Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  After mastering the Stearman, trainees moved up to the low-wing SNJ Texan or one of the silver Valiants left over from the war, fast and powerful single-wing planes that shook like a jack-hammer. The Valiant was known as the “Vultee Vibrator.” Trainees also logged a few hours in the massive PBY seaplanes. Twice as long and wide as every other plane at the base, the PBY looked like a submarine with wings stuck on. It flew like a truck and, with its small cockpit window, was difficult to land on the water. You had to descend slowly until—bam!—you smacked down onto the Gulf. One trainee landed right on a channel marker, killing himself and seven others.

  But it was the Yellow Peril that dominated Shepard’s first months of training, which began in earnest on January 7, 1946, after a month of classroom instruction. Some trainees had their first brush with death in the Yellow Peril. Others, like Shepard, just got their first taste of shame.

  For many students—especially someone as impatient as Shepard—the early days of basic flight training were maddeningly slow going. The pace had died down considerably since war’s end, and trainees were flying only one or two days each week.

  Mornings were spent—often restlessly—inside steamy classrooms, studying celestial navigation, physics, and astronomy, and learning about the seven characteristics of a good pilot: “skill, composure, enthusiasm, judgment, aggressiveness, combativeness and endurance.” In the afternoons, students assembled outside the hangars, eagerly looking for their names in white chalk on the large flight scheduling board.

  Shepard first found his name on the board on the afternoon of January 10. He was assigned to plane 64 and a thirty-minute hop with Ensign J. C. Pennock, a young instructor who would become his mentor for the critical first months of training.

  During the first few flights, Pennock flew while Shepard kept his hand gently on the control stick and his toes barely touching the rudder pedals, which was supposed to give him a feel for how Pennock was maneuvering the craft. If a student felt comfortable after a few introductory flights, the instructor might show him some acrobatics.

  Many naval aviators recall in specific detail their first loops, spins, and snap rolls, the abrupt climbs called chandelles, and the up-and-over corkscrew turns called Immelmans. “It was wonderful,” one Corpus Christi cadet recalled of his first series of spins above the Gulf. “The beautiful tidewater panorama whirled past my eyes like some gigantic kaleidoscope. . . . I loved it.”

  Training flights were always shorter than Shepard would have liked, but Pennock wasted no time in thrusting him toward his first solo flight. With Pennock barking in his ear, Shepard learned to taxi to the runway, adjust the fuel mixture, increase the throttle toward full power, keep an eye on the airspeed indicator as he rolled faster and faster down the tarmac, and then, at just the right moment, pull slowly back on the control stick while feathering the rudder. Once clear of the air base, he’d bank out over the gaping expanse of the Gulf. Then he’d do it again and again and again.

  Once he was airborne, Shepard displayed some of the natural abilities he had shown Carl Park back home above the Manchester airfield. He seemed comfortable with turns, climbs, glides, and landing approaches. But at first Shepard displayed less-than-perfect technique in reaching the sky. Pennock and a few other instructors noted in Shepard’s training records, sometimes with frustration, that he could be too aggressive at the controls. Instead of finessing his plane aloft, he sometimes jerked the nose up too quickly, bringing his plane dangerously close to stalling.

  He had his share of other troubles, too, such as the brief taste of fright on January 18 when the power on his Yellow Peril began cutting out in midflight. He and his instructor managed to limp back home in the malfunctioning aircraft, but the experience seemed to have rattled Shepard. The next day, while attempting to land, he approached with his nose too high, drifted unsteadily from side to side, and then slammed hard onto the runway, nearly losing control.

  Trainees progressed through a series of stages, A, B, C, and so on. Before proceeding to the next training stage, they had to perform a successful test flight, called a check flight, which earned them a “check” from their trainer—a ticket to the next stage.

  To earn a “down check” was considered the ultimate embarrassment. The measure of a top aviator was to fly with absolute precision. Hotdogging and aggressive flying were impressive to the lay person, but a real pilot knew that it was harder to fly a series of perfectly executed basic maneuvers than to swoop and loop.

  Shepard’s first check flight, on February 2, proved that he still had a long way to go. With Ensign Pennock sitting behind him, Shepard accelerated down the runway but waited too long before pulling back on the control stick. The plane began swerving back and forth as it barreled down the tarmac—“violently,” Pennock noted in his report—until Shepard finally pulled the nose up and the plane climbed to safety. In the air, a lack of precision caused some of his turns to “skid” and “whip,” the instructor noted.

  Trainees were judged on various stages of a check flight— such as taxiing, takeoff, climb, turns, glides, judgment, and landing—and received one of four grades for each stage: good, satisfactory, borderline, or unsatisfactory. Of twenty-four maneuvers Shepard performed that day, Pennock judged only one to be “good”; seventeen were “satisfactory” and five were “borderline.” With a less accommodating instructor, Shepard’s career might have ended then and there. The truth was that any of those five “borderline” grades could well have been an “unsatisfactory.” An unsatisfactory grade—equivalent to an F—was called a “down check” and was often a first step toward washing out of the training program. But Pennock saw something in Shepard, trusted his “good judgment” and desire—“student catches on very quickly,” he once wrote—and decided to pass him to the next stage.

  Shepard’s first solo flight—the next step in the regimen and a liberating, exhilarating landmark in every aviator’s life—was almost as sloppy as his check flight with Pennock. And it marked the start of a frustrating period of imperfection in his Corpus Christi experience.

  The Navy expected its trainees to score “good” marks at least 20 percent of the time. Through his first stage Shepard had earned “good” marks more than 30 percent of the time. But when he advanced to Stage B, his grades plummeted to a 15 percent “good” rate, and he received as many “borderline” marks as he did “good” marks.

  Instructors at Corpus Christi were either Santa Clauses (usually the self-confident war vets) or by-the-book Scrooges (usually those who had been denied the chance to dogfight at war and had something to prove). The latter seemed to feel it was their duty to prevent bad pilots from advancing, to weed out the slackers. “Cadet Brownstein is of quiet, meek disposition,” one instructor wrote of his student.

  Shepard was hardly meek, and most instructors—such as Pennock, who hovered somewhere between a Santa and a Scrooge—found him “eager to learn,” “a fast learner,” and “above average.” But as the training reached the complicated stages of acrobatics, instrument landings, and simulated aircraft carrier landings (performed on carrier-shaped runways), his grades declined, and his instructors began showing some impatience.

  “Student was confused during orientation, causing him to have trouble in making up his mind,” one instructor wrote. “Poor taxiing,” wrote another. “Very unsteady and erratic . . . DIDN’T THINK.”

  And one grizzled war veteran issued the ultimate insult: “chases needles.” That meant Shepard was staring at the dashboard instruments, using their data as a crutch instead of flying by instinct and feel—like a musician who plays all the right notes, but without soul. By mid-1946, as Shepard entered the challenging stage of intermediate basic instrument training, he needed to sharpen his flying or he would face reassignment to the regular Navy.

  Flying, like playing music, can be easily taught. Even a thirteen-year-old can learn to fly a plane, which in some ways is easier than driving a car; the barrier-free air can be more forgiving th
an the highway. But, like playing music well, learning to fly exceptionally is another matter entirely. Shepard knew how to fly. He had a natural sense of his place in the sky. What he lacked was the necessary focus to become exceptional. At times it was hard for him to recognize that his cavalier self-confidence was not enough.

  In the postwar Navy, plenty of naturally talented aviators clogged Corpus Christi’s runways. In fact, instructors seemed occasionally to go on binges and flunk wide swaths of trainees, apparently in an effort to purge the less-than-exceptional flyers from the air. The Navy wanted razor-sharp precision, and that called for hard work, practice, and diligence. Those who seemed unwilling or unable to sharpen their skills to perfection were known as Dilberts—and Shepard seemed headed toward becoming one.

  Dilbert (long before its current iteration) was a comic strip created by two Navy officers during World War II, a mockery of cocky student aviators whom the veteran flyers considered the menaces of the sky. Dilbert himself was usually depicted with a “vacant, stupid smile and irritating self-confidence.” With his big nose in the air—like a preening naval Mr. Magoo—he was often oblivious to the perils his sloppy flying inflicted on those around him. One strip showed him flying up above the clouds, unaware that his propeller was shredding the belly of a plane above him. The cartoon became wildly popular among pilots, and for many years Dilbert cutouts were tacked to the walls of naval air stations around the world.

  Dilbert’s problem was that he had little time for the minutiae of flying, including preflight inspections, diligent weather checks, and radio transmissions. At Corpus Christi—which some aviators nicknamed Dilbert College—most Dilberts ended up washing out. They were sent to a separate barracks, the Great Lakes boot camp, far from the airplane hangars, where they’d begin a few painful weeks of transition back to a regular naval officer or enlisted man. Going “to the lakes” was code for the end of a trainee’s flying career.

  Many otherwise solid officers found they just didn’t have what it took to fly. Some discovered, too late, that they suffered from motion sickness. Getting sick during spins and rolls was not a way to impress the instructor. Those were the guys forced to wear a flying-jackass medallion around their necks after a bad flight or a midair vomiting spell.

  Sometimes it didn’t make sense, who failed and who didn’t. Jack Barran, an academy classmate of Shepard’s, was athletic, smart, coordinated. But for some reason he just couldn’t get the hang of the airplane and “bilged out.” The bilge is the depths of a ship’s hull where leaking water collects; in the Navy, it means “stupid.” His instructor finally gave it to him straight one day: “Barran, you taxi great, but you fly like shit.” Meanwhile, others guys who weren’t athletic—uncoordinated goons who threw like a girl and tripped over their own feet—flew gracefully and fearlessly, as if all their previous earthly shortcomings had been exchanged for imperturbable poise in the air.

  Such incongruities added to the competitive and ever-changing pecking order among the students. Indeed, as would be true of many of Shepard’s relationships to come, classmates were both his closest friends and his fiercest competitors.

  Shepard was flying almost daily and loved it. But except for night flying, at which he excelled, his grades were below average, and so were his skills. The threat of being shipped to the lakes loomed large, and the lessons of Carl Park from his teenage years were no help now. He was up against guys who as boys had also built model airplanes, worshiped Lindbergh, and read pulp magazines like G8 and His Battle Aces.

  Halfway through basic training, Shepard was losing ground. One day in early June Shepard’s instructor ordered him to take the lead slot in a group of other training planes, a formation called a “join up.” He was supposed to make a slow ninety-degree turn and the rest of the group would follow. But he turned “IN THE WRONG DIRECTION,” as his furious instructor wrote in big, bold letters on his evaluation sheet; as in the children’s game Crack the Whip, all the other planes dutifully lined up behind him in the wrong direction as well.

  Then on June 13, 1946, Shepard experienced the ultimate Dilbert-esque humiliation. He had reached the end of the first stage of intermediate basic instrument training. An instructor and he climbed into an SNJ to begin a check flight in which he would prove he’d learned his instrument training well. The flight went wrong from the start. Whether it was nerves or overconfidence, he looked only straight ahead as he taxied toward the takeoff runway. With so many planes coming and going, not looking left and right was an unforgivable infraction. His instructor reached down to his clipboard and scratched a check mark in the left-hand box: “unsatisfactory.”

  Shepard pushed the throttle and sped down the runway, but as the plane rose off the ground he pulled the nose up too soon and high, coming dangerously close to stalling. The instructor reached down and checked “borderline” next to “takeoff.” The rest of the flight was uneventful, but on his approach for landing, Shepard “raised the flaps too soon,” the instructor wrote before checking once more, this time in the “field approach” box, “unsatisfactory.” Afterward he wrote a brief summary that Shepard “taxies in a straight line, does not look for other planes.” The instructor then stamped his report in red ink: “UNSAFE FOR SOLO.”

  To recover from a down check, students had to perform extra flying exercises and then pass two check flights in a row, which Shepard did successfully. But through the summer of 1946 he continued to struggle, earning more than ten times as many “borderline” grades as “good” grades. At the end of basic intermediate instruction he’d earned only 5 “good” grades out of 336—an appalling rate of 1.5 percent, and far below the 20 percent the Navy expected.

  Back in 1901 Wilbur Wright had essentially summarized the flyer’s credo on death: “If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds. But if you really wish to learn you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”

  Shepard, with his slumping grades and his down check, decided to get better acquainted with his machine and the sky.

  Shepard felt that one reason for his poor grades was a lack of flying time. It takes hundreds of hours of training to reach a true level of comfort in a plane. By the summer of 1946, he had accumulated barely 100 hours.

  The reason flight time was so scarce was the recurring intrusion of the real world, the nonmilitary world. From the moment Shepard’s ship had entered Tokyo Bay for Japan’s surrender eighteen months earlier, everything else was categorized as subsequent to the victory of war: the postwar employment boom, manufacturing boom, baby boom. The impact on Corpus Christi was a mass exodus of low-paid, low-morale mechanics headed toward jobs with Ford and General Motors.

  The men who had helped repair and maintain the Navy’s planes—the same men who had built an amazing eleven airplanes a day at Douglas Aircraft’s Long Beach plant during the height of war—were now needed in factories to feed the postwar demand for cars. This hemorrhaging of grease monkeys meant there weren’t enough functioning planes for the swarms of Lindbergh wanna-bes. So Shepard spent many afternoons in the hangar, playing bridge and talking about flying while waiting for a plane. They called it “hangar flying.”

  Sometimes he went eight frustrating days between hops. Finally Shepard decided he could wait no more and drove out to a local airfield, where he signed up for private lessons. The Navy frowned on private training, so Shepard had to do it in secret.

  In only a few months Shepard earned his private pilot’s license and invited his parents, Bart and Renza, and his sister, Polly, down to celebrate the event and show off his skills. He rented an open-cockpit biplane—similar to the Yellow Peril—and gave each family member an inaugural ride. Louise flew first, then Polly, who squealed and waved wildly at everyone on the ground. Bart wore a leather pilot’s helmet and a parachute harness, and Shepard even let him take the controls once they’d leveled off.

  Then it was Renza’s turn. She had given him his first
airplane ride—that DC-3 hop to Boston and back—and now he would give her a small taste of his new world. After a brief tour above town and out over the Gulf, he turned back toward the airstrip but suddenly pulled back on the controls. The plane arched backward and climbed slowly into the Texas sky. Renza gritted her teeth and held tight to the sides of the cockpit as the plane continued up and over—a long, slow loop. Shepard descended back down toward the runway, but just before touching down he pulled up, accelerated, and performed another stomach-churning loop Renza would never forget.

  As Shepard accumulated hours of “civilian” flying time, his grades at Corpus Christi steadily improved. Through the advanced stages of training—thrilling exercises in mock dogfights, shooting at towed targets, landing on simulated aircraft carriers, flying at night, and flying in formation—he began showing signs of precision and exactness.