The crews were all housed in the visiting officer's quarters, and after dinner at the officer's club most of the pilots went into Montgomery, a onetime capital of the Confederacy, which seemed a cosmopolitan city compared to Eglin's "city," Fort Walton, where cows occasionally wandered across the main street. Rode and I, and a few others, were tired, so we went back to the VOQ, where we were rooming together, and went to bed. Around midnight, Rode and I were awakened by one of the operations officers and asked if we were checked out in the C-47. A silly questionhe should have known that fighter pilots can fly anything, but we humored him and said that we were checked out. Since all the C-47 pilots were in town, he wanted us to fly one of the Eglin C-47s to Memphis to pick up some emergency equipment that might be needed at Eglin. The storm was building in intensity and appeared certain to hit Eglin. We dressed and went to the flight line after arranging for the P-82 crew chief, who had flown in with Rode, to fly with us as flight engineer.
We made the flight to Memphis without incident, and the emergency equipment (rations, bottled water, blankets, and tents) was loaded while we supervised the refueling and checked the en route and terminal weather for the return to Eglin. There were some clouds but no serious problems, as the ceiling and visibility at Eglin were still well above the minimums. Except for some heavy turbulence at times, the flight was uneventful, and we landed at Eglin shortly after dawn. While the aircraft was being unloaded, we were told it would be necessary to make another trip. After a quick snack, we took off again for Memphis and flew at higher than normal power settings so that we could complete the round trip before the hurricane struck.
On the ground at Memphis we were photographed and interviewed by the local newspaper because of our mercy flight. I don't know if the story ever appeared in print — probably not, unless it was an especially slow news day.
When we landed at Eglin the winds were quite strong and gusty, but Rode made his usual good landing. This time we were instructed to go to Gunter Field, on the other side of Montgomery from Maxwell, to pick up still more emergency gear. On departing I made one of the strangest takeoffs of my life. The wind velocity was 35 to 45 mph with higher gusts. Under the circumstances, we left the external rudder lock in place while we taxied, to keep the rudder from buffeting. When we lined up on the runway, the crew chief got out and removed the lock, and I lowered full flaps to reduce the wind and propwash on him. After he got back to the cockpit, the tower cleared us and I advanced the throttles to start the takeoff. The airplane was barely moving despite full throttle, and I thought something was wrong with the brakes, until I noticed we were about twenty feet in the air. I had forgotten to retract the flaps, and the combination of full flaps and the strong wind on an empty airplane produced what amounted to a vertical takeoff. Chagrined, I sheepishly raised the flaps and climbed toward Gunter. When we landed there we were told that the winds were too high for further landings at Eglin (no surprise to us), and we took our trusty C-47 across town to Maxwell. There we found that the rest of the Eglin aircraft had been flown to Atlanta, and we were relieved to see that the regular C-47 crew was waiting to take it there. Since both of our aircraft were hangared, it wasn't necessary to move them. It was late afternoon by then, so we had an early dinner and went to bed to catch up on our sleep. We had flown ten of the last fourteen hours. All in all it was a good way to end our AAF careers.
Soon after we returned from the hurricane evacuation, Colonel Slocumb notified me that I had been assigned as test officer on Project Agate. Its goal was to determine the feasibility and best method of attacking bombers head-on with jet fighters. The high speed of the fighters would make the closing rate very high and the time between reaching effective firing range and breaking away very short. B-29s were to be the targets, as there were no operational jet bombers at that time; the fighters were P-80s. The tests would be flown at 30,000 and 35,000 feet at various airspeeds.
The first problem was to determine how to measure the range at the start of the breakaway and the miss distance between the two aircraft as they passed. The range at which firing began could be determined precisely from a movie camera shooting through the fighter's gunsight reticle (illuminated circle on the gunsight). The size of the reticle and the wingspan of the bomber were known, so the range at any point could be calculated easily. I and the project officer, along with the bomber crew and members of the measurement and analysis section, had long discussions before we settled on the following method.
The attacking P-80 would have a 16mm movie camera in the cockpit shooting through the gunsight and actuated by the machine gun trigger on the control stick. Inside the canopy, behind the armor plate, would be a series of flashbulbs actuated by the bomb release button on top of the control stick. A second P-80, to be flown by Maj. Si Johnson, the squadron operations officer, would have a 16mm movie camera mounted in the cockpit, shooting 90 degrees to the right of the fuselage. The B-29 would also have a movie camera shooting through a gunsight in the nose. On each simulated firing pass the second P-80 would fly in line-abreast formation about fifty yards to the left of the attacking P-80. The pilot would activate his camera well before the attacker reached firing range and would stop it after the breakaway. I would simulate firing at the desired range by pulling the gun trigger on the stick that started the gunsight camera. When the trigger was released, the camera continued running for three seconds. As I released the trigger and started my break, I pushed the bomb release button that fired one of the flashbulbs so the camera plane's film would record that point. At the speeds we were flying, 400 mph for the fighter and 230 mph for the bomber, the closing speed was about 300 yards per second, so as an added precaution, we decided to run the first series of passes with my airplane offset to one side of the bomber's course. I decided it would be advisable not to inform the bomber pilots that during the war I had collided with a Japanese fighter on a nonsimulated head-on pass, knocking off its wing and part of mine in the process. That collision, incidentally, was the first of my five victories.
At Eglin, Rode was in the weapons branch in the proof division, which provided oversight and guidance for the weapons testing done in the flying squadrons and other organizations in the Air Proving Ground Command. The project officers for the various tests were assigned to the proof division. As part of his duties, Rode flew with all the squadrons as a participant in the many weapons tests. After leaving Eglin he was assigned to the armament division of the Research and Development Directorate in the Pentagon. While in both jobs he flew combat missions in Korea on Project Gun Val, to evaluate the effectiveness of 20mm cannon in the F-86 Sabre as a replacement for the standard .50-caliber machine guns.
On Sunday, January 11, 1954, Rode was returning to Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, from a trip to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, flying alone in a Lockheed T-33, the trainer version of the F-80 Shooting Star. The weather was terrible at Andrews, extremely cold with low ceiling and visibility and freezing drizzle (freezing drizzle is conducive to icing, which is extremely hazardous). He was making a ground-controlled approach (GCA), an approach under the guidance of a ground controller who monitors the aircraft's heading and glide slope by radar, when he dropped off the scope and hit the ground about 1,000 feet short of the runway. The impact broke the T-33 in two, smashed Rode's face into the stick, and severely damaged his spinal cord. Fortunately there was no fire, probably because of the extreme cold and the snow-covered ground.