His intellectual departure from traditional belief troubled Gene and me, who stayed the course, but we all remained steadfast friends, bonded by our passion for flight.
And finally our day came, but the Air Force sent us to different bases for flight school and later gave us sharply different flying assignments. Gene became an instructor, I went to tactical fighters, and Dave was assigned to the secretive world of electronic warfare. Soon Gene and I had taken wives, while Dave chose a single life. But we stayed in touch and visited when we could.
On one such visit Dave and I met in Spokane, Washington. I recall so clearly what he said that crystal clear afternoon, there in the beautiful, forested mountain countryside north of Spokane. I had a weekend off from the rigors of Survival School at Fairchild AFB, and he had driven over from Malmstrom AFB at Great Falls, Montana, to see me. Neither of us yet had an airplane of our own. We noticed a lone biplane performing aerobatics over a large deserted meadow. Dave and I stopped and watched as the red wings rolled, looped, and spun, the little engine reverberating in the silence of the valley. The pilot obviously intended his private air show for the eyes of God only, but we watched, beholden. And as the plane finally faded away he remarked that he expected his life would end some day in the cockpit of an airplane. I berated him for being a fatalist. Now I wish he had been right.
I got a letter from him while I was stationed in Thailand. He had bought an airplane, a used Grumman Yankee. He wrote of the plane's sporty handling characteristics and fighterlike appearance. I decided that if he could afford one on first lieutenant's pay, then so could I. And so I too bought a plane as soon as I returned Stateside, an old Cessna 140. But when I visited with Dave and flew the wonderful little low-wing two-seater that embodied the sheer joy and exaltation of flight, I knew I had to have a Yankee as well. I sold the '140.
We flew together military style whenever we met, wing to wing with only a few feet of separation, waltzing in cumulus-studded skies, pursuing one another in mock air battles. Afterward we would sip Mountain Dew, which was his drink of preference, and rap at length about the stuff of flying. As always, I listened mostly and watched the flash in his eyes as he talked about aspect ratios, power loadings, and corner velocities. He would sketch out dreams of elaborate modifications to his Yankee and talk of plans for air journeys to fascinating places. And he talked of new friends he had made. Friends, he said, who were open-minded and unpretentious, who shared his spirited views and philosophies.
Dave was clearly jealous of me when I landed a fighter assignment out of pilot training. He was a good flier, but there were no fighter slots available for his class, so he settled for flying EB-57s. The old 1950s vintage twin jet bomber had been converted so that it could carry electronic equipment to test the defensive capabilities of the more modern interceptors of the North American Air Defense Command. Dave's ho-hum job, as he described it, was to fly around and be blown out of the northern skies by imaginary missiles. And I knew, as I learned and practiced fighter tactics in the southwestern deserts, that he felt destiny had forsaken him. But Dave had a plan to find his way into a fighter cockpit and eventually to his ultimate dream: test pilot school.
We took chances in those days that we would never take now. We flew cross-country one summer in formation from Montana to Alabama. Low clouds stranded us in Springfield, Missouri, and we became impatient. Neither of our planes were equipped for safe instrument flying. While waiting we began to compare the planes and discovered that, together, we had the basic tools to make an instrument flight. He had a good attitude indicator; mine was mushy. I had a transponder; he didn't. We both had VOR receivers. We could back each other up! We didn't have the capability to make a precision instrument approach but reasoned that it didn't matter because the weather was reported to be improving along our intended route. We would make our two planes one. We would pierce the gray clouds glued to one another's wings. We had both done it in Air Force jets. Why not now? We decided to file an instrument flight plan and launch in formation.
The guy at the flight service station counter looked over our flight plan and pointed to an obvious error. We had written in two different aircraft numbers in the box reserved for such identification. Dave advised him to read on, and he would see why. We had written in the remarks section "Flight of two AA-l's." The technician was incredulous. He, like most general aviation people, thought of formation flying as two or more planes separated by a couple of city blocks of airspace at a minimum.
"No, no. You can't do that," he responded.
We assured him we could.
"How you gonna see each other?" he demanded.
We explained how we proposed to do it and assured him that we regularly did it in the military.
He finally accepted that we were serious but, doubting that our plan was legal, he phoned the Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center and informed them of the suicidal request he had received. He came back to the counter and removed his glasses.
"The center says the military does it all the time but they had never seen civilians do it. They said they don't know of any rules against it. So I guess I can't stop you if this is what you want to do."
A few minutes later we were taxiing out together under a 300-foot cloud ceiling, and Dave took our clearance from the tower.
"Grumman 5713 Lima Flight is cleared to Greenwood, Mississippi, as filed, maintain five thousand, squawk 0133."
The tower controller seemed to understand that we were a flight of two, but after giving us takeoff clearance, he was aghast when we taxied onto the runway together.
"One three Lima, are you taking off in formation?" he queried.
"Yeah, that's how we filed" was Dave's response.
He told us to stand by. Obviously, more phone calls were being made as legalities were being checked and our sanity was being questioned, but a minute later he came back up.
"OK, one three Lima flight, you're cleared for takeoff. Maintain runway heading. Good luck."
We launched into the murk with me on the wing. I could easily see his dark blue plane in the clouds, and I stayed glued to his wing for almost an hour until we broke into the clear. But still there was a solid undercast beneath us. A little while later we flew over a hole that looked to be a few acres in size, through which we could see the green Mississippi woodlands below. Out ahead of us there was little sign that the undercast was breaking up as we neared our refueling stop at Greenwood, so we canceled instrument flight rules with the center.
We were then on our own, but visual flight rules required that we remain clear of all clouds. Dave was cautious. He radioed me that the hole looked so small that he didn't know how we were going to descend through it and maintain cloud clearance. I knew he was assuming that we would use a normal shallow descent profile that would put us back into the cloud deck before we descended through the hole, but that's not what I intended. I was a fighter pilot; I knew how to get through the hole.
I told him to follow me and broke away from his wing. I rolled the Yankee nearly inverted, closed the throttle, pulled the nose down and dove through the hole as if in a dive-bomb attack. He followed. Luckily no one was cruising along under the cloud deck near the hole. But I didn't think anything of it. Such maneuvers were normal for me but not for him. When we landed he was ecstatic about it, and he laughed about it often as time went by.
A few days later we were out skirmishing over Lake Tuscaloosa. The two Yankees rolled and dove, unnoticed, I'm sure, among the scattered cumulus high above the bass boats and skiers. It really wasn't much of a match. I was pulling a high side "yo-yo" maneuver to gain a tracking solution on him when he decided to reverse his direction of turn. It was a reckless move. I unloaded the G-pressure on my Yankee and reversed my turn in unison with him, rolling out with a perfect lead on his plane. I smiled and pressed the mike button, uttering the three words that told Dave he was beaten.