The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (11 page)

I
N 1922, AFTER A PREVIOUS ATTEMPT
to cross the United States by airplane in under twenty-four hours had ended in the death of the pilot, Doolittle decided to give it a go himself. The army was agreeable because setting those kinds of records attracted serious public interest. Each success seemed to lift a veil of uncertainty about exactly what the airplane could accomplish.

Doolittle’s first attempt at a cross-country flight ended in disaster, and was nearly a catastrophe, when he tried to take off from a beach south of Jacksonville, Florida, en route to San Diego. He had made a significant modification to the plane that addressed one problem of being in the air for long periods of time. He fabricated a funnel with a tube that went out a small hole in the bottom of the plane, with the tube facing aft. When the plane was airborne and the pilot needed to relieve himself the airflow outside evacuated the tube. This arrangement became standard equipment on all military fighter aircraft for decades to come.

Doolittle had heard that Florida’s sandy beaches were hard-packed enough for automobile races and, hoping to make it an ocean-to-ocean event, saw no reason why an airplane could not take off from one. On August 4, 1922, a throng of well-wishers gathered on a beach south of Jacksonville. He found out in short order when, nearing takeoff speed, one of his wheels caught a patch of mushy sand and sent the plane careening off the beach and into the water, where an incoming wave capsized it.

Doolittle emerged from the wreckage and began to clamber up on the fuselage as the crowd rushed toward him to help, some laughing when they saw he was alive and well. One woman asked if he was hurt, and Doolittle courteously replied, “No, but my feelings are.”

A month later he tried again. At 9:52 p.m. on September 4, after carefully checking the consistency of the sand, Doolittle took off from Pablo Beach near Jacksonville, Florida, headed west. For the first few hours he had the advantage of a full moon but then ran into terrific electrical storms with lightning bolts that cracked so close he could smell the ozone.

Trusting his compass and other instruments Doolittle plunged into the maelstrom, using a Rand McNally road map to check for landmarks below as they were lit up by the flashes. Over New Orleans the rain became so fierce it stung his face and blurred his vision, but west of the Mississippi the storm abated. He landed for refueling and breakfast at Kelly Field in San Antonio with nothing but sunshine and a cheer that rose up from a crowd that had assembled before dawn as he came into sight.

At 8:30 a.m. Doolittle took off for San Diego, flying across the desolate mountains and deserts of the Southwest. By the time he reached the Arizona border he had been in the air close to fifteen hours and the monotonous drone of the engine was lulling him to sleep. Then, out of an otherwise clear sky, a light rain began to fall, which the prop wash threw over the top wing in a steady icy stream that dripped down the back of Doolittle’s neck, annoying him to the point that he stayed awake.

Late that afternoon he landed in San Diego on the Pacific, twenty-two hours and thirty minutes after he had taken off from Pablo Beach on the Atlantic, becoming the first person ever to cross the continental United States in less than a day. Accolades great and small issued from the national press and the popular new medium of radio.

This was Doolittle’s first brush with national fame. He received congratulatory letters not only from the chief of the Army Air Service but, more important to him, from General Billy Mitchell, whom he greatly admired. It also earned him his first Distinguished Flying Cross, for demonstrating “the possibility of moving Air Corps units to any portion of the United States in less than 24 hours.”

M
EANWHILE, THE
D
OOLITTLES
had started a family, beginning with James Jr., born October 2, 1920, then John, who came along June 29, 1922, both at the post hospital at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. When Joe wasn’t looking after the boys she had a Chinese cook teach her how to prepare Mexican food and acquired some odd pieces of furniture to make a home. In time, the Doolittles’ residence, humble as it was, routinely became a kind of center of gravity for the best and brightest on the posts where they were stationed. There was always food, drink, and laughter, and serious, intellectual conversations as well, and a warmth that grew out of lasting friendships formed amid the gray trials of army life.

Following a year of service as a test pilot and performer in aerobatic exhibitions, Doolittle took advantage of an army program to study for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the fall of 1923 he, Joe, and the two boys moved into an apartment near Cambridge. As a master’s thesis Doolittle planned to compute the aeronautical stresses and forces it would take to break up a plane in the air—with himself as guinea pig.

He took planes for test flights and pushed them to their outermost limits, diving at speeds often exceeding 200 miles per hour, inducing cracks in the structural frame and other components just short of having the plane come apart with him in it. It was an extremely dangerous way to find out a plane’s limitations, but the only way. Using delicate instruments he found, for instance, that the habit of some pilots to tighten the bracing wires running along the wings in fact promoted wing failure.

Doolittle also investigated pilot blackouts induced by these speeds and maneuvers. Again, flying alone, he used himself as a guinea pig. He found that any extended acceleration of 4.5 G
^§
resulted in a complete loss of consciousness, and further he concluded that if such acceleration continued for more than ten to twelve seconds it would be fatal.

The thesis was such a success that a paper developed from it was translated into a dozen languages and circulated abroad, earning Doolittle international fame as well as his second Distinguished Flying Cross. He applied for, and was granted, the opportunity to study for his doctorate at MIT.

The subject of his study was the effect that wind velocity had on flying an airplane. Doolittle chose this as a theme because he knew experienced pilots held differing opinions about it, and he wrote the paper so as “to be understood by the average pilot.” But when he turned in a draft of his doctoral dissertation his advisers rejected it.

On further inquiry, Doolittle was told his paper wasn’t studious-enough looking, that it needed more mathematical calculations, graphs, charts, etc.; in other words, it needed to be tarted up so as to look more scholarly. He went back to the drawing board, and in June 1925 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology awarded him a doctorate in aeronautical sciences, one of the first of its kind. Doolittle was proud of that, but for the rest of his life he regretted that he had rewritten the paper so it would “be locked away and never read by anyone.” He thought it could have saved lives.
⁴

B
Y THE MID-1920S
AIRCRAFT ENGINES
had become increasingly powerful and public fascination with flying led to the great popularity of air racing competitions—which had come a long way and were a far cry from the days of the flying circuses. Since the end of the First World War the speed of aircraft had increased past 250 miles per hour and flying clubs throughout the world held races and offered silver loving cups as trophies and often handsome cash prizes to the winners. As with the setting of speed or distance records, the military services encouraged their pilots to enter these competitions as a way of publicizing themselves, if not actually justifying their existence. Jimmy Doolittle finished on top in many of these events, and his national reputation as a flying ace continued to grow. Air racing competition between the army and the navy pilots had become almost frenzied. Doolittle’s first crack at a championship came in October 1925, when the army entered him in the prestigious Schneider Cup, a seaplane race in Baltimore. The problem was that Doolittle had never flown a seaplane before.

In less than a week he was obliged to learn the techniques of flying a plane with an entirely new configuration and center of balance from anything he had ever flown before—not to mention taking off and landing on water. He had had to put pontoons on his sleek and powerful 610-horsepower Curtiss R3C racer, while the navy pilots had flown with them since their first days at flight school.

After the elimination in qualifying rounds of more than half the entrants in various crashes and malfunctions, the racing field now consisted of four planes: two navy pilots, an Italian pilot, and Doolittle. The racecourse was laid out as a 31.7-mile triangle in the Chesapeake Bay, marked off by tall pylons. The racers had to fly around the course seven times, for a total of about 220 miles. After observing qualification tests, Doolittle thought he saw a way to shave a little time by banking steeply past the pylons and gunning out of the turn, but he mentioned none of this to the navy pilots, whose entourage included most of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis as well as various admirals, Washington naval attachés, and a squadron of navy planes that flew in formation over the spectators. Also present was Orville Wright, who had started it all back in 1903. It was a sunny but choppy autumn day on the Chesapeake. To compete with the navy’s flying squadron the army had sent a blimp that cruised out over the bay “like a majestic silver fish,” according to a report in
Aviation
magazine.

Doolittle drew first position. His plan was to climb rapidly, then dive sharply as he passed the pylons, banking steeply to get a speed advantage. Once Doolittle had the lead he kept it; the Italian plane dropped out and it became a race between the army and the navy.

Then one of the navy pilots developed engine trouble and had to land on the bay, and on the final lap the other found his plane engulfed in flames from an engine fire (somehow he brought the aircraft safely down on the water). U.S. Army Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle won the day at a record-setting average speed of 232.573 miles per hour, while the two planes entered by the U.S. Navy had to be ignominiously towed back to shore in full view of the navy brass and the corps of midshipmen from the United States Naval Academy.

Doolittle’s grease-smeared smile was featured prominently in the sports pages at home and abroad, including the
New York Times
, which, in noting that Doolittle had won “the world’s premier seaplane trophy,” observed cattily that “the Army men never seem to take tows in Neptune’s realm.”

B
Y THE MID-1920S
B
ILLY
M
ITCHELL
’
S
attacks against politicians and the army brass had become more strident and relentless, as he accused them of ignorance and even willful collaboration in the deaths of military pilots as the result of a lack of funding and oversight. At first the commander of the Air Corps tried to silence Mitchell by reducing his rank and banishing him to duty in San Antonio instead of making him permanent second in command, slotted for the future top spot.

This only made Mitchell more outspoken and caused him to publish an accusatory book lambasting the Navy and War Departments, Congress, and even the president. In 1925 he used the occasion of several fatal air crashes to charge that the administration of the national defense was “incompetent, criminally negligent, and almost treasonable.” President Calvin Coolidge convened a board of business and military men to construct some coherent national policy regarding aviation, headed by the Morgan & Co. banker Dwight W. Morrow (the future father-in-law of Charles Lindbergh).

Called to testify before the Morrow commission, Mitchell lashed out with the same caustic verbiage he had been using to condemn the administration, naming names, which of course filled the press columns day after sensational day. That was enough for Coolidge who, using his powers under the articles of war, preferred court-martial charges through the War Department against Mitchell for insubordination. The specific allegation was that Mitchell’s conduct was “prejudicial to good order and military discipline” and “of a nature to bring discredit upon the military service.”

The case quickly developed a circus atmosphere. The trial, begun in October 1925, was held in a decrepit warehouse near the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The court was composed of U.S. Army generals—including the young major general Douglas MacArthur—none of whom were fliers or had any experience with aviation.

The military judge in the case straightaway agreed with the prosecutor that Mitchell’s guilt or innocence was not dependent on the truth of his accusations against the higher authorities, only whether they were prejudicial to good martial order and whether they discredited the military organization, a legal confinement that severely hamstrung Mitchell’s planned defense and limited him from making the trial a cause célèbre for the promotion of airpower.

Public sentiment was on the side of Billy Mitchell, and the press slanted their reporting toward him, too, since he always provided good copy. Among the throng of spectators was the humorist Will Rogers, who had taken his first plane ride with Mitchell. It was reported that hundreds of spectators mobbed the sidewalks trying to get into the courtroom, including mink-draped society matrons “in luxuriously equipped limousines,” who had to compete for seats with the military, the press, and hoi polloi.

Doolittle and his fellow flying officers continued to agree with much of what Mitchell said, but Jimmy again opined that Mitchell “had gone overboard in his criticisms.” Eddie Rickenbacker, however, was under no such constraints as Doolittle and the other active duty servicemen; he was free to speak his mind and did so with acerbic gusto when it came his time to testify about his former boss.

I
N 1926
THE
C
URTISS
-W
RIGHT
C
ORPORATION
asked the army to grant Doolittle extended leave to help in its effort to market the Curtiss P-1 Hawk fighter in South America. Doolittle would become, in effect, a “flying salesman, [to] demonstrate the plane’s capabilities in flight, and prove that it was the finest pursuit airplane in the world.” It was a smart move on Curtiss-Wright’s part. Ever anxious in peacetime to unburden itself of another salary to pay, the army promptly acceded to the request. For Doolittle it was a dream assignment. The money was good and he got extra for doing trick maneuvers—his specialty.