The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (12 page)

Doolittle’s first assignment was the government of Chile, and in April of 1926 he boarded a freighter and steamed through the Panama Canal with a crated P-1 Hawk in the hold and a skilled Curtiss mechanic as his traveling companion.

Doolittle did not have a captive audience when he reached Santiago, a dirty, sprawling metropolis in the foothills of the Andes. Pilots from England, Italy, and Germany had already arrived to peddle their wares. “I wasn’t worried about the British or Italian models,” he said. “It was the German Dornier flown by Karl A. von Schoenebeck that was the greatest threat.”

Schoenebeck, it seems, had been an ace in Richthofen’s famous Flying Circus that had clashed so often with Eddie Rickenbacker’s Hat in the Ring squadron on the Western Front. The flying shows would begin in June at the
aerodromo
El Bosque, on the outskirts of town.

Ten days before the aerial demonstrations the Chilean aviators threw a party for the foreign fliers at their officers’ club, a handsome stone building in downtown Santiago dating to colonial times. As the party gathered steam, the visiting officers were introduced to the
pisco
sour, “a delightful specialty of the fun-loving Chileans,” which combines three ounces of
pisco
, a clear brandy of Spanish origin, with sugar, lemon juice, and ice (note: three ounces of alcohol in a single drink is more than
twice
the dose of a usual American cocktail). Let Jimmy Doolittle pick up the story from here.

At some point the name of the silent film actor Douglas Fairbanks was raised, whose “balcony-leaping, sword-playing swashbuckling roles” had excited the fancy of the Chilean pilots.

As the evening wore on, and after swigging several or more of the
pisco
sours, Doolittle announced that Fairbanks’s stunts weren’t particularly unusual. In fact, said he,
all
American children learn to do those things. Doolittle’s command of Spanish was not as good as he thought, but when that statement was finally translated the Chileans’ “eyebrows raised in doubt.”

“Inspired by the
pisco
sours,” Doolittle said, “I upended into a handstand, and ‘walked’ a few paces.” This polished gymnastic exhibition delighted the Chilean hosts, who clapped and shouted
ole!
Doolittle then entertained them with a series of flips, which electrified the crowd and elicited even more handclapping and shouting.

One of the Chilean pilots offered that he had seen Fairbanks perform a handstand on a windowsill, which struck Doolittle as “reasonable,” so he went to an open window, climbed through, and did a two-hand stand on the two-foot-wide ledge. This led to a one-hand stand, which, after more ovation, prompted the agile former boxer and gymnast to overextend himself, as it were, with a stunt from his tumbling days.

“Grasping the inside of the ledge with one hand,” Doolittle said, “I extended my legs and body parallel with the courtyard, one story below. This isn’t difficult. Just requires a little practice and knowledge of body leverage.” Otherwise known as a one-armed body lever, this was an extremely difficult stunt, especially when “practice” was nonexistent.

Reveling in the applause from his hosts, Doolittle held his precarious position for a few seconds until, to his dismay, he felt the sandstone of the ancient ledge he was holding begin to crumble beneath his fingers and break off. There was nothing to be done. The laws of gravity took over.

Doolittle plunged about twenty feet from the second story to a stone courtyard, luckily landing feet first—if you can call breaking both your ankles lucky. That was the verdict when they got him to the hospital and X-rayed the damage. It was a sobering experience in more ways than one, as Doolittle quickly realized the foolhardiness of what he had done. A minimum of six weeks, the doctors told him, would have to pass before the bones healed. What was he to say to the people at Curtiss-Wright? Or to his superiors in the army? A drunken stunt had put him hors de combat at a time when he might have sold planes and enhanced the army’s reputation immensely. Instead, he feared he would become a laughingstock. To complicate things further, the Chilean doctors misread the X-rays and his plaster casts were put on the wrong feet, each fracture being different, resulting in the bones being improperly set.

Doolittle had no intention of lying in a hospital bed while others sold their planes to the Chilean air force. After nine days in traction he had his mechanic come with a hacksaw and cut him out of the plaster at the ankles, whereupon he escaped to the airfield, clattering across the runway on crutches to be lifted aboard his plane.

With metal clips bolted on his flying shoes by the mechanic to hold his feet on the pedals, on June 24, 1926, Doolittle did a practice demonstration with the Curtiss P-1 Hawk. He flew all of his snap rolls to the right that afternoon and his right cast broke.

That night he went back to the hospital to have the cast replaced and next day went out and flew a demonstration with all his snap rolls to the left.

The left cast broke.

Back at the hospital the doctors called him a “crazy Yankee” and blackballed him, so Doolittle found a German cast maker in town who fixed him up with extra heavy-duty prostheses that were reinforced by, of all things, women’s steel corset stays. These worked fine, but he still had to hobble around on crutches.

By the day of the big airplane demonstration, word of Doolittle’s gallant persistence had gotten out, and crowds at the air show increased tenfold. Chileans are fond of underdogs and apparently viewed Doolittle in the same way as they might a one-legged bullfighter.

He was driven to the flying field and assisted into the cockpit. The president of Chile, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, was there, along with his cabinet and a large contingent of army and navy officers. Von Schoenebeck was already aloft, demonstrating his aerobatic routine in the Dornier. Doolittle decided he needed some competition, “So I took off, and climbed to meet him,” he said.

Doolittle flew up beside a surprised von Schoenebeck and wagged his wings, the sign for a mock dogfight. The German saluted and the fight was on. Try as he might, it turned out there was no maneuver von Schoenebeck could perform to keep Doolittle off his tail, and he went through them all—barrel rolls, dives, Immelmanns, sideslips—but every time the German looked back there was the Curtiss Hawk, dogging him like a pesky horsefly.

Doolittle was enjoying himself immensely. He knew his P-1 was faster (400 horsepower to the Dornier’s 260) and more maneuverable, and he whipped all around the German with close passes, then zoomed to show the Curtiss’s superior speed. After enough of this humiliation, von Schoenebeck broke off the engagement. As he began to descend, Doolittle saw that the fabric covering the Dornier’s upper wing was coming apart.
^‖
Doolittle then went through his aerobatic routine and as a finale sped across the field in front of the spectators, flying upside down at treetop level. The audience clapped, cheered, and threw hats into the air as Doolittle was lifted out of his cockpit, and several of the Hawks were sold that day.

Doolittle’s next destination was Bolivia, and he flew the Hawk due south between the mountains and the Pacific coast, setting a new record of 11 hours, 23 minutes between Santiago and La Paz. Unbeknownst to Doolittle, however, Bolivia and Chile were having one of their perennial border disputes and he arrived to find his residence, the Stranger’s Club, surrounded by a thousand-man mob of angry and arson-minded Bolivians shouting anti-Chilean and anti-American slogans, including the stock insult “Gringo go home!” Newspapers had reported that Doolittle was in fact a spy for Chile, and he was presently being denounced from the streets to the halls of the Bolivian parliament.

The Bolivian army arrived and dispersed the mob but authorities suggested that Doolittle leave town as soon as possible, advice he took to heart, since talk had begun of a firing squad. Airplane sales under present conditions were less than promising.

His next stop was Buenos Aires, which would require flying over the Andes, a hazardous adventure in 1926. He would be flying at roughly 18,000 feet, and as high as 20,000 feet at some points, meaning that the air would be awfully thin, and extreme turbulence was not uncommon at those altitudes. On top of all this was the matter of his broken ankles. If he ran into trouble he would have no choice but to try to set the plane down.

Nevertheless, on September 3, 1926, Jimmy Doolittle set another record by becoming the first American to fly over the Andes range (several Argentinians had done it, but more had perished in the attempt), and he broke the present speed record at that, making the trip from Santiago to Buenos Aires in 6 hours, 45 minutes. He was also, he pointed out, “the only man ever to fly over [the Andes] with two broken ankles.”

In Argentina Doolittle gave the requisite aerial performances—minus von Schoenebeck as his foil—and managed to sell several more Curtiss Hawks, and following this he sailed for home.

W
HEN HE REACHED THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
in October 1926 Doolittle checked himself into Walter Reed Hospital because his ankles were still painful and not healing properly. The doctors were “shocked” when they read the X-rays. The healing was abnormal, but because of the length of time that had passed since Doolittle’s fall it was decided to let the healing continue without refracturing the bones. When his ankles were put in new casts he was sentenced to immobilization in the hospital for an indeterminate period of time.

It was during this interlude that Doolittle ginned up the notion of performing the notorious “outside loop,” an aircraft maneuver that puts such enormous stress on both the pilot and the aircraft that many aviators believed it was impossible. Not Doolittle.

Flying an inside loop is relatively easy because the pilot is on the vertical inside of the loop, where centrifugal forces hold him in place and his blood is not rushed to the head. In an outside loop, however, this is reversed and the pilot’s feet, rather than his head, are pointed toward the center of the circle. The body is subjected to mighty strains, including an ever increasing centrifugal force that pushes the blood to the brain with tremendous pressure. In addition, there was the question among aviators of what it might do to the pilot’s internal organs. And would he “red out” and become unconscious when he attempted to push the plane around on the second half of the loop? Let alone, the effects of all that strain on the aircraft.

Only such a man as Doolittle could ask these questions with the apparent intention of testing them on himself.

In April 1927, shortly after he was released from the hospital, Doolittle secretly began practicing the outside loop in the Curtiss Hawk. He took it one stage at a time, going through the bottom half, then going around and under, a sensation that was disagreeable at first, similar to hanging upside down for a long time on the horizontal gymnastics bar. The second half of the loop was the tricky part, because when the plane reached the bottom the pilot had to remain alert enough to put on sufficient speed and push the plane out the top.

On May 25, 1927—four days after Lindbergh had soloed across the Atlantic—Jimmy Doolittle asked six of his fellow test pilots to “watch a patch of sky” about 10,000 feet up while he went into his stunt. At about 350 miles per hour Doolittle shoved the stick forward and began the loop. He saw red as the blood rushed into his brain. The g-force pressure was so great that it burst the blood vessels in his eyes, but other than that, and a great deal of “discomfort,” he had, that day, in fact achieved the seemingly impossible.

His buddies got word to the newspapers and next day headlines had Doolittle as “the first man in history to perform the outside loop.” Reporters wrote that his eyes were completely bloodshot and that he had a ruptured lung (this last was untrue). When one reporter wanted to know how he did it, Doolittle replied with characteristic self-effacement. “Don’t know. I just thought it up on the spur of the moment.”

When army brass got wind of Doolittle’s stunt many were horrified that now other, less experienced pilots would try it and wreck their planes. Orders were quickly posted banning anyone from attempting an outside loop.

Soon the Curtiss-Wright Corporation came calling again. The company asked the army if it could reprise last year’s South American sales tour, again featuring Doolittle. Again the army acceded, probably in some measure glad to be rid of him, thus providing a new set of opportunities for Doolittle’s growing repertoire of adventures and misadventures.

T
HIS TIME
D
OOLITTLE
had two planes to show off. Besides the Curtiss Hawk there was a two-seat observation plane, the Curtiss 0-1, a civilian test pilot, William McMullen, and, lastly, two Curtiss mechanics, who assembled both planes when they reached Lima, Peru.

When the Doolittle air show arrived in Bolivia, this time Doolittle was welcomed with open arms, the border dispute having blown over.

In between demonstrations of the planes, the Doolittle team met an American gold mine manager named Charles Wallen who had just arrived in La Paz with a strange story to tell after a nine-day trek by burro from his mine a hundred miles into the jungle. He had come for medical supplies, he said, for some native mine workers
^a
who, while drunk on their day off, enjoyed playing a dangerous game called
probando la suerte
(“trying your luck”). It worked this way: forty or so men would stand in a circle with their arms outstretched barely touching hands with those on either side of them. A quarter of a stick of dynamite with a long fuse would then be lit and passed from man to man. The man holding it when it blew up was considered
sin suerte
(“without luck”). Back at the mine, Wallen said, were a dozen or so Indians still alive from the last game but horribly mangled and tended to by the mine doctor, who had run out of everything but whiskey and quinine.