What is a 14-Year-Old Boy Doing at the Controls?
It was 1945 and the war was running down fast, Germany had surrendered, and the last and final act in the Pacific was unfolding. Many pilots had returned to the US, some having completed their allotted number of missions, others because of wounds or injuries that needed time to heal.
Two of these pilots were great swimmers, so they showed up daily at the Officer’s Club pool right on the shore of Mobile Bay. (Little did I realize that most of the time these characters were working off a hangover from their carousing the night before.)
I became friendly with “Mississippi”, a Captain with over 100 missions over Germany in P-47s. His buddy was “Bulldog”, also a Captain, who had been shot up over France, and flew his Mustang back to the UK, landed it, and then passed out. The pair of them had been given a sinecure assignment of checking out repaired planes before they were returned to service.
After I had made a nuisance of myself asking questions about their planes and missions, Mississippi came up with the idea of taking me with them on their next check ride. I was thrilled! The next day, at 1300 sharp I appeared at the Operations Room after having ridden my bike halfway around the base from the officer’s housing area where I lived.
Mississippi took me in hand and outfitted me with a chute, and made sure I knew what to do if I had to use it. The three of us walked across the tarmac to an old C-47 that had just had a thousand-hour overhaul. Mississippi and Bulldog walked around the plane to ensure everything was OK – a preflight check.
We climbed in; Mississippi was in the left seat, and Bulldog in the right. I was on a jump seat just behind them. They went through the usual checks, ran up the engines, taxied out to the runway and we took off. We climbed up to about 5,000 feet out over the Bay, and they went through a series of maneuvers and checks. It was a very clear day, no clouds, so the visibility was great.
Bulldog then got up and said he was going to take a nap in the rear, and motioned me to take his seat. Mississippi then began to instruct me on how to fly a C-47. He let me do some easy turns around big Bay buoys, then showed me how to use power to climb higher, and how to cut back on power to descend. I was really in heaven!
Then he asked me, did I think I could fly the plane for a while. I said yes, so he said to keep it at 5,000 feet, head due South for the ocean and keep over the Bay. When I got there I could do some turns or whatever I wanted, and then to head home, and he’d be back up to the cockpit before we got back to the Mobile area. With that, he too went to the rear, made a pillow of his chute, and was instantly asleep alongside Bulldog.
So there I was, a 14-year-old boy, 5,000 feet up in a twin-engine plane, piloting it virtually alone for the very first time after maybe 15 or 20 minutes of instruction. Flying the plane was so simple, however, that I didn’t think about what I’d do if we had an emergency of any kind. I just flew towards the ocean, and did some tentative banks and turns. The guys didn’t wake up, so I became bolder, made my turns tighter, and tried out the throttles to keep altitude just as I had been taught. They still didn’t wake up.
Then I climbed her up to maybe 6,000 feet, leveled off, cruised there for a few minutes, then eased back to 5,000 feet in a slightly diving turn. Still no wakefulness in the rear. It dawned on me then that the guys were sleeping off their hangovers while a kid (me!) ran them around the sky. (Had there been any untoward, jerky motion of the plane or strange engine noises they would have instantly awakened and rushed to the cockpit. This they told me afterwards!)
I was circling a sailboat when Mississippi came up and gave me a pat on the head! “Good job!”, he said. “But now you have to learn how to land. No sense in getting up here unless you can get back down in one piece.” He saw that I was shocked, so he said, “OK, I will handle the tower, flaps and landing gear, you just fly the plane as I tell you!” I said ok, sort of.
At his instructions, I flew the downwind leg, turned onto the base leg, then onto final approach, went over the outer marker, letting down at 400 feet per minute, and then I looked at the runway. It was dancing all over the place! There was a slight crosswind, and I was over-controlling to try to line up the plane with that jittering runway!
He put down the flaps and gear, and we were over the inner marker, I’d guess about 50 feet to the left of the concrete on the grass margin, but still about 100 feet up. I was petrified! Sweat begin to soak me all over. I steered right, but we seemed to float left as I did it. Panicked now at about 25 feet up, I looked at Mississippi. He gave a huge rebel yell of glee, grabbed the yoke and yanked the plane back onto the runway and sat her down nicely. I collapsed, totally drenched in my sweat, and pale as vanilla ice cream!
The guys were in tears they were laughing so hard! I had been set up in their diabolical scheme to scare me out of ten year's growth, just for the hell of it! They had a story to tell their buddies.
But then, so did I!
# posted by Mannning @ 11:55 PM
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