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

by Neal Thompson

  “Hey, Mickey,” Shepard said. “Come on in. Have a drink and meet my friend Bill Geiger.”

  Geiger was speechless. He was both starstruck and disgusted by Rooney’s drunkenness, and he was amazed that Shepard was on a first-name basis with a movie star. Rooney stumbled over and offered Geiger a sweaty handshake. “Hey, fella,” he slurred. “Shake the hand that held the tit of Ava Gardner.”

  Shepard’s love of cocktails never seemed to affect his flying or his nerves, however. That fact was never more clear than on the dark, cold morning of March 15, 1954, as Shepard’s squadron prepared for a simulated attack on the battleship USS Iowa. Jig Dog, with Shepard as his wing man, would lead a two-division group of eight Banshees and meet up with a dozen AD Skyraiders, propeller planes that would take off before the faster Banshees. Together they’d stage a coordinated mock attack.

  The Skyraiders took off into the predawn blackness just as a heavy snow began falling. Jig Dog could barely find his Banshee on the stormy flight deck and was sure the mission would be canceled. Then he heard the call: “Man jets.” And soon after: “Start engines.” Even after he and Shepard launched and rose toward twenty-five thousand feet, he thought that at any moment the orders for a return to the ship would crackle into his headset. “I’d never been out in weather like that, before or after,” he recalled. Once all eight Banshees were airborne, Jig Dog started climbing in an effort to get above the clouds. But in a matter of seconds “things began to unravel.” First his windshield froze over and he had to crank up the heat to full blast. Then it became unbearably hot. The heater had at least cleared a small opening in the ice, but it didn’t matter much because there was nothing to see but black sky filled with monsoons of snow. Jig Dog’s squadron kept flying, not by sight but by monitoring their instruments.

  Then, about half an hour into the flight, Shepard noticed that Jig Dog was beginning to veer off course and was soon leaning into a 45-degree bank, with the rest of the formation following him off in the wrong direction. Just like that childhood “crack the whip” game, Jig Dog was whipping his squadron dangerously off course.

  A wingman’s job is, foremost, to stick with his leader. To watch his six o’clock. So Shepard “snuggled in” next to Jig Dog and began calling on the radio.

  “CAG! CAG!” (CAG is Navy-speak for “commander, air group.”)

  Jig Dog’s mind was fuzzy. He wasn’t sure what was going on or how to correct it. Even worse, he didn’t care. He heard Shepard’s voice and tried to adjust his position. But he had an “uncontrollable urge to roll over on my back and dive into the ragged overcast.” He could see “the glow of light from the sun.” He was climbing and turning left. If he kept heading in that direction, the plane would soon spin out of control.

  Then he heard Shepard’s voice again—calm, not panicky, but urgent. The voice seemed far away, but it was insistent. And it drew him back from unconsciousness.

  “CAG. CAG. CAG,” Shepard almost yelled. “Nose down, CAG. Nose down. Wings level. You’re going in.” Jig Dog heard those last two words: “going in.” That snapped him out of it. He grabbed the stick with both hands and flattened out his jet.

  But then, almost immediately, he felt nauseous. He vomited into his mask and then into his lap. His reactions on the control stick were sluggish. The instruments all looked fuzzy. But Shepard’s voice kept pushing into his headset, and Jig Dog could feel his wingman’s presence just off his right shoulder. He finally descended to a lower altitude and regained his wits. The air tasted better, “and I began to care.” He cleared out his mask as best he could and began communicating with Shepard and the ship. The mission, he learned, was canceled and all planes were to return to the Oriskany.

  Jig Dog wasn’t sure whether to call an emergency, which would require the Oriskany to clear the deck of all planes, or try to keep flying. He talked it over with Shepard, who could tell his commander was emerging from whatever fog had confused him. They decided that Jig Dog should go ahead and land. The storm had blown past, and the sun was even poking through the clouds. Shepard kept talking, keeping him engaged. Jig Dog brought his plane in slowly and landed, snapping to a safe halt without incident.

  The inside of the Banshee was disgusting, and Jig Dog looked like shit. An inspection of the plane found that the oxygen system had failed. Cranking up the heat had probably exacerbated the problem. Jig Dog collapsed in the ready room and waited for his wingman. When Shepard saw his boss, he just shook his head.

  “Just wasn’t my day to buy the farm,” Jig Dog said. “Shep, I owe you one.”

  He’d get his chance to return the favor a year later. And Shepard would need it.

  It would make all the difference in his career.

  8

  “That little rascal”

  In late 1954, near the end of his second tour on Oriskany, Shepard was promoted to lieutenant commander—a significant step up the naval ladder to a rank that can take 15 or more years to reach but which he had reached after a decade, at age 30. During a boozy celebration at the Yokosuka officer’s club, Mitch Mitchell and the others razzed Shepard about becoming an old man. As the taunts increased, Shepard’s face began to turn red and he called the others a “bunch of pussies.” “He didn’t like to be needled,” Mitchell said. “He was very conscious of his manliness.” Finally, at night’s end, they threw him into the club pool, fully clothed—a baptism of sorts for a full-blown brown shoe.

  By the mid-1950s, naval aviation had reached the other side of a remarkable postwar transformation. Supersonic and technologically sophisticated jets were now the norm, and Shepard had contributed to nearly every phase of that transformation. He had stellar, enviable credentials: among an elite few to become a test pilot as a lowly lieutenant junior grade; first in-flight refueling tests of the Banshee F2H-2; first carrier landings with Banshee F2H-3; among the first Navy pilots to land on the new angled-deck aircraft carriers; among the first night-flying carrier pilots. He had flown numerous flights above seventy thousand feet, just shy of space itself. And his flight logs reflected a total of nearly five thousand hours of flight time—more than half a year in the air.

  But even more impressive than his credentials were the immeasurable qualities that only another aviator could appreciate, subtle skills and instinctive abilities that emerge only after hundreds and hundreds of flights. Shepard had uncanny spatial sense, a light but accurate and decisive touch with the controls, and an almost physical union with any plane he flew. He could make an airplane do anything he wanted. He was, in short, one of the best pilots in the U.S. Navy. Where he once thanked luck and hard work for his success, he now began to believe it was more than that. He was better than the rest, and he wore that self-satisfied poise on his sleeve.

  It was in his voice, too. When he now spoke about flying, he did so with unwavering authority. In his New England accent, with its unpronounced r’s and long a’s, he peppered conversations with pronouncements of finality. “In the final analysis” and “at the end of the day,” he liked to say. Another favorite was actually,as in, “Actually, Mitch, the best way to land a Banshee is . . .” He was suave and assured—not movie star slick, but confident and comfortable with himself, with his body and his clothes. People trusted him. He was a leader and a role model to younger pilots, who hung around him in the ready room, asking his advice and seeking his approval. “Probably the best aviator I’ve ever known,” said Bill Lawrence, one of the Mangy Angels, who would fly off and on with Shepard for a total of five years.

  But there was a flip side to many of Shepard’s traits, as if every good quality had an evil twin. The dark side of Alan Shepard the precise, technical flying genius was Alan Shepard the hotdogger, the showoff, the flat-hatter. Then again, some of the brass liked a little spunk in their men, and at the end of Shepard’s tenure with Air Group 19, Adm. Jack Whitney requested that Shepard become his aide. Maybe Whitney wanted to tame the bronco flyer, or maybe he thought he was doing him a favor. Shepard, however, was di
sgusted by the thought of trading jets to work as an admiral’s gofer. A Navy man is supposed to follow orders, especially those of an admiral. But Shepard wanted to fly. So he called Jig Dog.

  During World War II Jig Dog had similarly impressed his superiors, and at war’s end an admiral requested that Jig Dog become his aide. But Jig Dog had encouraged his boss to convince the admiral that he wasn’t right for the job: “He’s got attitude problems,” his boss had said. So when Admiral Whitney requested Shepard as his right-hand man, Jig Dog called the admiral’s office to put in a bad word for Shepard. “Admiral, in no way do you want Al Shepard as your aide,” he said. “I don’t think he’d be useful in the job. And besides, he’s a hellraiser.”

  That’s why, in 1956, instead of becoming an admiral’s aide, Shepard was called back for another tour as a test pilot and instructor at Patuxent River.

  When Shepard returned for his second tour at Patuxent River, he resumed flying the newest, fastest, hottest jets ever made. In the few years he’d been at sea, experimental jets had continued to emerge. His old straight-winged Banshee now seemed like a toy compared to bullet-fast and bat-winged jets named Demon, Crusader, and Skyray.

  But he would soon learn that, at the end of the day, every jet had its flaw. Usually those flaws became violently apparent when the planes reached the extreme region of plane-against-air friction, the invisible wall known as the sound barrier.

  To break the sound barrier, you have to fly anywhere from 660 to 760 miles an hour. That range is due to the fact that sound travels roughly 740 to 760 miles an hour at sea level but as much as 100 miles an hour slower at higher altitudes and in lower temperatures. When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, he was cruising at 700 miles an hour at forty-two thousand feet, becoming the first human to reach Mach 1.

  The tough-sounding Mach number got its name from Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, who had studied ballistics and sound waves in the late 1800s. The Mach number is the ratio of an object’s speed in relation to the speed of sound, so that Mach .7 is 70 percent of the speed of sound (or “subsonic”), Mach 1 is the speed of sound (or “transonic”), and Mach 2 is twice the speed of sound. Anything above Mach 1 is considered “supersonic,” but prior to Chuck Yeager’s feat, scientists had presumed the human body was incapable of withstanding the extreme forces of supersonic speed. Some scientists ventured that a pilot hitting the sound barrier would be squashed like a bug, his body flattened by the pummeling of pressure waves.

  Six years after Yeager proved those theories wrong, a test pilot named Scott Crossfield, part of the fledgling NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics—the predecessor of the space agency, NASA), sat in the cockpit of a rocket-propelled Skyrocket—slathered tip to tail with wax to reduce drag—and was dropped from the belly of a B-29 bomber. Crossfield lit up his engines and then tipped his plane into a shallow dive, watching the “mach meter” until, at 1,291 miles an hour, it reached the number 2.

  Three years later, another rocket-boosted aircraft, the X-2, reached 126,000 feet—the fringes of space. And a few weeks after that, a pilot named Mel Apt reached Mach 3 (2,094 miles an hour), but then immediately spun out of control and was killed. That was the problem with high-altitude supersonic flight—while knocking on heaven’s door, unpredictable and deadly things could occur quickly. Which is exactly what was nearly killing any pilot who tried to blast through Mach 1 in the Grumman F11F-1 Tiger, the Navy’s vexing and expensive new jet fighter.

  The Tiger was designed to be the first Navy jet fighter to go supersonic, with an enormous turbojet engine that could easily shove it toward unprecedented heights, a dozen miles above earth. An experimental version of the Tiger reached 1,386 miles an hour (Mach 2 plus some), and the Tiger would soon be adopted by Shepard’s beloved Blue Angels. The jet was so fast that a Grumman test pilot, while testing the plane’s machine guns, caught up to his own speeding bullets, which smacked into his windshield and damaged one of the engines, forcing a crash landing.

  But early models of the Tiger, also being tested by the Air Force in 1956, had a troubling little tic. When the F11F Tiger reached Mach 1, any effort to turn would cause “reverse yaw”—a violent, out-of-control spin in the opposite direction. Shortly after Mel Apt was killed in his Mach 3 flight at the former Muroc airbase (which had been renamed Edwards Air Force Base in 1949), Shepard was sent there to help “wring out” the Navy’s troublesome Tiger. A little more than an hour north and east of Los Angeles, Edwards was the desert testing grounds made famous by Yeager and by Shepard’s mentor, Turner Caldwell, and other pilots in their record-breaking matte black or bright red rocket-powered jets. In the aviation fraternity, it was also famous for the broken-down, wood-floored local dude ranch/bar, the Happy Bottom Riding Club.

  Even though it was an Air Force base, Shepard loved flying in and out of Edwards, which he called “a beautiful airfield.” After landing so many planes on the minuscule “floating runway” of an aircraft carrier, it was liberating to have the entire hard-packed dry lake beds on the edge of the Mojave Desert as his runway.

  The night before his scheduled tests on the Tiger, Shepard paid a visit to the Happy Bottom, which was run by Pancho Barnes, a legendary and foul-mouthed daredevil aviatrix of the 1920s, who once earned a cameo beside Clark Gable in the movie Test Pilot. There Shepard ran into a group of regulars—a few Air Force pilots stationed at Edwards. One of them, noting that a Navy pilot had entered the bar, began loudly asking his colleagues how they could recognize a Navy formation. Answer: four planes flying in the same direction—sort of.

  Shepard smirked, trying not to show his anger, then fired off his standard retort: “I’d like to see you ‘blue suit boys’ land on an aircraft carrier . . . at night . . . in a storm.” Shepard teased the Air Force guys about their inability to fly the F11F Tiger, then boasted that he’d tame the Tiger and prove it wasn’t the plane’s fault—it was the pilot’s.

  Behind his dark-lensed sunglasses and inside a pressurized suit that would allow him to function in the low-pressure air of high altitudes, he took off from Edwards one sunny California morning and ascended alone up above sixty thousand feet, a slow, spiraling ascent that took the better part of an hour. Once he reached the designated altitude, he tipped the Tiger forward into a dive and opened up the throttle. He was watching the airspeed indicator rise toward seven hundred miles an hour and the Mach meter rise toward 1 when, without warning, the engine flamed out and all power was lost. He had a split second to take a quick breath before the cabin pressure disappeared, and without the necessary heat from the engine, the thick-glass canopy enclosing the cockpit immediately frosted over.

  The Tiger began falling “like a Steinway piano,” Shepard said years later. Fortunately, the powerless plane had seized with its ailerons and rudder in good positions—Shepard was in a slight turn and able to keep the Tiger from spinning completely out of control. The plane corkscrewed toward earth, and Shepard decided to let it, to wait until he reached the denser air at lower altitudes. At forty thousand feet he tried to restart the engine. Nothing. Ten thousand feet later, in still denser air, he primed the fuel pump and tried to start the engine again. Nothing. Shepard laughed—one of those involuntary “oh shit” laughs—and through the frosted canopy watched the Sierra Madre grow closer.

  There are a number of reasons a pilot stays inside a dying plane longer than he should. First, his confidence lets him believe he can save what is lost. Second, his pride keeps him from admitting defeat and parachuting to safety. Third, bailing out is a risky and sometimes deadly alternative. Yet, more aviators—especially test pilots—have been injured or killed as a result of the decision to stay with a wounded bird than because of any other factor.

  Shepard knew he was “using up the sky in a terrible hurry,” but he decided to stay, to try one last time to start the engines. If it failed this time, he’d bail out. Again he primed the fuel pump and went coolly step by step through the start-up procedures. Th
is time, at twelve thousand feet, with just seconds between that height and no height, the engines restarted. He had fallen nearly ten miles but was able to quickly gain control, straighten out the plane, and fly back to the base.

  Shepard left the Tiger on the tarmac, turned, and flipped the plane a middle finger. After a meeting with his test chief, he went straight to the Happy Bottom Riding Club, where a couple of drinks eased the taunts and cackles of the Air Force boys.

  Shepard wasn’t always so fortunate. At the time, the Navy was also having problems with the latest version of its notorious Vought-built F7U Cutlass, an underpowered carrier jet that one test pilot trashed as “an unforgiving, unreliable airplane that took too many lives before it was retired.” The glitch du jour occurred when a pilot tried a snap roll—that is, rolled 180 degrees left or right, so the plane was upside down. During a snap roll the F7U would inexplicably slip into an inverted spin, like an upside-down boomerang. Other jets also had a tendency to do that, but ordinarily the pilot could let go of the control stick and the plane usually corrected itself. Not the F7U. Shepard went back out to Edwards, convinced that there was no reason those other pilots should be bailing out and destroying million-dollar airplanes.

  He tried a snap roll, and sure enough, the F7U went into an inverted spin and began plummeting. Shepard tried everything he could to save the plane but finally, just a few thousand feet from the ground, bailed out and parachuted to the orange California desert below, where he watched the plane crash and bloom into a fireball on the horizon.

  Shepard had almost killed himself twice, but that was in fact the whole point of being a test pilot: to make sure other pilots weren’t killed by an imperfect plane. In early 1957 he flew to Edwards once more to wring out another new jet—the F5D-1 Skylancer—as project director of a team of test pilots that would recommend to the Navy whether or not to order more F5Ds. For five days he and Billy Lawrence (his former Oriskany mate who had been assigned to Patuxent River, thanks to a recommendation from Shepard) and another test pilot pushed and prodded the F5D. The Navy had high hopes for the bat-winged, supersonic F5D, but Shepard didn’t like or trust how it flew, and he said so in a strongly worded report. “This isn’t what we want,” he wrote.