The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (30 page)

Even though it was the autumn, when thick fogs regularly roll in off Long Island Sound, the days remained sunny and dry and maddeningly clear.

Meantime, Joe Doolittle had established herself, as she did on every post, as the most charming hostess who attracted crowds of the famous and not so famous from far and wide. There was scarcely an evening when she did not entertain, and she had become by then a legendary cook, despite the fact that as a child her mother never allowed her in the kitchen. Most of her culinary skills, she admitted, were a result of the Chinese cook at the Eagle Pass airfield in Texas, who had taught her to make cheap Mexican dishes. These she spiced up and improved upon over the years until her chili con carne, meatballs, and chow mein became the talk of the town wherever she went. There was often dancing afterward, and a great deal of beer drinking, thanks to Joe’s expertly prepared home brew. Those were the last days of Prohibition, but like most decent, honest Americans the Doolittles partook whenever they pleased, and Joe had learned that using first-rate hops was the secret to making good beer. Since the best hops available were grown in California, Jimmy organized a relay between army pilots flying from the West Coast to bring Joe as many hops as they could carry. Those were good times for Jimmy too. He was home enough to play with the boys, teaching them baseball, tumbling, and boxing or singing them Russian folk songs he’d learned from a pair of the czar’s pilots who had fled the Soviet Union.
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On the morning of September 24, 1929, Harry Reader at last had the opportunity to demonstrate his giant fog-dispersing blowtorch.

The fog rolled in off the Sound sometime before six a.m., a thick gray soup that enveloped the field, the runway, and the hangar where Jack Dalton, Doolittle’s chief mechanic, was working. Dalton dashed to Doolittle’s quarters and woke him up, and in turn Doolittle aroused Reader, who promptly manned his torch. Doolittle also alerted other officials, including Harry Guggenheim, who had to drive from his home at Port Washington about ten miles away.

Everyone, including Captain Land, Conger Pratt, the commanding officer at Mitchel Field, Doolittle, and even Joe, gathered around Harry Reader as he got his heater going full blast. Sure enough, the fog began to disperse above the roaring torch and for some short distance around it but, as Doolittle put it, the experiment soon collapsed in dismal failure.

Although the intense heat could dissipate fog above Reader’s gravel pit in Ohio, when it got into the open the slightest wind would simply push fresh fog into the hole that the torch had dispersed, filling it up just about as fast as it had dissolved the fog.

With this disagreeable setback hovering over them, and all the dignitaries hanging around while Reader resignedly packed up his torch,
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Doolittle wasn’t about to let such a fine fog go to waste. He told Dalton to crank up the NY-2 Husky. He was going to try a blind landing in the fog now!

It was vintage Doolittle. Here was a man who six months earlier had barely escaped with his life in a fog-bound crash now anxious to jeopardize it again in a completely untried experiment. This time, however, he’d done the math on paper, and in practical experiments; he’d watched the theories being put into practice as the various instruments took shape. He saw the possibilities in his mind and the odds seemed in his favor.

Technicians rushed to man the radios and beacons as Doolittle taxied onto the runway, pulled his canvas hood shut, and took off. He climbed out of the fog at 500 feet and flew in a wide circle above the field for about ten minutes before lining up for a landing. He tuned his headset to listen to the vibrating radio beacon reeds. Every time he steered off a beeline course the humming told him to realign. When he was near the airport the local beacon took over and he began to descend. He looked at the altimeter, 200 feet, 100 feet, 50 feet—the reeds were vibrating perfectly—25 feet, 10 feet. Despite his best efforts he came down sloppy with his nose too high and bounced. But he’d just made aviation history with the first completely blind flight alone in a fog.

By then Guggenheim and others had arrived, and it was decided that Doolittle should do an “official” blind flight, meaning that everything, every move, would be thoroughly measured and recorded. The heaviest fog had begun to disperse but there was just enough left.

With the hood over the cockpit “tightly closed,” Doolittle taxied out onto the grass runway and let the engine rev while he once more adjusted the directional gyroscope to the magnetic compass heading and set the altimeter at zero. Then he opened the throttle until the aircraft was straining at every bolt and rivet. When he was satisfied he had full power on, Doolittle let go the brakes and roared off westward. (At Guggenheim’s insistence another pilot was put in the forward cockpit but he kept his hands off the controls the entire flight.)

Leveling out at 1,000 feet, Doolittle flew five miles, then made a series of 90-degree left turns; the last put him in the landing pattern for the west runway. The two vibrating reeds were humming left and right in the cockpit, homing him in to the Mitchel Field beacon. Whenever he veered off course, the reed in that direction would vibrate more, telling him to steer the other way. If he kept the reeds vibrating at an equal rate he knew he was flying on a direct path to the runway. Slowly descending until his new altimeter registered precisely 400 feet, he leveled out and picked up the local runway beam that guided him down, 200 feet, 100 feet, until he crossed thirty feet above the fence at the end of the runway and then glided to a touchdown, rolled, settled back on the tail skid, and came to a stop. There was uproarious cheering and applause as everyone rushed to the plane. Guggenheim joyfully pulled back the hood, revealing Doolittle with a vexed expression because he thought he’d made a sloppy landing.

“What happened to the fog?” he asked, looking around.

“It sort of rolled away while you were up there,” Guggenheim told him.
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But it didn’t matter.

The entire flight from takeoff to landing was only fifteen minutes, but Doolittle had made aviation history again—twice in one day!

During the course of a grand celebration they threw that night with excellent homemade beer and a broccoli-lemon cheese dip, Joe introduced a new tradition to the Doolittle family. There was a large, white damask tablecloth on the dinner table and everyone who had worked on the project was invited to sign it, beginning with Guggenheim and Land. Later, Joe embroidered the signatures in black thread and in the years to come anyone who ate at the Doolittles’ was invited to sign the tablecloth. In her lifetime Joe meticulously stitched more than five hundred signatures into the tablecloth, and when it was full she began using white table napkins. The only signature not actually made at the Doolittles’ table was that of Orville Wright, who signed the tablecloth in old age when it was brought to his home.
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J
IMMY
D
OOLITTLE BECAME ENSHRINED
, along with Rickenbacker and Lindbergh, among the giants of American aviation. “Man’s greatest enemy in the air, fog, was conquered yesterday at Mitchel Field,” declared the
New York Times
, “when Lt. James H. Doolittle took off, flew over a fifteen mile course, and landed again without seeing the ground or any part of his plane but the illuminated instrument boards.”

Of course there was an enormous amount of work remaining to perfect blind flight, but Doolittle and the Full Flight Laboratory had shown the way. “The occasion marked the first instance in which a pilot negotiated a complete flight while flying absolutely blind,” continued the
Times
story. “The demonstration was more than an exhibition of blind flying and instrument perfection. It indicated that aviation had perhaps taken its greatest step in safety.”

Guggenheim was somewhat more cautious, saying, “The last great hazard to airplane reliability is vanishing as this principle is developed, which will make the airplane more independent of weather conditions.”

Doolittle was even more cautious than that. Calling the
Times
reporter “optimistic,” he said for the record, “Although more work was needed, we made an initial contribution to instrument flight.” Privately, he considered his work on the blind-flight project “my most significant contribution to aviation.”

In the autumn of 1929, right after Jimmy’s famous blind flight, the stock markets crashed, plunging the country—and the world—into a great financial depression. Nobody at the time knew how bad it would be, but an immediate shock convulsed the petroleum industry; people stopped buying cars, making cars, and driving cars. Executives at St. Louis’s Shell Oil division were farsighted enough to understand they needed to open new markets, and the notion of having Doolittle compete in air races under Shell’s sponsorship was suddenly very appealing. They offered him
three times
his army salary to join the company, and even gave him his own private airplane, a $25,000 Lockheed Vega.
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It was an offer he would not refuse.

It was a hard decision for Doolittle; he loved the army and had given ten years of his life to it. He would miss being the army’s crack test pilot and chumming around with the airplane designers, builders, and dreamers who were behind all the innovations of modern flight. He did not leave the army entirely, however. He applied for and received a commission as major in the army reserve, just to keep his hand in. With that the Doolittle family packed up and left Mitchel Field for Lindbergh’s old stomping grounds St. Louis, Missouri.

St. Louis and the cities around it had become a mecca of aviation design and construction. Jimmy’s responsibility at Shell, he soon found out, was much greater than he had been given to understand. He was to manage aviation affairs at all three of Shell’s U.S. subsidiaries, including the one in San Francisco where his friend who had recommended him, John Macready, was posted. In particular, Jimmy was to oversee and coordinate the development and sale of all of Shell’s aviation products. He was also expected to race or stunt in the big air shows.

He had been at the company less than a month when all that changed. An old friend from his army aviation class, Jack Allard, now president of Curtiss-Wright’s export branch, arrived with a proposition. He wanted Jimmy—whose blind-flight fame had preceded him—to go on a whirlwind four-month, eleven-country European air show tour demonstrating the new Curtiss Hawk biplane, the standard U.S. Army fighter aircraft of the late 1920s. At first the Shell people were skeptical, but Allard won them over by explaining that Jimmy was immensely popular in Europe and that it would be to his, and Shell’s, advantage for him to meet the leaders of European aviation. Besides, there was the promise that at every show it would be announced the Hawk was exclusively serviced by Shell products.

From Greece, the Doolittle entourage toured Turkey, the Balkans (Yugoslavia and Bulgaria), Poland, France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, France, Norway, and Sweden. Doolittle had two forced landings, due to faulty engines, got lost in fog and had to ask for directions from Swiss Boy Scouts, and received a diplomatic reprimand for “flying under two of the Danube bridges at Budapest, on a challenge, at night (the opening line of the ambassadorial complaint read, ‘I would do little to belittle Doolittle but …’).”
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Meanwhile, he took note of the state of European aviation and its advances, especially in Germany, where the Germans were building “good-looking Dorniers and Junkers.”

At this pre-Hitler stage of international affairs, Germany was not yet seen as a threat, but Doolittle, who was foremost a military man, was quick to notice that all of the advanced European nations were technologically much further along in aviation than the United States. In Europe, governments supported air shows and plane racing, which were essentially test laboratories for the designers, engineers, and the military. The political climate in Europe had not yet turned rancid, but Doolittle concluded that World War I had not settled matters once and for all, that many old antagonisms remained and new menaces lurked. They did not, for example, tour Italy, where the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had recently consolidated his power.

Doolittle returned to the States in July of 1930 to learn that his mother, who had been ill for several years, had taken a turn for the worse. She passed away in September, carrying with her at least the satisfaction that her son had not grown up to be a jailbird.

That same fall, Doolittle purchased a wrecked Travel Air—a stripped-down, low-wing racing monoplane known in aviation circles as the Mystery Ship because he had it reconstructed to his own modernized specifications, streamlining it with a backward sweep, or curve, in the wings as they came off the fuselage. On June 23, 1931, he took it to a local air show for a test flight.

At first the Mystery Ship responded to Doolittle’s complete satisfaction as he performed several aerobatic stunts. Then he dived down to 100 feet, right above the crowd at almost 300 miles per hour, but when he zoomed up toward 500 feet there was “an ominous sound of cracking metal.” The plane went into a horrible spasm of vibration as the wings started to break and the ailerons bucked and snapped off. That, for all practical purposes, was the end of the Mystery Ship. What remained to be seen was whether it would also be the end of Doolittle.

Spectators were horrified. Doolittle had flipped the stick to point the plane away from the crowd and scrambled out of the cockpit, immediately pulling the rip cord on his parachute, but he was already so close to the ground that he actually watched his own plane crash and explode half a mile off, just as his feet touched earth. Like Lindbergh, Doolittle was now a member of the Caterpillar Club two times over, having twice jumped with a parachute to avoid what would have been certain death. His is said to be one of the lowest unplanned jumps in parachuting history. Jimmy had put a considerable amount of his and Joe’s life’s savings into the Mystery Ship, the remains of which were now no more than a steaming pile of hot, twisted metal.
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