After about a week under these conditions I developed a bad cold. Colonel Shanahan was nearby when I let loose a few of my kamikaze sneezes, and he called me into his office to ask how I had caught cold. I said it might have been caused by the cold Quonset huts. Concerned, he immediately picked up the phone and asked for the housing officer. He said that one of the two jet pilots in the detachment had caught a severe cold from living in the Quonset huts and that he wanted me moved into the main building because, being a jet pilot, I was under terrific strain. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, "Lopez, go up and see the housing officer, and look jetty." I went to the housing office and looked as jetty as I could, but evidently it wasn't jetty enough to move the housing officer, because he didn't move me. With fifty more hours in jets, I could probably have made it.
The humidity in the Fairbanks area was very low, and this along with the wool rugs in the main BOQs made static electricity a problem for most of us, but for Colonel Muldoon it was an opportunity. When we went to his office or room for meetings or for other reasons, he delighted in sneaking up behind someone while scuffing his shoes on the rug and popping an inch-long blue spark off the victim's ear. His rank was an insulator against reciprocity.
During extreme cold weather there was a phenomenon in the Fairbanks area known as ice fog. Ice crystals formed a dense fog that was only some twenty feet thick but that reduced the visibility essentially to zero. Occasionally, when the visibility was unlimited, something would trigger the atmosphere, and the fog would form almost instantaneously. The first time I took off in a jet from Ladd, the fog formed behind me and closed the field, causing me some concern. Fortunately it had dissipated when I came in to land an hour later, and I had no difficulty. Some time later it was to be the cause of a tragic accident involving Colonel Shanahan.
The cold-weather test detachment maintained a bombing and gunnery range about thirty miles from Ladd near Blair Lake. As soon as the Tanana River had frozen solid enough to support a loaded Weasel (a small tracked vehicle used to move personnel and cargo over rough terrain), Colonel Muldoon led a group of three Weasels to carry the bombing range crew and supplies out to Blair Lake. Barney and I rode with him in the lead Weasel, which was breaking the trail. It was about 30 below zero, and we had flying suits, winter flying pants, and parkas over our uniforms and mukluks on our feet. The cold wasn't too noticeable inside the Weasel, but once we crossed the river and entered the heavily forested area, we had to get out so often to clear fallen trees and debris that we decided to ride on the outside to save time. I was extremely cold until I found a warm spot over the exhaust pipe to sit on. After that, the rest of the four- or five-hour trip was a piece of cake, albeit ice cream cake. Colonel Shanahan spiced up the journey by roaring over our heads periodically in a UC-64 Norduyn Norseman (a single-engine, high-wing utility or bush airplane), leaning out of the cockpit window, and waving wildly while clearing the tree tops by at least an inch.
After we arrived at the cabin at Blair Lake range we fueled and lit the kerosene stoves and started a fire in the fireplace. When it got warm enough I removed my winter outer gear and found out why I had been so comfortably warm on the Weasel. The heat from the exhaust had burned completely through the seat of my outer pants, and my flying suit seat was scorched as though a hot iron had been left on it. Luckily, layer number three, my uniform trousers, had escaped unscathed, because layer number four was tender epidermis — mine. I was accustomed to flying by the seat of my pants, but not in a Weasel. The return trip the next morning was uneventful, quicker, and much more comfortable, since I was inside and not on the hot seat.
In the next few months I flew several missions in the Norseman as copilot and kicker, thereby acquiring a new MOS (military occupational specialty). We were delivering food and cans of fuel to the Blair Lake crew, and lacking a place to land, we had to air-drop the supplies. When we arrived over the range I went to the rear of the cabin where the door had been removed, tied myself to cabin strong points, and kicked the cargo through the open door on the pilot's signal.
Since the food in the officer's mess wasn't the best, three or four times a week Colonel Muldoon, Barney, two or three others, and I would go into Fairbanks and have steak dinners at the Model Cafe, which I believe was the only eating place in town. The decor was early nothing, but the food was quite good, especially when compared with the fare at the mess. It became our custom, at Colonel Muldoon's instigation, to match coins to see who would pay for all the meals. The steak dinners were inexpensive by today's standards, about $3, but salaries were commensurately low too, and paying for five or six meals regularly would have been a strain on a captain's pay. However, the laws of probability did not seem to be affected by the cold, and the costs were spread pretty evenly among us over the course of our stay.
My first flight from Ladd in the P-80, with the temperature at 20 below zero, was uneventful, but my next flight, about a week later at 50 below, was eventful. When I started the engine it rumbled and took much longer to reach idle rpm than normal, but since it seemed to be running all right, I took off. After about 45 minutes, while at 35,000 feet, I heard a strange rubbing noise from the engine and could also feel a vibration in the fuselage. The engine instruments were in the green, but I throttled back and returned to the base to land. The plane was heavier than the normal landing weight, because there was still fuel in the tip tanks, so I added a few mph to my approach speed. As I started to flare, the bottom suddenly dropped out; the airplane stalled about three feet in the air and hit the runway hard. Fortunately the P-80 was extremely rugged, and the only damage was to my pride. Later, the crew chief found that the static ports had iced up, causing the airspeed indicator to read high, thereby restoring some but not all of the face I had lost.
When the engine was removed, it was revealed that the turbine wheel had been rubbing against its housing, which had most likely warped during the engine start. Since it couldn't be repaired in the field, the engine was replaced, a relatively simple task in the P-80. The airplane was removed from the hangar and cold-soaked for several days at below minus 50 degrees. When the crew chief started the engine, it reacted the same way that it had on the last flight. He immediately closed the fuel stopcock and shut it down. The airplane was towed back into the hangar, and after it had warmed up the engine was pulled and inspected. Again the turbine housing had warped, and the blades would have rubbed if the engine hadn't been shut down so promptly. Colonel Muldoon wisely decided to ground both P-80s until we got a handle on the problem. The Lockheed technical representative who was there for the tests asked that Allison, the manufacturer of the engines, send an engineer to Alaska for consultation.
With the P-80s grounded, Barney and I were out of work as far as our primary tests were concerned. To continue to fly, I rode as copilot with Colonel Muldoon in a Curtiss C-46 Commando on a cargo flight to Great Falls and back; we logged more than twenty hours, and I was checked out as first pilot. It was quite a switch from the P-80 I had been flying for the last few months. It weighed more than 55,000 pounds to the P-80's 14,500, and it had two reciprocating engines and was a tail dragger — the P-80 had one jet engine and a tricycle landing gear. Most noticeable, however, was the difference in the height of the cockpit. In the P-80 the pilot's eye level in the landing attitude was about eight feet above the runway; in the C-46 it was seventeen feet. On the plus side, I had a fair amount of twin-engine time and had flown the same engine-propeller combination (Pratt & Whitney 2,000-horsepower R-2800 engines and Curtiss Electric propellers) in the B-26, the P-47, and the P-61. My landings were pretty good, too, because Colonel Muldoon announced before each one that it would cost me a steak per bounce.