Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman

by Neal Thompson

  By 1950 most of those planes were jets. Fast, complex, imperfect pieces of machinery, these were some of the most complicated mechanical concoctions humanity had ever produced. They allowed humans to travel one, two, and then three times the speed of sound. But they also leaked oil, creaked and groaned, spontaneously exploded, mysteriously spun out at high altitudes, and crashed without warning.

  Often there was no time to learn the intricacies of each new plane. With the manufacturers constantly making modifications, the handbooks were often outdated. Shepard usually got a quick rundown of the jet’s quirks from another pilot, maybe a brief assessment like “she flies real easy.” Then he’d take off and learn the rest in the air.

  “Training was very informal, to put it politely,” another early Navy jet pilot said. And sometimes that informality cost lives. Three months before Shepard’s arrival, two test pilots and two crewmen were killed in an experimental twin-engine Neptune patrol plane. At the time, Pax officials were becoming nervous about the occasional crashes and the many near misses; they raised the requirements for new test pilots (only those with instrument flying experience were accepted) and proposed expanding the classroom and training portion of each Pax tour from five months to eight.

  Still, it was considered amateurish if a pilot needed a lesson or asked too many questions before flying any given plane. Such was the ethos of this boys’ club, where a man’s stock soared with each rejection of death. Shepard’s commander when he arrived at Pax, John Hyland, had gained fame during an air show for Navy dignitaries in which an osprey flew into his jet’s tail, forcing him to eject at five hundred or so miles an hour. In the days before automatic ejection seats, this required him to pop open the canopy and allow himself to be sucked from the cockpit. Just barely avoiding slamming into the tail, Hyland pulled open his parachute and plunged deep into Chesapeake Bay. A sea plane rescued him and delivered him to Pax. Besides a sore arm, his only injury was a bruised knee, which he banged on the bumper of an ambulance waiting for him on the tarmac. Hyland returned to the air show, took the microphone, and apologized to the VIPs for not bringing back the parachute’s D-ring handle as a souvenir.

  The plane Hyland had been flying was an F2H “Banshee,” which in time became Shepard’s specialty, the only jet he considered a worthy successor to his Corsair.

  The Banshee was a twin-engine, straight-wing jet fighter with twice the power of the Navy’s first jet fighter, the FH-1 Phantom. The Banshee carried bombs, rockets, and cannons, could fly in rough weather, and could reach 586 miles an hour, just a hair shy of supersonic. McDonnell Aircraft built 895 of them, and the Banshee helped establish McDonnell as the rising star in the competitive aircraft manufacturing industry.

  Shepard also regularly flew an alphabet soup of other jets—the F9F, F3D, F86, and so on, long, sleek, silvery tubes capable of maneuvers he could only dream of executing in his old Corsair. His job at Pax was to push each plane a little further each day. The tests, as he’d note in his log book, included airspeed calibration, stability and control, climb tests, buffet evaluations, and aerobatics. The goal was to get right up next to a “critical area”—that is, the point at which the plane might explode, spin, lose control, or stall—and then write up a report on the plane’s limits. Once he found the outer limits, he’d go out the next day and push the envelope a little further.

  Shepard once took to the sky in a Banshee carrying full external fuel tanks—extra tanks attached to the jet for long-distance flying. He wanted to see if the tanks could withstand a high-speed roll. They couldn’t. As he began twirling his Banshee, the bolted-on tanks broke from the jet’s wings and blew two craters in a farmer’s field, while Shepard managed to bring the damaged and wobbling jet back to Pax intact. “He could fly anything,” one colleague said.

  One of Shepard’s projects was to fly all over the United States to measure the contrail levels of various jets at various locations. Contrails are the vapor trails that snake behind jets. The Navy wanted to know at what altitudes the contrails of its planes were visible so that, in wartime, they could fly above that level and thereby avoid antiaircraft fire. Shepard spent many happy hours flying forty thousand feet above major American cities.

  And when he returned to Pax, he’d usually swoop down over the brick rancher he and Louise had built on the Patuxent River and give her a supersonic heads-up that he was on his way home. Some days these flat-hats reached as low as a hundred feet. His commander told him to knock it off, though, when the manager of a local turkey farm began complaining that Shepard’s low, high-speed passes were freaking out his turkeys.

  Shepard would soon take the art of flat-hatting—the earth-hugging feat he’d been introduced to at Corpus Christi but had yet to fully explore—to dangerous new levels. But at first he earned a reputation for an analytical mind, a mind that was constantly busy with questions of aerodynamics and engineering. He didn’t often show this egghead side of himself, but those closest to him realized that he never performed a test or maneuver (or, later, an illicit stunt) until he was convinced it wouldn’t kill him.

  Nor was he afraid to sit at his desk and type out a lengthy, detailed, and highly critical report on one of his test planes. Shepard knew his job was to wring out a jet’s imperfections and to prevent imperfect jets from being used by the Navy. He spent long hours with Pax River’s engineers, discussing the most minuscule idiosyncrasies of a jet. “If it sucked, he’d say so,” one of Shepard’s commanders recalled. Another commander said Shepard “turned in some of the best reports we had.”

  Shepard’s attention to detail eventually established him as one of Pax River’s most conscientious and hardworking pilots, and word of his expertise began to spread. One day an officer named James Stockdale (who would later spend seven years in a POW camp and become a vice presidential candidate) needed a pilot to perform a series of complicated ascents to high altitudes for a study on accelerated climbs. He chose Shepard not for his flamboyance but for his technical ability and precision.

  Shepard tried to bring that same level of precision to his hobbies, too. He took up waterskiing and progressed quickly from two skis to slalom. With a friend, he built a ramp on the Patuxent River so that they could take turns jumping. Then he began trying to ski barefoot. Friends began to wonder if he was good at everything he did, this hipster with the gorgeous wife, the adorable kids (he and Louise had had a second daughter, Julie, in 1951), the sports car—and the world by the balls.

  By that time Shepard already had a strong sense that he could “roll a plane a little better than the next guy,” as he put it. But as his luck held out and his superiors began entrusting him with riskier and more complicated assignments, he began to become more deeply convinced that he might be a little better than the rest. He knew deep down that he didn’t have more raw talent than some of the others, though he would never have admitted such a thing. He did, however, believe he worked harder and paid closer attention to the details of flying perfect tests. He began to push himself harder, and the goal was always perfection, to show the bosses and his peers that he, in his own words, could “fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown.”

  But as soon as he learned to fly perfectly, the power of it seemed to supercharge his already swelling ego, and he began to experiment with flying recklessly, as if straightforward, glitz-free missions were now beneath him, as if he couldn’t help but indulge his dark side. His antics would take him to the brink of a premature end to his career.

  When construction workers completed the first span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which connected Maryland’s mainland to its Eastern Shore across a narrow stretch of the bay, Shepard couldn’t resist. A couple of his colleagues had already flown under the half-built bridge. Shepard did them one better and looped the span—he flew his Banshee under it, over the top, and then back under again. John Hyland, head of Pax River’s tactical test division, got wind of the stunt and called Shepard into his office. Hyland admired Shepard’s skill a
nd his bravura. But he couldn’t condone such flights or every yahoo in a Navy jet would try it. He gave Shepard a stern lecture about the dangers of flat-hatting but decided not to report the incident to the higher-ups.

  A few weeks later, though, Shepard was returning from a test flight out over the Chesapeake and decided to take a detour up to Ocean City, the bustling beach town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He flew down low and screamed across the beach, blowing the bikini tops off a number of sunbathing women. He was moving too fast for anyone to get his tail number, but a photographer from a Philadelphia newspaper happened to be taking pictures and caught the stunt on film.

  Shepard was summoned before Rear Admiral Alfred M. Pride, the no-nonsense commander of Pax River, who chewed Shepard’s ass and then issued a letter of censure, a black mark in his record that would silently follow him the rest of his career.

  But apparently Pride’s censure wasn’t severe enough.

  Shepard’s favorite jet, the F2H-2 Banshee, had set an altitude record of fifty-two thousand feet in 1949. Shepard was among a select group of Navy pilots trained to fly even higher, and in 1952 he was assigned to an elite group performing altitude tests on the Banshee. One day, a few weeks after Shepard had flat-hatted Ocean City, a project manager at the Naval Aviation Test Ordnance Center on nearby Chincoteague Island in coastal Virginia asked Pax River for a high-flying test pilot. Shepard was sent to help. The mission was to fly above fifty thousand feet—something the Chincoteague pilots and planes couldn’t do—and release a missile, to determine the high-altitude effects of missile launches.

  Shepard flew from Pax River to Chincoteague that morning, performed the mission perfectly, landed back at Chincoteague for a debriefing with the project manager, and then had lunch with his friends George (an academy classmate) and Betty Whisler. Shepard returned to the airfield by midafternoon, refueled, and prepared for takeoff.

  It was a relatively quiet Saturday afternoon, and a quarter of a mile downrange from the airfield about three hundred enlisted sailors and fifty officers—including Shepard’s friend George—had gathered in rows on the tennis courts for their weekly inspection.

  As Shepard took off, he radioed the air traffic control tower, seeking permission to make a “low pass.” His intent was to boast of a successful mission—an aerial chest thumping of sorts—by streaking above the base and putting his jet into a wing-over-wing victory roll. The tower gave him the okay, but they didn’t know his reputation for low passes. “When Al made a low pass, it was really low,” said George Whisler, who was standing at attention on the tennis courts as Shepard took off, U-turned, then pushed his twin-engine Banshee to full bore and swooshed down on top of the naval base.

  Shepard ripped the air just 150 feet above the ground. Passing over the tennis courts, the roar of his engines scared the breath out of the hundreds of uniformed men standing at attention below. Thinking a jet was about to crash onto their heads, sailors and officers dove to the ground, and hundreds of white hats were swept into the air by the wake of Shepard’s jet. The commanding officer of the base jumped to his feet and screamed, “Get that pilot’s name. I want to know where he’s from. And then I want him grounded.” George knew instantly it was his friend but kept his mouth shut.

  When Shepard landed at Pax River twenty minutes later, he taxied to a stop and saw Admiral Pride waiting for him. He thought: Hmmm, I must have done a great job on that mission if the admiralis coming out to greet me. But Pride’s face was locked in a scowl.

  Pride was one of the pioneers of naval aviation, having flown off the Navy’s first carrier, the USS Langley, in the 1920s. He was also a serious, strict, and proper New Englander who was much feared by his men. A test pilot once thought his career was over after he bailed out of a damaged jet during a night flight, landed in the water, shed all his clothes, swam to shore, and rang the doorbell of the nearest house—where the naked aviator was greeted by Pride’s flustered wife.

  “Were you just over Chincoteague?” Pride asked Shepard.

  “Well, yes, sir.”

  “Did you make a low pass?”

  “Well, I guess I did.”

  Pride had had enough. He dismissed Shepard and then summoned his immediate supervisors. Shepard should be court-martialed, he told them. “I want to straighten this kid out,” the crusty old admiral said. “We just can’t have this sort of thing.”

  While Shepard’s supervisors pleaded with Pride not to court-martial him, Shepard was grounded and put “in hack” for ten days. Being in hack meant he had to pack a bag, move out of his house, leaving Louise and the girls behind, and live in the bachelors’ quarters. While in hack, he wasn’t allowed anywhere near an airplane.

  H. Y. Davidson, Shepard’s old rowing buddy from the academy, saw Shepard drinking alone that night at the officers’ club. When Shepard told him the story of the low pass at Chincoteague, Davidson was surprised his friend was so upbeat after apparently sabotaging his own career. Davidson said to himself: What a waste of a good career.

  When he heard the rest of the story weeks later, Davidson was shocked to learn Shepard hadn’t been shipped off to the supply corps. “A lot of us would have lost our wings for something like that,” Davidson said. “But he had a way of getting away with it.” Once again, Shepard had a couple of guardian angels looking out for him.

  With his strong jaw, his dimple-framed smirk, his slicked-back hair, and his lithe body language, Bob Elder looked like a movie star playing a fighter jock role. Elder had been born in the wilds of Saskatchewan, Canada, but his family moved to Portland, Oregon, when he was a teen. A longtime love of airplanes led him to enroll in the naval ROTC program at the University of Washington, and he received his aviator’s wings just a few months before Pearl Harbor. Elder was among the first naval aviators to join the dogfighting in the Pacific, where he flew combat missions off aircraft carriers in some of the most crucial battles of the Pacific war, including the Battles of the Coral Sea, Guadalcanal, and, most notably, Midway. On June 4, 1942, Elder and his SBD Dauntless flew three missions, spent a total of twelve hours and fifteen minutes in the air, and helped sink the Japanese aircraft carrier Hiryu. For his destruction of Japanese planes and ships at Midway, Elder earned two Navy Crosses and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  After the war, Elder was among the first Navy pilots to fly jets and among the first to land them on aircraft carriers. By the time he and Shepard met in 1950, Elder was known Navy-wide as “sierra hotel,” naval aviator radio-speak for SH—shit hot. (The opposite of shit hot was “delta sierra”—DS, or dumb shit.)

  Elder was considered all the more shit hot because he didn’t boast or brag and didn’t talk down to his inferiors. He was approachable and likable. “Bob was very laid-back,” one colleague said. “But he was a great tactician.”

  Shepard had adopted Elder as his mentor. Just as he had gravitated toward Doc Abbot and Turner Caldwell, he had a way of befriending the shit hot men around him. He soaked up whatever knowledge of flying they were willing to share. When he wasn’t conversing with them, he was watching, observing, learning.

  Elder had taken a shine to Shepard, too. After Shepard’s terrifying low-low pass over Chincoteague, Elder stepped up to argue vigorously in his defense to prevent Admiral Pride from court-martialing Shepard. Shepard’s boss, John Hyland, also joined the emotional debate, but it wasn’t easy. “He [Pride] was furious,” Elder said.

  Finally, Elder and Hyland calmed Pride’s anger and convinced him that a court-martial would only cast off one of the Navy’s most promising young aviators. Pride withdrew his court-martial threat and settled for a strong letter of reprimand. He also grounded Shepard for two weeks and warned that if he ever heard of another Alan Shepard stunt, he would kick him out of the Navy with a bad-conduct discharge.

  Afterward Hyland had a long talk with Shepard, warning him that he had gotten caught twice and that getting caught a third time would surely end his career for good.

  “Now look, Sh
ep, if you want to fly low and do slow rolls at low altitudes, for God’s sake, go out to sea and do it where no one can catch you. But don’t get caught again,” Hyland said. “Now, do you understand that?” Elder gave him a similar lecture.

  “He was pretty flamboyant as a young officer. I had to stick my neck out a country mile to get him out of that one,” Elder recalled. “That was a close one on Al’s part. It was a dumb thing to do. He shaved the corners a little closer than most.”

  Secretly, though, Elder admired Shepard’s skills—and his exuberance.

  “I thought he was a little indulgent,” he said. “I was, too, so I could recognize it.”

  A few weeks later, when Shepard was allowed to fly again, he flew back to Chincoteague, where his old boss, Doc Abbot, had recently been assigned. He seemed uncharacteristically subdued, his chin down instead of up as he asked Abbot to borrow his car for a few hours. Though Shepard didn’t explain why he needed it, Abbot handed him the keys. When Shepard returned that afternoon, his chin was back up and he was all smiles. He stood on the tarmac talking happily with Abbot, not quite ready to return to Pax River. There seemed to be something on his mind, but Abbot couldn’t get him to open up.

  Then Shepard spotted on the tarmac a twin-engine bomber plane called a JD-1. He’d never flown one, and he asked Abbot for a ride. Abbot took Shepard up and showed him how to fly the thing. Then they landed and swapped seats, and Shepard flew the big bomber perfectly, even better than Abbot. At one point he put the plane into a hard turn, and Abbot noticed that the altimeter didn’t budge—Shepard had just learned to fly the plane, yet he was keeping it absolutely steady. Abbot felt sheepish, but then on the landing, Shepard accidentally braked too hard and the nose slammed down onto the runway. Abbot was secretly thrilled to see his friend, for a change, make a mistake.