About two years before the P-80 crash landing, Barney was on his checkout flight in the Bell XP-77 prior to starting its test program. The XP-77 was a plywood fighter powered by a Ranger V-12 575-horsepower engine. Designed to dogfight with the Japanese Zeroes, it was more than 1,000 pounds lighter than the Zero, but it came out long after they had ceased to be a major threat. The only thing Zero about it was its worth to the AAF.
After checking its general handling and stall characteristics, Barney dived to pick up speed and started a loop, but he fell out of it at the top into a flat spin. Recovery from a flat spin can be difficult; without a rudder it becomes impossible. Unknown to Barney, the rudder had torn free from the vertical stabilizer. He tried everything he knew to break the spin, until, almost too late, he dived over the side and pulled the ripcord without counting to ten. If he had, the numbers from five to ten would have been recited posthumously. The chute opened; he swung once and hit the ground on the downswing. The XP-77 landed flat, about fifty feet away. The prop had chewed all the branches from one side of a scrub oak. When he didn't return from the flight, the squadron began a search of the area he had been flying over, and after several hours a pilot spotted the wreckage on the ground. Barney's parachute was nearby, but he did not see Barney. A short time later, a jeep was directed by radio to the wreck and found Barney ensconced in the upper branches of a nearby tree that he had climbed to escape the hordes of voracious Florida mosquitoes. Barney said he had waved when the plane came by looking for him, but the pilot evidently was not looking for him in a tree, especially as his chute was on the ground in plain view. At the time, Barney thought the fall had only knocked the wind out of him, but in later years he developed severe back problems that required a major operation to correct them.
In June I was checked out in my first night fighter, the Northrop P-61 Black Widow. It was the first airplane designed as a night fighter; all previous night fighters were modifications of aircraft originally designed for another purpose. It looked almost foreboding on the ramp, with its all-black paint and two big 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines. It was armed with four forward-firing 20mm cannon in the belly (lower fuselage) and with four .50-caliber machine guns in the top turret. The machine guns could be locked to fire forward as fixed guns operated by the pilot or used as moveable turret guns by the gunner, whose position was behind and above the pilot's cockpit. The radar operator sat in the back of the fuselage, facing forward, between the tail booms. He had no forward visibilty and not much to the sides. My brother Carl trained as a P-61 radar operator in Fresno, California, and he remarked that the only way he knew they were landing was when he saw the Roma Wine sign go by.
It was large for a fighter, with a wingspan of 66 feet and a gross weight of about 30,000 pounds, but it handled like a smaller plane. The flaps were long, reaching almost from wing tip to wing tip, and the ailerons were tiny, with a span of about 4 feet, but they were only to provide control feel for the pilot. Roll control was achieved by spoilers that rose out of the top surface of the wing; they reduced lift on one side or the other, causing the airplane to roll.
I had already completed the written test on the aircraft systems, so after a cockpit check by one of the other pilots, I started up and taxied to the end of the runway. Since this was my checkout flight, I was flying without a crew. The P-61 accelerated well at takeoff power, and it lifted off easily. I reached forward to raise the landing gear lever, careful not to ease the wheel forward unconsciously. I had been warned about pilots who nosed into the ground while raising the gear, especially at night. Just as I was congratulating myself for avoiding that pitfall — fighter pilots have to congratulate themselves since they are the only ones aboard — there was a loud impact behind me that I both heard and felt. I cut back to climb power and started a turn to stay close to the field in case something was amiss. All the instruments had their proper readings, and the airplane felt okay. To be on the safe side, I asked one of our pilots who was approaching the field in a Mustang to look the P-61 over and see if anything was loose or had fallen off. He assured me everything was all right, so I continued with the flight.
After landing I went back into ops and told the pilot who had checked me out about the noise and impact. He said with a smile, "I must have forgotten to tell you that the nosewheel slams into the up position, right under the pilot seat, when it retracts. It's perfectly normal." I found out later that every pilot being checked out was intentionally not told about the nosewheel so that he, too, could be surprised. Of course I followed the same procedure later when I checked pilots out in the P-61.
I had a sad duty to perform late in June. The Grumman F7F Tigercat tests were completed, and the airplane was declared surplus to the requirements of the AAF. I was detailed to fly it to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where it was to be used as a target for gun and rocket tests. It was in excellent condition with little more than a hundred hours of flying time, and it seemed wasteful to destroy it. I thought we should give it back to the Navy, but they wanted only the two-seat night fighter version. If I could have hidden it away somewhere, today it would be worth several hundred thousand dollars to the avid collectors of warbirds. Before I took off for Aberdeen I had to sign a form stating that the aircraft clock was installed and working. After an uneventful flight with one landing at Spartanburg, South Carolina (I didn't need fuel but wanted to make an extra landing and takeoff), I landed at Aberdeen, where the operations officer signed for the clock and, incidentally, for the F7F. It was only one of the disappointments I experienced during this period.
About a month earlier, Colonel Muldoon had assigned me as test pilot for the Japanese Kawasaki Ki-61 Hien (Swallow) that had been brought to the States following the war. It was better known to Americans by its code name "Tony." I had never encountered one in combat, although a few had been reported in China. I was looking forward to flying it and was excited when I learned it was to be flown to Eglin from Wright Field in a few days. Unfortunately, the engine failed during the ferry flight, and the pilot had to make a belly landing. He was not injured, but the airplane was not reparable without more effort than it was worth. As a result I lost what I thought would be my only chance to fly a foreign airplane, but in 1993 in France, I flew two Russian planes, an Antonev An-2 and a Yak-11.
Early in July, one of the married pilots in the squadron, who considered it his duty to keep abreast of such events, announced in operations that two new good-looking blondes were now living on the base. The arrival of two blondes was big news. Eglin was in such a sparsely populated area that young women hired as secretaries often lived too far away to commute. The base housed them in dormitories, enclosed by high metal fences, that were off-limits to men (an old-fashioned idea). The young ladies had to meet their gentlemen callers in a small building outside the fence. A few days later I saw them from a distance but couldn't tell much except that our intelligence seemed to be correct.