack it.
The Crossfield luck rode with me that day. I sinned, but the Corsair
was in a forgiving mood. There was no mid-air collision. The whole
flight came down alive and landed. From that point on I was a Corsair
man and glad of it. My gunnery score improved. Much later someone
noticed that my paperwork was not in order for that plane. But it was
too late then and the fact was overlooked. The outfit was an action
squadron.
Our squadron skipper was Commander William Flateboe, a married man
a little older than I, twenty-nine or so. We had served together at
Corpus as instructors. When he was an ensign at Corpus, Flateboe was
one of the wildest flat-hatters in Texas, a champion windmiller. When
we organized the Reserve squadron, he was as conservative in the air
as an airline pilot. But as the weeks and months dragged on, both
he and I became restless and bored in the air and a second stage of
infantile flat-hatting set in. I think I must have logged fifty hours
flying below the rim of the Columbia River gorge.
In the midst of this flat-hatting renaissance, the thought struck
me that we ought to legalize our flat-hatting. Thus was born the
13th Naval District Stunt Team, which in time became one of the best
aerial stunt teams in the country, and we felt, of course, that it
was _the_ best. There were four of us on the team: Flateboe, the
“slot” man, Lou Colvin, a wingman, and an ensign named Bill Helsell,
my usual wingman; I was the leader. The really remarkable fact about
this stunt team was that we performed our precision formations in the
supposedly dangerous Corsair.
Helsell was a fabulous aviator, one of the few men I have known whom
I completely trusted in the air. He was low on total flying hours,
and from a technical standpoint he knew and cared little or nothing
about airplanes, but he was a rare natural pilot.
I first met him in a University car pool. He was the son of a Seattle
lawyer. He studied engineering at Yale, achieving a straight A
record; then he switched to law at the University of Washington,
graduating cum laude. He was a dour-faced lad, outwardly a cynic and
cold as ice. But that was a mask; he displayed many a kindness but
feigned annoyance at the necessity.
Formation stunt flying, to my mind, is the quintessence of
precision, and beyond any doubt it requires much skill and intense
concentration. All four planes, tucked in as tight as we could get
them without scraping paint, flew through the air as though locked
together by invisible steel bars. As the leader, I guided the team.
The other three planes flew “on me,” adjusting speed in minute
increments, always keeping their eyes fixed on my plane. If I looped,
they looped in unison. If I rolled, they rolled in unison. If I
pulled a Cuban Eight, they pulled Cuban Eights in unison. Had I flown
straight into the ground, they would have flown straight in with me
in unison.
I set a hard pace. Striving for perfection and developing a flair
for showmanship, which is the ultimate goal of most stunt teams,
we worked at our drills at altitude. When we flew them cold, we
performed right on the deck, a wingspan above the ground. We were
soon very much in demand for various events. We felt that even in our
aging Corsairs we could show the Regular Navy Blue Angels in their
Bearcats a thing or two.
The original team did not last long. Flateboe was the first to go.
Something had been eating away at him. One weekend evening while
working at the base on some papers, he got up and said: “To hell with
it.” He jumped in an airplane and set a course to rendezvous with one
of the squadron flights on a training exercise out over the Strait of
Juan de Fuca. Flateboe overhauled the flight at great speed and wound
his plane into a gigantic barrel-roll around the formation. That was
the last anyone ever saw of him. He evidently dived straight into the
water. Later Colvin dropped out, leaving Helsell and me to carry on.
A subtle shift in emphasis then took place. Showmanship became
secondary, the spectators unimportant. The stunt team changed into a
delightful, though perhaps dangerous, aerial contest between two very
competitive pilots. All attempts to make Helsell cry “uncle” failed.
This contest reached its peak one day in Astoria, Oregon. I pulled
out of a giant loop not more than twenty feet above the ground,
screaming across the airport at 350 miles an hour. A tower, part of
an adjoining skeet range, loomed in our path, dead ahead. I bore
on, casually lifting my wing to clear the tower in the last second.
Locked in beside me, Helsell skillfully followed my maneuver, never
once batting an eyelash.
“_That_ ought to scare you,” I radioed.
“You’ll have to do better than that, Dad,” Helsell replied.
There was a professional stunt team, a barnstorming outfit complete
with wing-walkers and a delayed-parachute performer, giving a show
on the same field that day. After we landed, the leader of this team
came up to me and said: “Hey, fellow. Do us a favor, will you? Will
you please stay away from the fields where we’re working? You’ll put
us out of business.”
I considered that one of the finest compliments ever paid us, but the
man had no cause for worry. Helsell and I soon put ourselves out of
business. One day during a regatta on Lake Washington, I led Helsell
through a low-altitude formation roll over a crowd watching the crew
races. Such a maneuver was routine to us then (we had logged five
hundred hours of precision-stunt-flying), although by CAA regulations
illegal. Probably a hundred amateur movie cameras caught the act. The
13th Naval District received a mass complaint shortly afterwards and
restricted us to an altitude minimum of 1,000 feet.
“Hell,” I said, “at 1,000 feet it’s no fun.”
“I know,” the Old Man said, “but that’s an order.” He abruptly ended
the conversation. And with that the stunt team folded.
Working with that team, working that fine artistry in Corsairs, was
one of the most rewarding periods in the air I have ever experienced.
Every second of each maneuver was a supreme satisfaction, a delight
akin to playing fine music.
With me the bad always comes with the good. The most humiliating
experience I had in an airplane occurred during a routine drill with
VF-74. The fact that I was a party to this fiasco has stuck like
a lance in my side ever since. It seemed impossible that our fine
outfit could pull such a blooper. It began one day while we were on
two weeks’ active duty, flying out of Sand Point.
It seems that the Naval Reserve unit in land-locked Denver, Colorado,
was having difficulty in stirring up public interest and getting
recruits. Someone conceived a grandiose plan: our whole air group,
including VF-74, some twenty-five fighters and fifteen torpedo
planes, would fly to Denver en masse and land amid contrived hoopla
and press coverage. As a good-will gesture and public relations
stunt, we would bring along an ice-packed salmon caught that same
day in Puget Sound and present it to the mayor of Denver. Afterwards
there would be a big official dinner party, more hoopla, and finally
a gay time for us on the town, we hoped. We packed our smartest
uniforms and took off.
Disaster struck the torpedo planes flying in separate formation.
Caught in a bad storm, they were forced to land on a field in Helena,
Montana, in a stiff ninety-degree crosswind. The long crosswind taxi
of these cumbersome birds burned out the downwind brakes on several
of the planes. With no brakes the planes were finished, grounded. The
salmon, a key item in the good-will gesture, was on board one of the
torpedo planes. It never left Helena.
The remaining airplanes, our twenty-five fighters, first ran into
trouble at Ogden, Utah, when we landed to refuel. Fifteen of us took
off without difficulty, but the engine of the sixteenth plane conked
out on the narrow taxiway, blocking the remaining nine planes. They
could not get into the air until the disabled plane was towed out of
the way. The fifteen of us waited at altitude for a quarter of an
hour, then radioed that we were pushing on alone. After all, there
was a huge reception gathering at the Denver airport and we couldn’t
be late. No, sir.
We were falling behind schedule now and our leader elected to
bypass the ordinary roundabout air routes and steer a direct
course for Denver, about four hundred miles away. This course
led us directly over the Continental Divide and some of the most
desolate, mountainous country in the world, which from 15,000 feet
had a remarkable sameness about it. I laid out a course on a chart
but, as was customary in fighters, let the flight commander do
the navigating. He miscalculated a compass heading and we drove
on, aiming considerably south of Denver, all of us thinking he had
reasons of his own for this course.
After some time I was convinced that we were steering too far to the
south. The same feeling overcame the other thirteen pilots in our
formation. Suddenly the radio was alive with chatter and debate. The
skipper broke in and said: “If I’m right, then in four and a half
minutes we’ll pass over Waldron, Colorado.” Precisely four and a half
minutes later we passed over a town on the fork of a river which
resembled the plan of Waldron on the chart. There was an airfield on
the opposite bank which seemed to confirm positively the skipper’s
navigation. However, to make doubly sure, I peeled off and dived into
the valley to check the name on any available sign. I missed signs
but spotted a large “W” painted on the mountainside. It was Waldron,
all right, I thought. The skipper was correct.
Actually we were over Gunnison, Colorado, considerably to the south
of Waldron. Gunnison, too, is located on the fork of a river with
an airfield on the opposite bank. The “W” on the mountainside had
nothing to do with Waldron. It was put there by the students of
Western State College in Gunnison.
Led astray by this strange set of coincidences, we flew on following
the skipper, who predicted a second town lying ahead, Fort Collins.
Twenty seconds later a town passed beneath our wings.
“We are now forty miles north of Denver,” the skipper said. “Close
into parade formation.” We pulled our planes together in neat
formation, following the highway straight into Denver, or so we
thought, then about ten minutes away. We flew and flew and flew.
Fifteen minutes passed, but no sign of Denver, no familiar big-city
haze, no gradual build-up of traffic on the highway, no increase in
housing. On the contrary, the countryside looked, if anything, more
desolate. Helsell, who usually had little to say, piped up sourly:
“I’m logging a strong Las Vegas, New Mexico, beam.” Now we were very
concerned. Time was ticking away.
Again there was a confused debate on the radio. In the midst of it
we passed over still another small town. I peeled off and buzzed
it. The Rotary Club sign on the highway at the city limits read:
“Alamosa.” Alamosa? No one knew where this could be. It was off our
charts. Nine of our planes, low on fuel, pulled out of formation and
landed at Alamosa.
I radioed my wingman, Bill Helsell:
“Nuts. I’m going to find Denver. You want to come with me?” He did,
of course, so we cleared with the skipper and took off on our own,
fiddling with our radios, trying to pick up a station, any station.
Thunderstorms all around us gave little but static.
Regretting now that I had not carefully tracked the skipper’s
navigating, I retraced our course from memory on my plotting board.
We had indeed come too far south and Denver lay to the northeast of
us. We flew in that direction. Soon we picked up Trinidad radio,
which I knew was south of Denver, but still off our charts. We
homed eastward on Trinidad and then turned due north, on course to
Denver at last. We picked up Pueblo radio beacon as expected. Homing
on Pueblo, we flew into a very black thunderhead full of rain and
lightning. In that weather we lost the Pueblo radio signal. Minutes
later we relocated ourselves by radio. We had passed Pueblo, which
was under the storm. We couldn’t see the ground.
Long overdue in Denver, the authorities there became concerned about
us and sounded a disaster alert. They figured we had exhausted our
fuel. The Navy, the Civil Air Patrol, the Air National Guard, and the
Lord knows who else, took to the air in search of fifteen Navy planes
downed somewhere on the Continental Divide. The nine fighter planes
blocked on the runway in Ogden had finally made it, sans fish, to
Denver. There was great confusion at the airport over whether to wait
for the lost planes or begin the ceremonies with the nine pilots.
Helsell and I were doing our damnedest--almost. Used to conserving
fuel, another of our private competitions, we were still in the air
looking for Denver. Every time we saw a house we zoomed down to see
if it held a clue. Convinced that Denver lay to the northeast, I made
one more attempt to find it. We flew northeast and came up over a
ridge right into the face of another black line of thunderheads. I
began to lose heart. It was almost dark, we had only a half-hour’s
fuel, the radios yielded only static. To plunge into that
thunderstorm flying blind, in the Rocky Mountains, with the distance
to Denver unknown, could be idiotic.
“What do you think?” I radioed Helsell.
“Do _you_ think we should turn back?” he answered.
“Yes,” I said.
“So do I.”
And turn back we did, searching for the nearest airfield. At the
point of turning we were exactly twenty-three miles southwest of
Denver, or about six minutes by Corsair. The thunderstorm line was
thin and lying on the last ridge before the midwestern plains.
Denver was clear as a bell. If we had pressed on for six more
minutes, we would have landed, salvaging part of the day, heroes,
pride of the Navy. Instead we were bums. We landed on a mountainside
field--elevation 9700 feet--in a small town called Fairplay,
Colorado, and joined the skipper and three other pilots who had
followed the same course.
When I found how close we had come, I was mortified. The next day
when we got to Denver, after the Navy sent a gasoline truck to refuel
us, I was even more mortified. Captain Greber flew down from Seattle
to chew us out.
“I can understand the torpedo planes grounded in Helena, out of
commission,” Greber said. “I can understand one plane, or maybe two
planes, getting lost. By really stretching my imagination I can
conceive of maybe six planes getting lost together. But fifteen
airplanes, in largely clear weather on a four-hundred-mile flight! An
hour-and-a-half hop. It’s beyond belief.”
He was right. It was the most incompetent, unprofessional, ridiculous
performance I had ever seen in the air, one that I could have
tempered if I had held to my convictions and not quit. Worse was the
fact that my decision also made Helsell look like a chump.
This brilliant maneuver did little to boost recruiting in Denver,
but it brought VF-74 fame of a different sort in Navy circles. For me
it was a great personal lesson. Not once since then, either on land
or in the air, have I ever turned back from any course that I set
upon, no matter how dark the clouds that lay ahead.