One day I took off in the Bell jet, the P-59. It was only my second flight in it, and I really didn't know the systems. Suddenly, a P-38 prop fighter dove in on me. I couldn't believe it! None of the test pilots had ever started a dogfight, but this guy seemed determined to bounce me. I whipped that jet around and pulled up in a vertical climb-not really understanding what in hell I was doing-and I stalled going straight up. I was spinning down and that damned P-38 was spinning up, both airplanes out of control and when we went by each other, not ten feet apart my eves were like saucers and so were the other pilot's. We both fell out of the sky, regained control down on the deck, engines smoking and wide open. Finally he said, "Hey, man, we'd better knock it off before we bust our asses." I didn't know who he was. We landed, and I went over to meet this tall, lanky first lieutenant. His name was Bob Hoover. I told him, "You're really hot in that airplane." He said "You are, too. I didn't know a P-59 could swap ends like that." I told him the truth: "I didn't either, till I tried it."
Bob was a combat pilot, had been shot down and spent time in one of the worst German stalags. He was assigned to the fighter test section, and from then on, we would dogfight every chance we got, in any airplane we happened to be flying, and neither of us ever won. As soon as our wings would pass we'd go right into a vertical climb, spin down, and break off so low to the ground, that it was either give up or crash. A stand-off every time. Bob became a legend: he had about twenty major accidents, all equipment failure, and once made it back into Wright on a dead engine by bouncing his wheels off a passing truck to give himself altitude over a chain link fence.
He loved practical jokes. He went over to a little airport in Dayton and signed up for flying lessons. He took the course taught by a really sharp-looking blonde, and when the time came for him to solo, a bunch of us went out to watch. He took off, climbed above the field, then dove straight down, did a roll and barely missed the hangars, looped and spinned, and turned everything loose. His instructor hid her face in her hands and almost passed out, but when she saw us standing in our uniforms and laughing like hell, she knew she'd been had.
Bob and I became pals and called each other "pard." One Friday, I said to him, "Hey, pard, how about dropping me off down at Hamlin? We have an airplane that needs some service testing and there's a little strip up there on the side of a hill." The truth i is, I had got other pilots to fly down there, but when they saw the small strip that stopped just short of a steep cliff, they chickened out of landing. But Bob was game, and made it in with a couple of yards to spare. I got out and he took off wide open and dropped! right off the edge of that damned cliff, engine racing. Down he went into the valley, roaring around down there to build up speed. It was a ten-minute walk to my front porch in Hamlin, and when I climbed those steps, I could still hear ol' Bob grinding away in there.
In the fall of 1945, Hoover and I began putting on air shows together. Air shows were very popular around the country after the war, and tens of thousands of people would show up at a local airport to watch military airplane demonstrations. At Wright, we had the only jet fighters flying, the P-80 Shooting Star, and when the requests began to pour in from local groups, some of the senior test pilots felt they couldn't be bothered, but Bob and I would fly anywhere, anytime, because we loved it. So, off we went- Michigan; Wisconsin, Alabama, New York. We were the stars of the show; the public hadn't seen a jet airplane, and there were no restrictions about what we could do: we could fly as fast or as low as we wanted, buzz Main Street, anything, nobody cared. It was great fun, and, man, you'd come in and break real crisp and grease it in, then taxi to a ramp in front of all those people, and think, well, I might not be the world's greatest, but maybe the second greatest.
People would come up and stare at your airplane and wonder how it could fly with no propeller. I'd get a volunteer to stand behind the tail pipe and light a newspaper. Then I turned on the igniter and whoosh, the engine fired up. The crowd really thought that guy had lit the engine. One day at a show in Philadelphia, I noticed two gals staring at my jet. "You gals ever seen a jet before?" I asked. They said no. I helped them up on the wing, and one of them told me she was flying air shows too. She pointed nearby and said, "That's my P-39.' I hadn't seen one since my early days of squadron training at Tonopah. I told her I had five hundred hours in the ThirtyNine and thought it was the best airplane I ever flew. She asked me if I wanted to fly it. "Yeah, man," I replied, "I'd give my right arm." So we concocted a little deal.
She was scheduled to fly the show the next morning. She was an ex-WASP, and the P.A. announcer told the crowd all about her just before take-off. We parked her Thirty-Nine away from the crowd. She had outfitted me in a woman's wig, a white jump suit, and a blue cap, and off I went. I put on a helluva acrobatic show, doing Immelmanns and Cuban eights, thrilled to be back in a Thirty-Nine again. I landed and parked far from the crowd, where she replaced me in the cockpit and then taxied up to the main ramp to receive the cheers
Those air shows were wonderful fun and good flying, as long as you kept your nose clean and didn't have any accidents. That's all that mattered. Those Shooting Stars were tricky; Hoover had a bad accident flying into Boston for a show; his engine exploded at 40,000 feet and he somehow dead-sticked in the fog. The test pilots would fly the Shooting Star to an air show and after the first day they would fly back on a commercial airliner, leaving behind a malfunctioning P-80. We would send a crew out to fix it, and then I would go get it and bring it back. But I knew the P-80 systems cold; if anything went wrong, I could usually fix it myself. I had a crew chief along to service the airplane and help. The point was, that of all the guys who flew in air shows, I was one of the very few who always came whistling back in without any problems.
I know that impressed Colonel Boyd because he ordered me to stage an air show with a Shooting Star for the open-house at Wright Field in early November 1945. Twenty-five fighter test pilots prayed that I'd bust my ass. Here I was, a damned maintenance officer, being the star attraction at an air show at their own base. And I wasn't even a test pilot. But anyone who knew my combat background understood that doing acrobatics was my piece of cake. For the Wright Field show, I took off with jet assists on each wing and water injection into the engine for additional power boost, and that P-80 shot straight up in the sky. Then I dove low over the crowd, did a few slow rolls, shot back up, then down again to do acrobatics. It really was an impressive show, and I flew real crisp that day. The test pilots looked grim after that.
A few days later, the old man sent for me and asked me if I wanted to be a test pilot. I told Colonel Boyd that I was interested, but that I wasn't very well educated. "You shouldn't have any problem," he said. "If you do, there are a lot of test pilots around here who would be glad to tutor you." Nothing got by Colonel Boyd. He knew damned well that Hoover and I were beating the asses off his test pilots in dogfights every day, and it amused the hell out of him.
Boyd's office was on the second floor of the headquarters building, his windows facing the flight line. He was six feet, two inches, lanky and balding, with thick dark eyebrows, and a thick hard jaw. Think of the toughest person you've ever known, then multiply by ten, and you're close to the kind of guy that the old man was. His bark was never worse than his bite: he'd tear your ass off if you screwed up. Everyone respected him, but was scared to death of him. He looked mean, and he was. He might have the most responsible job in military aviation, heading flight tests of all new airplanes, and you might be his star test pilot, but Lord help you if you stood in front of his desk with an unpolished belt buckle. That's the way he was. There were some tough characters among the pilots at Wright, but when the old man sent for any of us, we stood at attention with sweaty palms and knocking knees.