Space

by James A. Michener

  From Monday through Saturday noon, week after week, John Pope experimented with planes about to be purchased in large lots by the United States Navy, and he came to be recognized by the high command as “The guy who will fly anything.” He was especially appreciated by the manufacturer’s representatives for the extremely thoughtful reports he submitted after each flight, for he seemed to become one of them, a man desperately interested in the success of every model he tested, and after one long spell of intense application, even Claggett, the most professional of the test pilots, had to warn him: “Remember, John, the plane doesn’t love you. If it’s a clinker, say so, reject the damned thing.” But Pope felt that any plane which had matured to the point of having actually been built, even if only three prototypes were in existence, was worth saving.

  His attitude was tested one morning when Captain Penscott asked him and Claggett to give two problem planes a workout. “Pope, you take the F3H up for maximum maneuvers, and you, Claggett, take the F7U, to serve as the target plane.”

  “I don’t fly the F7U,” Claggett said in a low, respectful voice.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s pitifully underpowered and has killed too many good men.”

  Are you afraid to fly it?” Penscott asked, and deathly [297] silence engulfed the ready room, because for anyone to challenge Randy Claggett’s courage was preposterous. He had flown more different types than anyone on the base, and in more different kinds of dangerous assignments and weather. He had taken the most tentative planes aloft and given them the most punishing analysis, often finding himself in perilous situations from which only his iron will saved him, and if three new planes arrived tomorrow on a barge, too dangerous to fly, he would want to give each a whirl.

  But he had satisfied himself that the F7U, this bastard son of a heroic father, was unacceptable, and he would bother with it no more. His friends had lost their lives in this plane for reasons which he had outlined before their accidents occurred, and one of the finest squadron commanders the Navy had ever produced had been broken because of his rebellion against sending his young men aloft in this Gutless Cutlass, and Claggett felt that this was enough. Now he was being asked if he was afraid to fly it.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am afraid.” And without permission he walked quietly from the ready room.

  Captain Penscott faced an extremely difficult decision; at Pax River a man could be a full Navy captain in charge of testing, with all the power that that implied, yet be less significant than the top pilot who was actually taking the questionable planes aloft. Penscott could dismiss a newcomer who showed signs of weakness, but he could not discipline the best pilot of them all because he refused to fly a plane that had been proved to be a killer.

  He made a command decision: “Pope, will you fly the F7U as target?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Find Claggett and tell him he’s to fly the Screamin’ Demon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  So over the Chesapeake, two of the finest test pilots in America, in two fearfully disappointing planes, performed every prescribed maneuver, with the target F7U performing like a masterpiece and the pursuing F3H attacking it with vigor, but in the routine return to base, Pope’s F7U began to lose stability, and the first to notice it was Claggett in the pursuing plane.

  [298] “John, this is Randy. I had that once. Pull back, old man.”

  When this failed to produce the necessary correction, Claggett said, “John, it looks like your left aileron. Adjust!”

  Again there was no improvement, and now the F7U was in real trouble, heading for a disastrous spin at only a thousand feet above the water.

  “John,” came the quiet voice, “Try a tight turn left.”

  The headstrong plane ignored this correction and gained speed in a pronounced spin to the right, a vertiginous and twisting drop, and now Pope heard nothing, not Claggett’s voice, not the tower, not even the plane itself. Patiently, methodically, without a shred of panic, he ran down the final items on his mental checklist, the one prepared months ago after long discussions with men who had fought this wayward plane, and as it was about to crash into the Chesapeake, he made the last corrections, pulled its nose up, and set it level for safe landing at Pax River.

  When he delivered the F7U to the ground crew, he walked soberly to the ready room, where he and Claggett wrote seven pages of summary comment on the deficiencies of this plane, betraying no hysteria but specifying fact after fact which condemned it. And when Claggett was finished with that job, just as thoroughly and just as negatively, he spent two more hours reporting on his F3H. For duty of this caliber they received $429 a month.

  If John Pope tried to ape the high professionalism of Randy Claggett, he also found delight in adopting the Texan’s major bad habit. He had become a goody-grabber, eager to take the Pax-Jax-Lax route to anywhere, so he was delighted one Sunday evening when Claggett called him in bachelors’ quarters with the news that General Funkhauser, one of the honchos at Allied Aviation in Los Angeles, wanted a consultation on the F6Q-1, which was approaching the time when prototypes would be coming into production.

  “Pick you up at the landing, 1900,” Pope said, and when in the evening darkness a special run of the wheezing launch brought Claggett across the river, John was waiting in his Mercury convertible. With the top down, the two pilots roared along dark Maryland roads to Washington National Airport.

  [299] “I don’t like asking you to fly commercial, especially a night trip,” Claggett apologized, “but all I could get was Government Transportation Request, so we’re taking United.”

  They boarded one of the last flights out of National and droned westward to St. Louis, where they would change to a more powerful four-engine job that would carry them to Los Angeles. Pope dozed on the flight west of Denver, but Claggett excused himself: “I’m gonna make a serious run at the redheaded stewardess.” And toward morning, when Pope looked toward the vacant seats at the rear of the plane, he saw Claggett and the redhead necking.

  They landed at Los Angeles at 0600, grabbed a rented car, and stormed along the superhighways toward Pasadena, where General Funkhauser and his aides would be waiting. They stopped for a leisurely breakfast of coffee and eggs, then pushed ahead to Allied Aviation.

  They talked with tremendous concentration all morning, ate a lunch of salad and rye crisp, then worked with the engineers all afternoon. At 1700 they were back in their rented car heading for the airport, where they had a fish dinner before boarding the United Airlines Red-Eye Special for the all-night flight back to Washington. There they jumped into the convertible at 0800, roared down to Pax River, and reported to the airfield.

  Claggett spotted a new arrival, a WFZ, about which he was curious, so he walked quietly over to the plane and asked the pilot, “How do you start this bundle of bolts?” After he had checked the intriguing new system he asked, “Any peculiarities I should know about?”

  With that he took the new plane into the air, flew high over the blue waters of the Chesapeake and far above the Atlantic at Wallops Island. When he landed, he asked for the original pilot and compared notes for about an hour. Then he wrote his report, entered the new plane in his Logbook, jumped in his ancient Chevy, drove to the landing, crossed in a rainstorm, got into his even more decrepit second Chevy, drove to the Solomons barrack, kissed his wife, and fell asleep for sixteen hours.

  The two men would accept any chance to travel, but what they enjoyed most was any trip to Edwards Air Force Base in California, because they knew that when they landed at that vast salt flat they were in the presence of [300] their peers, the finest Air Force test pilots. Here Chuck Yeager had broken the sound barrier in powered flight and Joe Engle had flown the X-15 almost out of the atmosphere to a height of 280,600 feet.

  One had to respect the work done at Edwards, but at the same time one had to be always alert to defend the equally fine accomplishment at Pax River. The difference was this: an Air Force airplane, takin
g off and landing on fields of immense dimension, could be an ultimate flying instrument, the only consideration being the ideal combination of flight, altitude, speed and maneuverability. Wings could be wide or narrow, as the probable mission of the plane dictated. Weight could be minimal, every component honed to the vanishing point. Anything could be altered to provide greater combat effectiveness, and the speed at landing could be 250 mph if that’s what the combination produced.

  But as Pope explained one night in the mess at Edwards: “A Navy plane is bound by so many restrictions, you wouldn’t believe it. Weight? Not a single Air Force plane I’ve seen could be used aboard a carrier, because if we soldered a restraining hook to the bottom of one of your birds, the girders necessary to absorb the shock of that sudden stop would be missing. When she lands, bottom of the plane gets torn off.”

  Claggett, who loved his excursions to Edwards, enjoyed especially this arguing with the Air Force types: “You take the F4U, that marvelous plane the Marines used in World War II. Did you know that its wings folded? So it could be stacked on deck. You put folding wings on an F-105 and you couldn’t get it off the field.”

  The two Navy men rarely made much headway in their arguments with the hotshot Air Force fliers, and one night Claggett, in some irritation, said, “I’m not sure that many of you clowns could qualify for landing on the deck of a carrier.”

  “We can fly anything with wings,” a taciturn man from Tennessee called Hickory Lee said, “or even nubs of wings.”

  The argument grew furious, with Claggett describing the difficulties his Marines had experienced in transferring their high caliber of land flying to the carrier Essex off Japan in 1945. “I want you apes to listen, and Pope can verify what I’m sayin’ because it’s history. The Marines [301] sent one of their best contingents, nineteen fliers with top records and three weeks’ carrier familiarization. At the end of nine days flyin’ without ever seein’ an enemy plane, what were the results? Seven pilots dead, one more drowned off the bow end. Seventeen F4Us lost at sea or completely wrecked.”

  The Air Force men were attentive, and Claggett added, “In those same nine days Navy pilots, making far more takeoffs and landings, lost not a single man. Dented not a single fender.”

  At this point the argument grew so heated that Claggett stomped out of the mess, uncharacteristically leaving the fight, but after he had made a quick deal for some large cans of white paint, he returned quietly to summon Pope, and together the two men went out to a hard-surface runway and sketched in bold sloppy strokes the outlines of the landing deck of a medium-sized carrier. The work was arduous, requiring much stooping over, and far from accurate, but toward midnight, when they were satisfied with the results, they returned to the mess, where this fellow Hickory Lee was still arguing. Smeared with white paint, the two Navy men challenged the locals to a contest: “I want you apes out there at 0600. I got me two colored paddles and I’m gonna be your landin’ officer, and I wanna see if you clowns can even hit the deck, let alone land on it.”

  At dawn the pilots assembled, and the Air Force men were astonished at how minute their target was going to be, but Claggett bellowed, “All right, Lee, take her up!” And when the Tennessee captain sped his F-104 down the runway and high into the clouds, he made a sweeping turn, straightened up, and came roaring down at the simulated carrier at whose stern Claggett waited with two paddles to represent a landing officer. Several things happened: the F-104 was so much lighter than the rugged Navy types that Lee could not slow it down the way Navy pilots did; he came in high and fast, searching for a long landing area on which to brake down after his wheels touched. Also, Claggett complicated things by jiggling his paddles more than necessary and flashing the okay-to-land signal just a trifle slow.

  Lee slammed onto the imaginary carrier, applied his brakes heavily, and ran about a mile and a half off the [302] bow end. “You failed, you dumb sonnombeech” Claggett shouted. “You’re in three thousand feet of water.”

  He invited the others to try their luck, and when they landed, brakes screaming, and overshot the carrier, the Air Force men appreciated what a tremendous shock they would have had to absorb in order to stop their planes in the indicated distance. Grudgingly they admitted that there might be something about carrier flight they had not fully appreciated, but the trials continued, a gang of grown-up kids playing with toys that cost $3,000,000 each.

  “You all flunked,” Claggett said at breakfast, “and even so, it wasn’t a fair test, because I couldn’t simulate one thing. On a real carrier, just as you approach the stern, the ocean lifts the ship thirty feet in the air, you fly right into the rolling edge, and we never see you or your plane again.”

  The Air Force men liked Claggett; they respected the intense professionalism he displayed in all he did, so that Pope was not surprised when, at the conclusion of one test period at Edwards, some of the older Air Force types rose formally at the end of an evening meal and informed Randy that he had been selected for membership in the most exclusive flying club in the world, the Society of Airplane Test Pilots. Claggett, obviously proud of the honor, reverted to Texas hillbilly, to the delight of the pilots: “To peripherize the words of a great Confederate gineril, ‘If nominated, I ain’t gonna run, and if elected, I ain’t agonna serve, and if you-all try to put me in one of them newfangled F-100 series, I’m agonna gallop right acrost that there desert.’ ”

  But the Pax-Jax-Lax tour that Pope remembered with greatest pleasure came when he finagled a four-week reciprocal visit to England’s test center at Boscombe Down, which lay southwest of London near the cathedral towns of Salisbury and Winchester. There, in the gray clouds that hung over the English Channel; he tested the sophisticated aircraft being developed by the English experts, and whenever he discovered something he did not like or which seemed second class, he noted it but was hesitant about voicing his negative opinion too strongly, because he remembered that it was on this field and others like it that the Spitfire was tested; it had everything wrong about it except its fantastic maneuverability and its [303] stubborn capacity to absorb punishment and still shoot down the Luftwaffe in staggering numbers.

  He liked the British pilots, with their painstaking and sometimes creaking traditions, and he had to respect the severity with which they went about their work, but the highlight of his tour came when Penny cabled that her committee was sending her to England to look into negotiations regarding shared British-American facilities, and after her work in London she would be heading for Boscombe Downs. John consulted with his English pilots as to where she might stay, and they recommended the Boar and Thrush, a small inn from which the tower of Salisbury cathedral could be seen across the plains, and there the Popes spent one of the happiest weeks of their lives. Using her committee expense account, Penny rented a sports car, and in it they explored the glorious countryside: Salisbury, Winchester, Plymouth, the Hardy country, the prim majesty of Bath, and the spot that moved John most deeply, that circle of massive monoliths at Stonehenge, for when he saw this mysterious relic of four thousand years he imagined himself one of the ancient astronomers who oriented it, and he insisted that they wait there among the rolling hills until the evening stars appeared, so that he could check the accuracy with which the great stones were aligned.

  “I have never been happier,” he said. “I have the best job in the world. I work with the best men. And I sometimes imagine it will go on forever.”

  Penny replied that she felt that she had the best job possible: “To be at the center of things. To feel the changes coming on so fast. I suspect that Glancey and Grant will be reelected forever, and I’ll stay at their right hand doing the work.”

  They were an unusually handsome pair, there in the shadows cast by the great stones; they were both thirty years old, both slightly underweight, both of medium height and fine appearance, and they were both straight arrows, attuned to jobs which they took seriously and which demanded their best. Their future prospects were illimitable
; they were in love; and they were spending their vacation in one of the gentlest areas of the world.

  Penny saw in the English papers that three choral societies were uniting for a program in Winchester [304] Cathedral, and with the help of women at the air base she arranged tickets for the Popes and an English couple whose husband flew with John. Somehow they jammed themselves into the sports car and trundled off to Winchester, where the united choir was a delight: boys of fourteen and elderly women of seventy, old men and round-faced young girls, singing the ancient songs of England and the best religious music.

  John had little appreciation of the music but could enjoy the soaring architecture of the cathedral, and during intermission he found special pleasure in noting the numerous plaques set into the walls in commemoration of this or that English regiment which had served in India or Khartoum, but at the close of the second half of the program the choirs offered two encores that brought Pope right out of his seat. He had never heard either piece before, but with the aid of the brief explanation by the choir leader, he could immediately recognize their importance. The first began as a show piece for the baritones, who were then joined by all the voices; the words were a poem he did not know by a poet whose name he did not catch:

  “And did those feet in ancient time ...”

  The majestic thunder of the song made him want to cheer, and when the voices died away in prayer for a better day, he led the applause, hoping the chorus would repeat the song. Instead they closed with what the announcer said was one of the finest operatic choruses, which, like the first encore, had a solid religious base. It was the chorus of Israelites lost in their Babylonian captivity, dreaming of their homeland:

  “Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate ...”