Chapter 11: ►

_How Dark the Clouds_

During my four years at the University of Washington in Seattle after World War II, I kept strong ties with Naval aviation. In early 1946 I helped organize a reserve squadron, VF-74, a group of mature “Weekend Warriors.” The pilots were experienced aviators, mostly married men and veterans of the war. Under Navy supervision we trained hard to achieve a high degree of readiness, prepared for instant mobilization in the event the nation went to war again. We flew drills two days a month and spent two weeks on active Navy duty every year. Our squadron was consistently among the leaders in Naval reserve gunnery scores, but we could never claim a trophy because our maverick pilots were indifferent to paperwork. For me personally, my tour with this hard-flying outfit provided not only the most rewarding moments in the air but also in one instance the most humiliating.

The rewarding moments came during the months and months of weekend flights around Seattle. Our squadron was furnished a mixed bag of F6F and F4U Corsair airplanes, leftovers from World War II requiring constant maintenance. After the Navy demobilized, funds were scarce for reserve squadrons and thus our operations were run on a tight-fisted basis. One result was that we pilots could not shift around, checking out in different airplanes. I was an F6F pilot, restricted to that type of airplane. This annoyed me. The Corsair was considered something of a flying challenge, a fairly unstable plane, quick to stall and difficult to recover from a spin, but none the less a superior gun platform. I longed to master that beast and at the same time possibly improve my gunnery score.

One day while I was waiting in the operations office for my airplane assignment, the officer detailing the airplanes piped up: “Hey, I need a Corsair pilot.” It happened that at that moment there were none around.

“Put me down,” I called. I had been waiting for just such a chance. It never occurred to this officer to ask me if I were checked out in the plane. He neatly printed “Crossfield” on the blackboard in a space alongside the number of the airplane.

In a way, airplanes are like women, that is to say impossible to understand fully, and often ticklish to handle. It takes a little time to get to know them, to find out how and to what they respond. Some must be manipulated by fingertips, with infinite finesse, others must be pushed around like trucks. Some forgive the pilot’s sins; some don’t. The Corsair was very nearly inscrutable. She was hard to figure, slightly forgiving, and she required a great deal of attention.

I found this out under extraordinary circumstances. Soon after my name appeared on the board, I took off with five other planes. The flight had moved out so quickly I had time only to glance briefly at the airplane handbook in the cockpit. The flight leader was in a frisky mood. When we reached altitude he whipped the formation into the damnedest tail chase I have ever been in. I found myself in that totally strange airplane doing Cuban Eights, loops, barrel rolls, chandelles, and the Lord knows what else. Only a pilot can fully appreciate this situation, I suppose. Locked in that crazy ride, with one plane twenty feet ahead of me and another twenty feet behind, I really sweated. I thought to myself: “You damned fool. How’d you ever get into this?” But I wasn’t about to pull out, to admit that I couldn’t hack it.

The Crossfield luck rode with me that day. I sinned, but the Corsair was in a forgiving mood. There was no mid-air collision. The whole flight came down alive and landed. From that point on I was a Corsair man and glad of it. My gunnery score improved. Much later someone noticed that my paperwork was not in order for that plane. But it was too late then and the fact was overlooked. The outfit was an action squadron.

Our squadron skipper was Commander William Flateboe, a married man a little older than I, twenty-nine or so. We had served together at Corpus as instructors. When he was an ensign at Corpus, Flateboe was one of the wildest flat-hatters in Texas, a champion windmiller. When we organized the Reserve squadron, he was as conservative in the air as an airline pilot. But as the weeks and months dragged on, both he and I became restless and bored in the air and a second stage of infantile flat-hatting set in. I think I must have logged fifty hours flying below the rim of the Columbia River gorge.

In the midst of this flat-hatting renaissance, the thought struck me that we ought to legalize our flat-hatting. Thus was born the 13th Naval District Stunt Team, which in time became one of the best aerial stunt teams in the country, and we felt, of course, that it was _the_ best. There were four of us on the team: Flateboe, the “slot” man, Lou Colvin, a wingman, and an ensign named Bill Helsell, my usual wingman; I was the leader. The really remarkable fact about this stunt team was that we performed our precision formations in the supposedly dangerous Corsair.

Helsell was a fabulous aviator, one of the few men I have known whom I completely trusted in the air. He was low on total flying hours, and from a technical standpoint he knew and cared little or nothing about airplanes, but he was a rare natural pilot.

I first met him in a University car pool. He was the son of a Seattle lawyer. He studied engineering at Yale, achieving a straight A record; then he switched to law at the University of Washington, graduating cum laude. He was a dour-faced lad, outwardly a cynic and cold as ice. But that was a mask; he displayed many a kindness but feigned annoyance at the necessity.

Formation stunt flying, to my mind, is the quintessence of precision, and beyond any doubt it requires much skill and intense concentration. All four planes, tucked in as tight as we could get them without scraping paint, flew through the air as though locked together by invisible steel bars. As the leader, I guided the team. The other three planes flew “on me,” adjusting speed in minute increments, always keeping their eyes fixed on my plane. If I looped, they looped in unison. If I rolled, they rolled in unison. If I pulled a Cuban Eight, they pulled Cuban Eights in unison. Had I flown straight into the ground, they would have flown straight in with me in unison.

I set a hard pace. Striving for perfection and developing a flair for showmanship, which is the ultimate goal of most stunt teams, we worked at our drills at altitude. When we flew them cold, we performed right on the deck, a wingspan above the ground. We were soon very much in demand for various events. We felt that even in our aging Corsairs we could show the Regular Navy Blue Angels in their Bearcats a thing or two.

The original team did not last long. Flateboe was the first to go. Something had been eating away at him. One weekend evening while working at the base on some papers, he got up and said: “To hell with it.” He jumped in an airplane and set a course to rendezvous with one of the squadron flights on a training exercise out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Flateboe overhauled the flight at great speed and wound his plane into a gigantic barrel-roll around the formation. That was the last anyone ever saw of him. He evidently dived straight into the water. Later Colvin dropped out, leaving Helsell and me to carry on.

A subtle shift in emphasis then took place. Showmanship became secondary, the spectators unimportant. The stunt team changed into a delightful, though perhaps dangerous, aerial contest between two very competitive pilots. All attempts to make Helsell cry “uncle” failed. This contest reached its peak one day in Astoria, Oregon. I pulled out of a giant loop not more than twenty feet above the ground, screaming across the airport at 350 miles an hour. A tower, part of an adjoining skeet range, loomed in our path, dead ahead. I bore on, casually lifting my wing to clear the tower in the last second. Locked in beside me, Helsell skillfully followed my maneuver, never once batting an eyelash.

“_That_ ought to scare you,” I radioed.

“You’ll have to do better than that, Dad,” Helsell replied.

There was a professional stunt team, a barnstorming outfit complete with wing-walkers and a delayed-parachute performer, giving a show on the same field that day. After we landed, the leader of this team came up to me and said: “Hey, fellow. Do us a favor, will you? Will you please stay away from the fields where we’re working? You’ll put us out of business.”

I considered that one of the finest compliments ever paid us, but the man had no cause for worry. Helsell and I soon put ourselves out of business. One day during a regatta on Lake Washington, I led Helsell through a low-altitude formation roll over a crowd watching the crew races. Such a maneuver was routine to us then (we had logged five hundred hours of precision-stunt-flying), although by CAA regulations illegal. Probably a hundred amateur movie cameras caught the act. The 13th Naval District received a mass complaint shortly afterwards and restricted us to an altitude minimum of 1,000 feet.

“Hell,” I said, “at 1,000 feet it’s no fun.”

“I know,” the Old Man said, “but that’s an order.” He abruptly ended the conversation. And with that the stunt team folded.

Working with that team, working that fine artistry in Corsairs, was one of the most rewarding periods in the air I have ever experienced. Every second of each maneuver was a supreme satisfaction, a delight akin to playing fine music.

With me the bad always comes with the good. The most humiliating experience I had in an airplane occurred during a routine drill with VF-74. The fact that I was a party to this fiasco has stuck like a lance in my side ever since. It seemed impossible that our fine outfit could pull such a blooper. It began one day while we were on two weeks’ active duty, flying out of Sand Point.

It seems that the Naval Reserve unit in land-locked Denver, Colorado, was having difficulty in stirring up public interest and getting recruits. Someone conceived a grandiose plan: our whole air group, including VF-74, some twenty-five fighters and fifteen torpedo planes, would fly to Denver en masse and land amid contrived hoopla and press coverage. As a good-will gesture and public relations stunt, we would bring along an ice-packed salmon caught that same day in Puget Sound and present it to the mayor of Denver. Afterwards there would be a big official dinner party, more hoopla, and finally a gay time for us on the town, we hoped. We packed our smartest uniforms and took off.

Disaster struck the torpedo planes flying in separate formation. Caught in a bad storm, they were forced to land on a field in Helena, Montana, in a stiff ninety-degree crosswind. The long crosswind taxi of these cumbersome birds burned out the downwind brakes on several of the planes. With no brakes the planes were finished, grounded. The salmon, a key item in the good-will gesture, was on board one of the torpedo planes. It never left Helena.

The remaining airplanes, our twenty-five fighters, first ran into trouble at Ogden, Utah, when we landed to refuel. Fifteen of us took off without difficulty, but the engine of the sixteenth plane conked out on the narrow taxiway, blocking the remaining nine planes. They could not get into the air until the disabled plane was towed out of the way. The fifteen of us waited at altitude for a quarter of an hour, then radioed that we were pushing on alone. After all, there was a huge reception gathering at the Denver airport and we couldn’t be late. No, sir.

We were falling behind schedule now and our leader elected to bypass the ordinary roundabout air routes and steer a direct course for Denver, about four hundred miles away. This course led us directly over the Continental Divide and some of the most desolate, mountainous country in the world, which from 15,000 feet had a remarkable sameness about it. I laid out a course on a chart but, as was customary in fighters, let the flight commander do the navigating. He miscalculated a compass heading and we drove on, aiming considerably south of Denver, all of us thinking he had reasons of his own for this course.

After some time I was convinced that we were steering too far to the south. The same feeling overcame the other thirteen pilots in our formation. Suddenly the radio was alive with chatter and debate. The skipper broke in and said: “If I’m right, then in four and a half minutes we’ll pass over Waldron, Colorado.” Precisely four and a half minutes later we passed over a town on the fork of a river which resembled the plan of Waldron on the chart. There was an airfield on the opposite bank which seemed to confirm positively the skipper’s navigation. However, to make doubly sure, I peeled off and dived into the valley to check the name on any available sign. I missed signs but spotted a large “W” painted on the mountainside. It was Waldron, all right, I thought. The skipper was correct.

Actually we were over Gunnison, Colorado, considerably to the south of Waldron. Gunnison, too, is located on the fork of a river with an airfield on the opposite bank. The “W” on the mountainside had nothing to do with Waldron. It was put there by the students of Western State College in Gunnison.

Led astray by this strange set of coincidences, we flew on following the skipper, who predicted a second town lying ahead, Fort Collins. Twenty seconds later a town passed beneath our wings.

“We are now forty miles north of Denver,” the skipper said. “Close into parade formation.” We pulled our planes together in neat formation, following the highway straight into Denver, or so we thought, then about ten minutes away. We flew and flew and flew. Fifteen minutes passed, but no sign of Denver, no familiar big-city haze, no gradual build-up of traffic on the highway, no increase in housing. On the contrary, the countryside looked, if anything, more desolate. Helsell, who usually had little to say, piped up sourly: “I’m logging a strong Las Vegas, New Mexico, beam.” Now we were very concerned. Time was ticking away.

Again there was a confused debate on the radio. In the midst of it we passed over still another small town. I peeled off and buzzed it. The Rotary Club sign on the highway at the city limits read: “Alamosa.” Alamosa? No one knew where this could be. It was off our charts. Nine of our planes, low on fuel, pulled out of formation and landed at Alamosa.

I radioed my wingman, Bill Helsell:

“Nuts. I’m going to find Denver. You want to come with me?” He did, of course, so we cleared with the skipper and took off on our own, fiddling with our radios, trying to pick up a station, any station. Thunderstorms all around us gave little but static.

Regretting now that I had not carefully tracked the skipper’s navigating, I retraced our course from memory on my plotting board. We had indeed come too far south and Denver lay to the northeast of us. We flew in that direction. Soon we picked up Trinidad radio, which I knew was south of Denver, but still off our charts. We homed eastward on Trinidad and then turned due north, on course to Denver at last. We picked up Pueblo radio beacon as expected. Homing on Pueblo, we flew into a very black thunderhead full of rain and lightning. In that weather we lost the Pueblo radio signal. Minutes later we relocated ourselves by radio. We had passed Pueblo, which was under the storm. We couldn’t see the ground.

Long overdue in Denver, the authorities there became concerned about us and sounded a disaster alert. They figured we had exhausted our fuel. The Navy, the Civil Air Patrol, the Air National Guard, and the Lord knows who else, took to the air in search of fifteen Navy planes downed somewhere on the Continental Divide. The nine fighter planes blocked on the runway in Ogden had finally made it, sans fish, to Denver. There was great confusion at the airport over whether to wait for the lost planes or begin the ceremonies with the nine pilots.

Helsell and I were doing our damnedest--almost. Used to conserving fuel, another of our private competitions, we were still in the air looking for Denver. Every time we saw a house we zoomed down to see if it held a clue. Convinced that Denver lay to the northeast, I made one more attempt to find it. We flew northeast and came up over a ridge right into the face of another black line of thunderheads. I began to lose heart. It was almost dark, we had only a half-hour’s fuel, the radios yielded only static. To plunge into that thunderstorm flying blind, in the Rocky Mountains, with the distance to Denver unknown, could be idiotic.

“What do you think?” I radioed Helsell.

“Do _you_ think we should turn back?” he answered.

“Yes,” I said.

“So do I.”

And turn back we did, searching for the nearest airfield. At the point of turning we were exactly twenty-three miles southwest of Denver, or about six minutes by Corsair. The thunderstorm line was thin and lying on the last ridge before the midwestern plains. Denver was clear as a bell. If we had pressed on for six more minutes, we would have landed, salvaging part of the day, heroes, pride of the Navy. Instead we were bums. We landed on a mountainside field--elevation 9700 feet--in a small town called Fairplay, Colorado, and joined the skipper and three other pilots who had followed the same course.

When I found how close we had come, I was mortified. The next day when we got to Denver, after the Navy sent a gasoline truck to refuel us, I was even more mortified. Captain Greber flew down from Seattle to chew us out.

“I can understand the torpedo planes grounded in Helena, out of commission,” Greber said. “I can understand one plane, or maybe two planes, getting lost. By really stretching my imagination I can conceive of maybe six planes getting lost together. But fifteen airplanes, in largely clear weather on a four-hundred-mile flight! An hour-and-a-half hop. It’s beyond belief.”

He was right. It was the most incompetent, unprofessional, ridiculous performance I had ever seen in the air, one that I could have tempered if I had held to my convictions and not quit. Worse was the fact that my decision also made Helsell look like a chump.

This brilliant maneuver did little to boost recruiting in Denver, but it brought VF-74 fame of a different sort in Navy circles. For me it was a great personal lesson. Not once since then, either on land or in the air, have I ever turned back from any course that I set upon, no matter how dark the clouds that lay ahead.