Wes Posvar, who had been awarded a Rhodes scholarship and was now studying at Oxford, kept up his flying in a De Havilland Tiger Moth with the Oxford Flying Club. On several of his school breaks, however, he traveled to Germany and flew airlift missions.
Nineteen forty-eight was also the year of President Truman's famous whistle-stop campaign; against all odds and predictions, he defeated Thomas E. Dewey and won another term as president. That election has special meaning for me, since it was the first in which I was able to vote, and my vote helped to elect President Truman, who in my opinion was the most honest, straightforward, courageous, and down-to-earth president in this century.
Earlier I mentioned that after Si Johnson's crash, we had no more accidents during a firepower demonstration. That is true, but one of the pilots in the squadron, Ray Evans, came too close for comfort at two subsequent demonstrations. Ray was one of the pilots who had come to Eglin with the group from Pinecastle. He had flown P-47s in the Pacific during the war and had been assigned to Pinecastle when he returned to the States. Ray went balls out at whatever he did. He was an avid fisherman, and although he could not swim a stroke (he often said that the harder he swam the deeper he went), he regularly spent the day in small boats without a life jacket, standing up and casting his line. He fell overboard several times but always managed to grab the side of the boat, climb back in, and get on with the fishing. He and Frank "Radar" Smith were great fishing buddies and often spent hours in a T-6 searching out likely fishing holes and the roads or paths that led to them.
Ray had a close call during Project Highball when his oxygen regulator failed at 35,000 feet, causing him to pass out; he did not recover until he had descended to about 1,000 feet. But that was nothing compared to his dive-bombing misadventures during the next two firepower demonstrations. He was set up to dive-bomb a pyramid target with an F-80 early in the program and then join three other F-80s for a high-speed pass at the conclusion. In the practice the day before the event, he had missed the target by about 50 feet and felt he had lost a lot of face, which is anathema to a fighter pilot. He swore he would get a direct hit during the demonstration. He did, with the bombs and very nearly with the airplane. I didn't see it, because I was flying one of the other 80s, but several observers said that he came down absolutely vertical. He released the bombs so late that no one thought he would be able to recover, but recover he did, by pulling 11.8 g's. Even so, he barely missed the ground. Ray of course blacked out, as did many of the people in the stands. The F-80 did not fare as well, however. As he recovered from his blackout he radioed a bit groggily that the airplane didn't feel right. I joined formation with him to inspect it and saw why. It looked like an airplane drawn by a bad cartoonist. The right horizontal stabilizer was bent upward in the middle at an angle of almost 90 degrees, while the left one was tilted upward at somewhat less of an angle. The aft fuselage looked like one of those Shar-Pei dogs, with large wrinkles all along the skin. Luckily, he found he could maintain control, and he made a straight-in approach and landed safely. The F-80 was class-twenty-sixed (damaged beyond repair) and sent to the salvage yard. It was a tribute to Lockheed's sturdy construction that the airplane stayed in one piece, since he had far exceeded the 8-g design limit.
Ray was enjoined by the group commander and the squadron commander to begin the pullout in future dive-bombing runs much farther from the ground and to stay within design g limits. In the next demonstration a few months later, Ray obeyed half of the orders. He began his pullout a few hundred feet higher and this time registered only 10.6 g's on the accelerometer. The stabilizers didn't bend, but the fuselage was twisted enough to class-twenty-six another F-80. Ray was assigned to another type of mission in later demonstrations while we still had a few F-80s left. Artie Lynch, in his inimitable fashion, said that Ray pulled out so late because Si Johnson was on the pyramid beckoning to him to come lower.
In the late fifties Ray commanded a squadron of Lockheed F-104 Starfighters at Hamilton Air Force Base, near San Francisco. He was making a practice ILS (instrument landing system) approach when his engine failed at very low altitude and he crashed into the ocean. After all his hairy escapades, he was killed on a fairly routine mission while doing everything by the book. Some problems are impossible to handle no matter how good a pilot you are.
In the summer of 1948, Artie Lynch was offered a job as a test pilot for North American Aviation. The lure of much higher pay and no requirement for an unwrinkled uniform was too much. He accepted, resigned his commission, and moved to California. On Saint Patrick's Day in 1954, he was killed during an airshow at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada, while demonstrating a two-seat version of the F-86 Sabre, which North American was hoping to sell to the Air Force. He had started a roll immediately after liftoff, but the rudder locked, and he crashed. Artie had once told us that when he died it would be on Saint Patrick's Day in front of a large crowd. He was truly one of a kind. I have fond memories of flying with him and of our time together.
I'm certain that Si and Ray and Artie are in that fighter pilot's heaven I mentioned earlier, where I hope to join them someday in the distant future, rat-racing among the mountains of sunlit cumulus clouds and buzzing a few feet above the beautiful white sand and blue-green water of a Gulf beach liberally sprinkled with bikini-clad blondes. With no regulations to restrict us, and no chance of getting killed, we will fly as close to the clouds and the ground as we wish. Surely, a merciful God will not have an FAA in heaven.
17
The Test of the F-84B
Late in 1948 I was able to fulfill one of my childhood ambitions by riding on the back of a fire engine. The operations officer asked if anyone wanted to fly a surplus P-61 Black Widow to Eglin Auxiliary Field 8, adjoining the bombing range where the firepower demonstrations took place, so it could be used as a target. It wasn't in first-class condition and had not been flown for several months, but it had been cleared for a one-time flight. I said that I would, gathered my flight gear, and went out to the airplane. When I looked it over I saw a good-sized tear in the fabric covering of the elevator. The crew chief said he had tried to sew it but the thread just ripped through the fabric. That wasn't reassuring, but he said he was certain it would hold together for a short low-speed flight. He also said that he would accompany me. That was reassuring, but I told him I would go alone, because if I had to bail out I did not want anyone in my way.
I made the flight, which lasted only ten minutes, with the wheels down; the wheels must be down to bail out of the main entry hatch behind the pilot, and I wanted to avoid possible problems with the hydraulic system. The flight itself was uneventful. After parking the airplane and getting the range officer to certify that the clock was still in it, I climbed aboard the fire truck that had been sent from Eglin to cover my landing. Rather than ride inside the truck, I chose to stand on the back platform, but like many childhood fantasies, the realization turned out to be far less exciting than anticipated. Perhaps tearing through the streets of New York City with the sirens blaring would have been more of a thrill than sedately driving through the deserted piney woods of Florida.
In July 1948 we received the first F-80Bs, which were equipped with ejection seats, as all jet fighters would be from then on. It had become obvious that escape from a fighter at jet speeds was all but impossible without an ejection system. At first we worried more about the seat's firing accidentally than we did about getting out of a disabled plane. Many of us, myself included, left the ground safety pins in place all the time, figuring we would sacrifice the few seconds required to remove the pins for the reassurance they provided. We heard no reports of accidental seat firings, however, and after a short time, we followed the rules and removed the pins as part of the pre-takeoff check. As I related in a previous chapter, we had been given ejection-seat training at Wright Field several months earlier.