There was no radar control at Ladd, and the tower operator assumed the aircraft had taken off safely, since he was unable to see it at any point in its run. The plane had cut the phone lines in the hangar, and it was some time before a mechanic, who by great good fortune was working in the hangar, was able to make his way through the almost impenetrable fog to the fire station. Still more time was lost as the fire trucks and ambulance crept cautiously through the fog to the hangar. Had the mechanic not been working, it is unlikely the crash would have been discovered in time, and Colonel Shanahan might not have survived.
The crew and passengers were removed from the plane and taken to the hospital, where their relatively minor injuries, mostly frostbite, were cared for. Colonel Shanahan, however, remained trapped in the cockpit for several harrowing hours while the wreckage was cut away. At the hospital the surgeon was forced to make the heartbreaking decision to amputate his leg, because it was so badly mangled. In fact, the surgeon later told us that the extreme cold had saved the colonel's life. The wound had frozen and stopped the bleeding before the loss of blood became fatal.
Upon learning of the accident the next morning, we were shocked and saddened by Colonel Shanahan's loss but were relieved that there were no fatalities and no other serious injuries. He was popular at Ladd and well respected throughout the Army Air Forces, and the knowledge that he would have to give up flying and leave his beloved Air Force depressed us all. When we were allowed to see him in the hospital, however, he was in good spirits and said he would continue to work with armament as a civilian.
A few days later he was airlifted back to a major military hospital in the States, and Colonel Walker, his deputy, assumed command of the detachment. Colonel Muldoon asked me to see that all of Colonel Shanahan's belongings were packed for shipment back to his home in Dayton, Ohio. I moved into Colonel Shanahan's warm room for several weeks while attending to the packing — the room of the same colonel who had tried so many times before to get me moved into the main BOQ.
Packing his belongings was much more of a chore than I had anticipated. He wasn't much for collecting duplicates, but he had one of everything. His specialty was armament, and he had more guns, ammunition, and assorted accessories than I had ever seen. Included were several homemade rifles made from Browning .50-caliber machine gun barrels. Admittedly, I took my time packing so I could stay in the comfortable building as long as possible, but even with my best effort it would have taken quite a while. I carefully packed everything but his papers in a large wooden crate, but when two muscular GIs came to move it, they could not budge it. It was back to square one. I had to unpack it and repack it in several smaller crates before it could be moved and shipped. Sadly, when it was moved out, so was I.
Time was beginning to weigh heavily on me. My main duty was test flying, and I was doing precious little. As much as I love reading, even that was beginning to pall. I was so bored that I was almost tempted to brave the ski slopes again.
My last flight in the P-80 had been on November 22, and now, near the end of January, neither P-80 had been cleared for flight. I made a few test flights in the P-51H, but most of my flying came from scrounging time in multiengine aircraft. I was so desperate, I even tried helicopters. During that period I was checked out in the UC-64, the C-47, and the Stinson L-5, a small liaison plane. I didn't actually check out in the helicopters (fighter pilots please note that I still had some pride), although I made as many as fifteen landings during one flight. Brad Brown, the helicopter test pilot, and I surveyed the countryside and saw many herds of caribou and some magnificent moose. We would have enjoyed shooting them, but only with a camera.
There was another even more important reason that I was rapidly tiring of Alaska. I had heard from a friend at Eglin that the neo-Neanderthal that Glindel Barron, the lovely blonde from Panama City, had been dating had left Eglin and returned to his cave in the north. I wanted to get back to Florida and stake my claim before someone less worthy moved in.
Although we were unable to do much test flying in the P-80s, a lot was accomplished. We developed a system for starting jet engines in cold weather that eliminated the hesitant starts and consequent warping of the turbine wheel shroud. Colonel Muldoon, Barney, and I met with the Allison tech rep and the master sergeant maintenance chief in a series of discussions of the problem. The sergeant was a sharp and experienced mechanic, and it was he who devised the solution.
The fuel used in jets at that time was JP-1, which was close to pure kerosene. It was considerably less volatile and therefore harder to ignite than gasoline, but it produced more energy per pound. The sergeant reasoned that gasoline would make the start quicker and smoother but that JP-1 was needed to produce more thrust. Accordingly he installed a valve in the fuel system whereby gasoline from a drum on a truck next to the airplane could be used for the start, after which the gasoline hose was disengaged from the valve and the engine was run on its internal JP-1 fuel.
The system was tested, and it was immediately apparent that the problem had been eliminated. After a series of successful low-temperature starts over a period of a week, the P-80 was, at long last, declared ready for flight. On February 6, I made a soul-satisfying flight of one hour, during which the airplane performed perfectly, and I began feeling a bit jetty again. I was looking forward with great anticipation to a heavy flying schedule so that the test program could be completed before the test season ended, but it was not to be. In checking the engine to ensure that the turbine wheel clearances were unchanged, the maintenance crew found that the fuel was contaminated with small particles of some foreign substance, which in time could clog the filters and cause engine failure. The entire fuel system would have to be flushed repeatedly until completely free of contamination. The sergeant estimated it would take more than a month to obtain the proper equipment and several additional weeks to do the job. As it turned out, he was overly optimistic. The P-80 did not fly again until early that summer, when Dick ''Superhot" Scott flew it back to Eglin.
Based on our results, the Air Materiel Command ran a series of starting tests with gasoline and found that much smoother starts resulted at all temperatures. It later became standard Air Force procedure to fill the P-80 leading-edge tanks, which held 94 gallons, with gasoline and the remaining tanks with JP-1. The gasoline was used only for starting and for purging the system of JP-1 after a flight, although it could be used in emergencies. This procedure was followed for several years until JP-4, more volatile than JP-1, became the standard fuel.
With the P-80s grounded again, Colonel Muldoon decided there was no need for me to remain in Alaska. On February 14, Valentine's Day fittingly enough, I left the Yukon for Eglin, the sun, the beach, and, I hoped, the blonde.
10
Characters in Flight
I arrived back at Eglin on the twenty-first of February 1947 and moved back into the BOQ. After a few days it was as though I had never left. Late February and early March are the start of spring in northwest Florida, or the Florida panhandle, as it is called. It was warm and sunny most of the time, so I had the sun, but it was a bit too cold for the beach, and to my great disappointment, there was no blonde. I called her office as soon as I arrived and found that she had just left for a two-week vacation, but I did learn that she had not yet been claimed.
I had missed out on so much flying while at Ladd that I decided to try to catch up as soon as possible. The first five days I flew fourteen hours in six different types, a B-17 Flying Fortress, an F-13 Superfortress (photo reconnaissance version of the B-29), a North American AT-6 Texan, a P-80 Shooting Star, a P-82 Twin Mustang, and a B-25 Mitchell. The next week I added twelve more hours in a P-51H Mustang, a P-38L Lightning, a C-47 Skytrain, and a C-45 Expediter. During the three months in Alaska I had flown only forty hours, twenty-one of them on one trip in a C-46 Commando.