“Release the aircraft to another test crew,” the general demanded.
“With all due respect, I can’t do that sir,” Slade replied as tactfully as he could muster. “If I’m right and the failure occurs during takeoff no one gets out and we lose the asset.”
“That’s not what maintenance says. That’s not good enough captain. I need that jet!”
“Sir, we’ll get it back to you ASAP,” Slade replied, but the line was already dead.
The next few days grew increasingly bad. Everyone distanced themselves from Slade. His test engineer began whispering, “I knew it was only the pod, but Slade knows best! He told the general to shove it; this was his program not the general’s!”
Slade knew he had to shake the tree. He called Tech Sergeant Roscoe Chapman. The sergeant worked on Eagles since their initial flight testing and was Slade’s crew chief for three years before getting a coveted transfer across the base to NASA’s flight test center. No one knew the airplane better.
“Sergeant, I have an Eagle, number 0183, you know the one; it’s the Dreamland bird,” he said, going on to explain what happened on the mission. “I know you’re busy, but I need to another pair of eyes on this. Can you come down and look at it — now — it’s in the middle of the program and we have a timeline to keep?”
“No problem captain, I’d still be rotting in that Costa Rican jail if you hadn’t sweet talked the Secretary of Transportation into letting me out!” he laughed. “I’m on my way!”
Chapman checked in with Slade on the way to the maintenance hangar, looking through his own personal log of the aircraft; Roscoe kept meticulous records for every aircraft he worked on. “I oversaw the current modifications on 0183 before I came over to NASA. This bird was the first production E model, December of 1986, she’s got lots of miles on her.”
“What’s your gut feeling?”
“The bird’s thirty years old captain. Those elevator cables stretch after years of high G forces; it doesn’t take much. If there’s something wrong I’ll find it.” He began to walk out, but then he stopped and turned. “Captain, what if I don’t find anything?”
“Then I take her up again,” Slade shrugged. “If you say the aircraft is sound, sergeant, that’s good enough for me.” Chapman nodded and got to work.
Two hours later Sergeant Chapman called Slade to the jet. Slade arrived with his squadron commander Lt. Colonel Wilkins and found Colonel McFarland and General Green there as well. They were not in a good mood. Apparently Sergeant Chapman would not report to them until Captain Slade was there.
Slade saluted.
They refused to salute back.
Instead, the general barked, “Sergeant what do you have to say? No excuses. I want to know exactly why I had to send two dozen of the most powerful people in Washington back to the capital with nothing — nothing!”
“Yes sir, but begging your pardon sir, I think I better show you.” Chapman led them to the left rear stabilizer. There was a ladder there. Sergeant Chapman pointed to the fin.
“Captain Slade, sir, would you push up on the leading edge of the stabilizer.” Slade climbed the ladder under the withering scrutiny of his commanding officers. He knew what he expected to find; the stabilizer must be loose. Even a slight wiggle in the fin at high speeds would cause significant buffet that would inevitably shake the fin apart.
Slade was wrong — dead wrong.
Obediently he pushed up on the leading edge of the stabilizer. It wasn’t supposed to budge, but it moved and it didn’t stop moving. There was a gasp from the observers. Slade pushed until the left horizontal fin was straight up and down; however, the right fin was still in its horizontal position; that wasn’t the way it was supposed to look.
“Holy shit! What the Hell happened?” General Green demanded.
Sergeant Chapman pointed to the stabilizer and replied, “Sir, the horizontal stabilizer is held on the torque tube by a bolt two inches in diameter. The bolt is missing. It had worn through the torque tube until the head could fit through mounting bracket and then it departed the aircraft. That’s when Captain Slade felt the buffet.”
“You mean to tell me there was nothing holding the stabilizer on the aircraft?” the colonel exclaimed, turning white.
“Nothing sir,” the sergeant said, shaking his head. “There’s no reason on God’s green Earth the fin should still be on the airplane; there’s literally nothing holding it on! I don’t know how Captain Slade flew the jet and I don’t know how he landed it. All I know is that if this jet tried to takeoff like this the stabilizer would have come off. It would have killed everyone on board. They wouldn’t have known what hit them.”
The commanders strode off without a word. Slade’s squadron commander looked after them, cursing, but then he came up to Slade. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything.”
Wilkins stomped off. Slade went and offered his hand to Sergeant Chapman.
“You saved my ass.”
“No need to thank me sir, I’m just glad you called. These new techs have no common sense. They don’t know how an airplane flies. They checked the rigging, the sensors and the position indicators — everything the tech order told them to — everything was right on. But they never actually touched the tail. I’m glad to help straighten things out.” Then he looked at Slade strangely, and hesitantly said, “You know there’s no way you should have been able to land that jet.”
“I know. Someone was looking out for me,” Slade admitted.
“I never knew if you believed in God or not sir.”
“Oh I always believed in Him, Roscoe,” Slade said, using the sergeant’s first name for the first time. “I just didn’t know until now that He believed in me.”
Three months later, after a successful conclusion to the test program, the fallout kicked in the door to Slade’s life.
Lt. Colonel Wilkins called Slade into his office. He entered and saluted. The commander pointed to his chair, and said, “Slade, I put you in for a commendation medal for saving the aircraft and crew of the test flight.”
“Sir I appreciate that, but I was just doing my job.”
“That’s the story of your career isn’t it?” the colonel said mysteriously. He reached into his desk and took out a blue leather folder and handed it to Slade. “This is the medal and the commendation; everything went through fine.” He laughed humorlessly, adding, “That weasel of a test engineer put in for a commendation himself and got it. If you’d listened to him you’d both be dead!”
Slade took it without any show of emotion. The colonel shook his head, but it was the timbre of his voice that caught the captain’s attention. Slade stiffened.
“Damn it captain, you don’t get it do you?” the colonel snapped, catching Slade completely off guard. “I’ve got thirty pilots out there. You’re the best of them, but why are you still here instead of in the astronaut program? I’ll tell you why: self-promotion!
“You should have rung your own bell like the DARPA engineer did; you would have been right to do so! Who the Hell knows you did a great job unless you tell them? I’ll give you an example: one of my line pilots, Captain Barr, has half the time you have and half the credentials — damn it, she scraped the tail off a C-17, a Class A mishap — but she’s going to the astronaut program, not you. You thought doing your job exceptionally well should be enough. It’s not. You flew under the radar in RF-4’s during Desert Storm; you’re still doing it! Wake up!”
The colonel got up and pointed to the mandatory row of photos on his office wall. It descended from the President of the United States all the way down to General Green and Colonel McFarland. “Because you’re stubborn and you’re good, General Green will get his second star and Colonel McFarland will get his first. If you’d knuckled under to their pressure we’d have had a mishap. The investigation would have stopped the program for a year. The command would have cleaned house — the general, the colonel — even me. We owe you our careers and this is how we repay you.”