Two that I remember in particular were Billy P. and Daniel T. Brannon, identical twin master sergeants who were line chief and hangar chief respectively, or vice versa. They were master sergeants in every sense of the word. What they didn't know about aircraft maintenance wasn't worth knowing. Their knowledge, dedication, and attitude made them the rarest of individuals, truly indispensable. Many years later, when I was teaching thermodynamics at the Air Force Academy, a young doolie (freshman) came to see me. He was the son of a retired Master Sergeant Brannon, and regardless of which twin it was, I jumped at the chance to tell him how much I thought of his father and how invaluable he had been to our squadron.
I had no intention of getting out of the Army Air Forces. My job as an Eglin test pilot was one of the choice assignments in the AAF and far exceeded my boyhood dreams. I knew the jets were coming, and I wanted to be in on the ground floor. I intended to make the Air Force my career, as did my closest friends, Dick Jones and Barney Turner. So for us, the end of the war had almost no effect on our daily lives; the flight testing went on as before.
As young bachelors and fighter pilots our lives were almost idyllic. We lived in bachelor officer quarters just a short distance from both the flight line and the officer's club, where we took our meals. On weekends we had a choice of personal cross-country flights, dancing at the club with lovely southern belles, or swimming and sunning at the beach club and admiring those same belles. Often, flying to other cities to see different belles (southern or northern) won out.
Also, many of the married pilots and their wives — Schoeny and Jean Schoenfeldt, Pete and Carol Bedford, and Bill and Emmy Cavoli in particular — saw to it that we ate properly by regularly inviting us to dinner. We spent a lot of time with them at their homes and at the beach. Bill and Emmy had no children at that time and sort of adopted us. Emmy, being a good Italian, thought that if you could walk away from the table, she had not fed you enough. Often, what I thought was the full meal was just the appetizer.
We had no major duties other than flying many different fighters. If there was no specific test flight scheduled, we could always find a reason to take up the planes for an hour or so of aerobatics or rat racing.
The Gulf coast has large buildups of cumulus clouds almost every afternoon in the summer, and they gave me some of my fondest lifetime memories. Often at the end of scheduled flying for the day, Barney, Dick, and I would take off in three fighters of the same or different types, climb up in formation to near the top of the clouds, and then peel off into a rat race (aerial follow the leader), diving into cloud canyons, zooming up over cloud mountains, rolling over the top, and then diving down again. As we flew between the clouds and the sun, we could see the shadow of the airplane on the cloud surrounded by a rainbow-colored halo. If I had to choose one thing to do for the rest of my life, that would be it. Who knows, when fighter pilots die maybe they fill the heavens in their favorite airplanes, encircled in rainbows. If so, most of my best friends will be there, and we'll have one hell of an eternal rat race.
In early August three Navy fighters had been delivered to Eglin for us to test for possible AAF use: a Grumman F7F Tigercat, a Grumman F8F Bearcat, and a Ryan FR-1 Fireball. The Tigercat was a powerful, heavily armed twin-engine fighter powered by two 2,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-2800 engines, the same engines used in the P-47, B-26, P-61, and Douglas A-26 Invader, as well as the Navy's Grumman F6F Hellcat and Chance Vought F4U Corsair. Ours was a single-seat version, but there was also a two-seat night-fighter model. It did not see action in World War II, but the night fighter was later used by the Marines in Korea.
The F8F, a small fighter that is still flown today, consisted of a large propeller and an R-2800 engine dragging a small cockpit and wings along for the ride. Delivered to the Navy in 1945, it never saw combat in World War II, but with various modifications it has been a regular winner on the unlimited air-race circuit and has set many speed and time-to-climb records, flown by pilots like Darryl Greenamyer and Lyle Shelton. It was flown to Eglin by a Grumman test pilot who then demonstrated its performance by doing an Immelmann (a half loop followed by a half roll) on takeoff. It was quite impressive, since most fighters did not have a high enough power-to-weight ratio to perform that maneuver.
The FR-1 was a hybrid fighter powered by both a reciprocating and a jet engine. It mounted a 1,350-horsepower Wright R-1820 engine in the nose and a General Electric J-31 jet engine with 1,600 pounds of thrust in the tail. Even with both engines at full power, its performance was unimpressive. Its principal use, it seemed, was for the shock value of flying past bombers with the propeller feathered. Often we would fly over to the Navy air-training area near Pensacola, get in formation with an SNJ trainer, feather the front engine, and pull away from it. An SNJ was about the only plane it could outrun with only the jet engine running.
I had an interesting experience on my checkout flight in the FR-1 Fireball. It had been at Eglin for a week or so before it could be flown, undergoing a complete inspection by our maintenance crews. I was on the flight line one morning while the FR-1 crew chief was trying to remove the upper half of the engine cowling. When he pushed up on the cowling, the nosewheel came off the ground and the airplane settled back on its rubber tail skid. As I helped him get the nose back down, he told me that the weight of the jet engine in the tail put the center of gravity almost directly over the main landing gear, making it easy to tilt it back on its tail.
A few days later I was given a cockpit check and took it up for my first flight. All went well until I peeled up to land and lowered the landing gear. The green lights for the main gear came on, but the nosewheel light did not, indicating that the wheel had not locked down. I pulled out of the landing pattern and cycled the gear a number of times with the same result. Several more attempts under both positive and negative g and while rocking the wings proved fruitless. I flew by the tower at low speed to give the tower operator a chance to look with his binoculars. He said the wheel did not look locked to him. Capt. Dick "Superhot" Scott was completing a mission in a Mustang, and I asked him to fly alongside and take a close look. He confirmed that the nosewheel appeared unlocked. By this time I was running low on fuel and would soon have to land. Knowing that the airplane would sit back on its tail without much provocation, I decided to try to land and bring it to a stop on the main gear and tail skid so the nosewheel did not touch down at all. I notified the tower of my intention and asked them to have a vehicle follow me down the runway, with some men aboard to sit on the horizontal stabilizer when the plane stopped and to remain there until the nosewheel could be locked down. I touched down in a nose-high attitude, rolled the canopy all the way back, leaned back in my seat, and gently lowered the tail skid to the runway, not touching the brakes but letting the drag of the tail skid coupled with the nose-high attitude slow me down. Three men from the fire truck chased the plane as it slowed and jumped onto the horizontal stabilizer, where their weight kept the nose up until a couple of crew chiefs, who had followed the fire truck in a jeep, locked the nosewheel in place and then gently lowered it to the ground. I was relieved that my plan had worked but was concerned that it had looked to the crowd watching, which included the group commander, like a Keystone Kops routine. Back at the squadron, however, Col. Thomas McGehee (the group commander) congratulated me on avoiding an accident and said it was lucky I was so experienced in the plane. I replied, "Thank you, sir."