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

by Neal Thompson

  Afterward Shepard finally explained why he had borrowed the car. He told Abbot how a few weeks earlier, before the Chincoteague flyover incident, he had flown low over the beach at Ocean City and “scared the hell out of a lot of people.” The local sheriff got the number on the plane’s tail—presumably from the photograph in the newspaper—and wanted to bring charges against Shepard. Shepard borrowed Abbot’s car so he could visit the sheriff and talk his way out of an arrest.

  “It was a remarkable piece of work,” Abbot recalled. “It surely would have been the end of him.”

  Surviving his brush with court-martial had indebted Shepard to his two superiors, John Hyland and especially Bob Elder. But it also endeared him to them. Military men harbored a built-in distrust of their superiors, and that distrust was especially strong among self-reliant aviators. Escaping an admiral’s wrath relatively unscathed only solidified the brotherly bond between Shepard and Bob Elder. Shepard had committed one of the ultimate sins—three times—and had gotten caught twice, but emerged with a smirk and a swagger.

  The two men began flying together more often, performing tests with each other, such as the dangerous in-flight refueling procedure. They once traveled to the Cleveland Air Races to demonstrate in-flight refueling to the crowd, which included Miss America. The next day’s paper pictured Shepard standing on the outside steps of a tanker plane, looking straight down into Miss America’s impressive cleavage.

  But an in-flight refueling test at Pax River would nearly kill them both.

  The plan was to see if a jet could carry ten thousand pounds of bombs. The test had been designed by the Air Force, but the fledgling service didn’t yet have a plane that it trusted with that much weight.

  “Let’s show them how to do it,” Elder suggested, and came up with an idea.

  To reduce the total weight and allow the plane to lift its ten-thousand-pound payload, he’d take off with an F2H Banshee’s fuel tanks near empty. Then he’d refuel in the air as soon as he reached a safe altitude. Shepard would fly right beside Elder in a “safety” plane, to observe everything up close. Top officers from Patuxent River, the Air Force, and the Pentagon were invited to watch the test from the deck of the USS Leyte.

  Refueling in air is an extremely difficult maneuver, and in the early 1950s the Navy was still learning how to do so safely with its jets. Both planes—the powerful jet and the slower tanker plane, usually a propeller-driven aircraft—had to fly at exactly the same speed, almost exactly the same altitude (the rear plane flew slightly lower), and just a few feet apart. The low-fuel plane then extended a long, stiff refueling pipe, called a probe, and inserted it into the drogue in the rear of the tanker. Pilots often defused the danger with jokes about the sexual nature of midair refuelings. Shepard once took the joke a step further. He painted pubic hair around the drogue on the theory that the other pilots’ probes would be more likely to reach the drogue if the target looked like a vagina.

  Shepard’s boss, John Hyland, took off first in an AJ tanker plane loaded with jet fuel, followed by Shepard in the safety plane, an F9F. Finally, Elder took off in a new Banshee just delivered from the factory. When the trio reached eight thousand feet, Shepard tested the AJ’s drogue by refueling from the tanker, topping off his own tanks. But the F9F had a special tip on the end of its probe, and—unbeknownst to Shepard—when it disconnected from the tanker, it damaged the drogue. When Elder plugged his Banshee’s probe into Hyland’s tanker, hundreds of gallons of fuel gushed out. The volatile cloud smothered his plane and was sucked into the engines’ intake ducts. Elder felt his plane “shuddering like a dog passing pee seeds.” Pockets of fuel began to explode. Part of Elder’s landing gear was blown off. Wing flaps were shredded, and one engine was nearly blown off its mounts. “Literally, it was blowing the airplane apart,” Elder said. In the understated language of a naval aviator on the brink of destruction, he added: “I had my hands full.”

  Shepard pulled away from the fireball, thinking he’d never see his friend again. Elder’s communication system was destroyed, so Shepard couldn’t contact him. All he could do was fly alongside as Elder’s Banshee flipped upside down and slid into a spin, plummeting toward the Chesapeake. A pilot’s instinct is to save an airplane at all costs. It’s a fine line, and many pilots cross it, thinking they can save a plane only to find—too late to bail out—that they cannot. Elder considered bailing out but continued systematically trying every trick in the book, whipping the control stick this way and that, stepping on the right rudder, then the left. Suddenly, just a few hundred feet above the water, Elder gained control of the crippled plane, straightened it out, and limped toward the nearest airfield, at Oceana, Virginia. Elder wasn’t even sure if the landing gear was intact, so he came in slowly, gently.

  Shepard looked down in awe, watching Elder land roughly but safely.

  Bravo Zulu! he thought. Translation: good job.

  What distinguished Shepard from his colleagues, beyond his precocious command of flying jets, was an aptitude for the theories of flight. He spent many hours flying out over the Atlantic, scribbling notes about air speed, distance, and altitude onto a clipboard in his lap, all to test a theory he called “total momentum.”

  The goal was to find new ways to give Navy pilots an edge in a dogfight with an enemy. Shepard gathered enough data to compile a report that advised pilots in the fleet to always fly a little higher and/or faster than their opponent, because the combination of speed and altitude—the “total momentum” of the airplane—would give them the advantage in a dogfight, helping them reach the desired position behind and above an enemy plane, where they could take aim with their guns and rockets. “I don’t know what a genius IQ is, but he had it,” Shepard’s boss, John Hyland, once said.

  One of Shepard’s final projects as a test pilot was a lengthy series of ridiculously dangerous tests in 1952 above the hard-packed sands of dry Muroc Lake, the California air base made famous by such record breakers as Chuck Yeager, the Air Force pilot who five years earlier had broken the sound barrier there.

  Shepard’s mission: to deliberately disable his jet in midflight, then try to land it.

  The intent was to come up with emergency flying procedures that Navy pilots could use if their jet ever flamed out—a so-called dead-stick landing. Shepard and Hyland took turns flying up to about forty thousand feet, where they’d intentionally shut off their engines and then try to wrestle the plane to the ground. Most Navy pilots were familiar with the procedures for dead-stick landings in a propeller plane. But in the early 1950s very few Navy pilots had flown a jet, let alone landed one with a flamed-out engine. Also, jet engines at the time were notoriously unreliable, and flame-outs were a common concern—especially in Korea, where the Navy and especially the Air Force had begun introducing jet fighters to take on the powerful, supersonic Soviet MiG-15 jets.

  Shepard compiled an extensive report on dead-stick jet landings that was circulated among aviators—largely it required a long, slow, meticulously controlled descent—and, according to Hyland, was “very, very well received all around the fleet.”

  By the end of his Pax River tour, Shepard had to feel luck on his side.

  Scores of test pilots found themselves, like Elder, spinning upside down in a “wounded bird” but, instead of escaping, rode the bird into the earth. In fact, the whole point of Pax River—to push jets beyond their limits—was designed to accommodate death. Test pilots were the 1950s equivalent of crash-test dummies later used by car makers, but they were obviously no dummies.

  The paradox of Shepard’s job was that his planes—prototypes and experimental models—were supposed to blow up, spin out, and crash. That’s why the Navy needed the best pilots in the world to test them. And when an aviator emerged from two years of such flying, with a trail of dead buddies behind him, he was a changed man, absolutely convinced of his own invincibility.

  Shepard would claim years later that he survived test piloting by staring in the mirror e
ach day—just as he had begun to do during his struggles back at Corpus Christi—to “look for signals.” Did you goof off yesterday? Did you get complacent? In his mind, he had to put such pressure on himself because atop the naval aviation dog pile every day is a competition. And the competitors happen to be your best friends, who, as Shepard once put it, “are going to run right over you on the way to the same target.” But when his two-year tour at Pax came to an end in 1953, Shepard had begun to realize that he had become a seriously “sierra hotel” aviator—shit hot.

  “Maybe you are a little bit better,” he once told himself.

  Years later, he’d admit: “I believed I was the best graduate of the Navy Test Pilot School to ever come down the road. Obviously I wasn’t, but I believed I was.”

  In early 1953, with the Korean War still raging, Shepard was plucked by a World War II hero to serve in a new carrier-based jet squadron bound for Korea—a chance to apply his test pilot theories, reflexes, and guts against a formidable foe.

  7

  “Do you wish to declare an emergency?”

  Alan, Louise, and the girls pulled up one Sunday afternoon at the Sunnyvale, California, home of Alan’s friend Bob Elder and his wife, Irene. It was early 1953. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the new president, America was finally tiring of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red-baiting, and thirty thousand Americans had been killed in Korea.

  Pack up and move, pack up and move. It was becoming the family routine. At the end of the weeklong drive across the country, the Shepards had arrived with no place to stay and just a few dollars in their pockets. The Elders let Alan and Louise and the kids live in their extra bedroom until they were able to find a place of their own amid the cherry and apricot orchards of nearby Palo Alto.

  They had learned to travel light, put down shallow roots, and expect change. During eight years of marriage, Alan and Louise had already moved across the country and back once and lived in half a dozen houses. The girls, at five and two, were adapted to the peripatetic lifestyle, and the family made the most of whatever months or weeks they could all be together. In Palo Alto Louise quickly found a Christian Science church, and for a few months they lived as a normal, social, church-going family, although at Sunday services Alan usually stood at the back of the church with two other reluctant Navy men.

  Alan even agreed to join Louise and a dozen other couples in a small drama club called the One-Nighters, which met on Friday nights to rehearse. The other members were surprised that Alan, normally so aloof, played his parts with gusto. Once they performed on Academy Awards night at Woodside’s Pioneer Hotel, and they laughed and carried on so much that the waiters thought they were all drunk.

  The comfortable family routines came to an abrupt end when Alan and his new squadron boarded the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany in San Francisco, bound for the coast of war-racked Korea. They were shipping out for the first of two conjoined tours that would keep him separated from the family for more than a year. Just prior to his departure, Louise and the girls visited the ship, touring the floating village and dining in the officers’ mess, which had been decked out with white tablecloths and silver, with white-gloved stewards serving the food. As Louise and the kids drove home, one of the girls asked, “Mommy, how come Daddy is so rich and we’re so poor?”

  Shepard had tamed the brutish Corsair, nailed scores of carrier landings and wrung out some of the Navy’s first jets, but the lone blank on his aviator’s resume was aerial combat. As his squadron and the USS Oriskany churned toward Korea he had to be praying for a chance at one-on-one combat with a “Red.”

  U.S. newspapers would soon pick up stories about the first Navy and Marine aces—aviators with five kills—and would quote Marine Major John Bolt and his lively description of chasing down two MiG jets and, within five short minutes, shredding both “dudes” to pieces, calling it “a pretty good return on the investment.” Another Marine aviator, John Glenn, flying an F86 jet with baseball great Ted Williams as his wingman, earned the nickname “Old Magnet Ass” for repeatedly attracting North Korean antiaircraft fire. One night an enemy shell blew a two-foot hole in Glenn’s tail; another night he ran out of fuel and glided across the 38th parallel to a dead-stick landing. Before the war’s end Glenn would blast three MiGs from the sky.

  In mid-1953, the Navy still lagged behind the Air Force in its use of jets in the Korean conflict. The Navy was having some success with its F9F Panther jet fighters, but its pilots were flying mostly Corsairs and other propeller planes. Air Force pilots, meanwhile, were flying supersonic F86 Sabres.

  Back at Moffett Field, during training exercises before joining the Oriskany, Shepard and his colleagues loved to stage mock dogfights out over San Francisco Bay. But while Shepard chafed for a dogfight, his expertise from flying jets at Pax River made him the perfect candidate for a much broader role: to introduce jets to the underpowered naval air fleet. Shepard was selected to usher F2H Banshee jets into VF-193, an all-weather fighter squadron nicknamed the Ghost Riders. All-weather squadrons were a relatively new concept in the Navy, created to fly in the volatile, low-visibility conditions of Korea and East Asia. The F2H would became the most versatile all-weather aircraft of the 1950s.

  The Ghost Riders were one of four squadrons that constituted Air Group 19, which was commanded by James David Ramage, a tall, broad-shouldered figure of a man who was a World War II dive-bomber and (like Bob Elder) a Navy Cross recipient. During the war, Ramage’s initials, J.D., according to Navy call signs, had translated to Jig Dog. Later the Navy changed its call signs so that Ramage’s initials became the much less manly Juliet Delta. But Ramage would always be known as Jig Dog.

  Within days of his arrival at Moffett, Jig Dog had ordered a “group grope”—to get a full view of his air group, he wanted to see every bomber, jet, and tanker airborne. Unlike some commanders, who were largely ground-based administrators, Jig Dog was a talented aviator, so he joined his men in the air. After that, he endeared himself even further by hosting cocktail parties at his house. Shepard enjoyed himself so much, one of those nights he had to “slow-roll” his car home at half the speed limit.

  At the time, the Navy was buying up hundreds of new jets, planes that Shepard had tested and critiqued back at Patuxent River. Even more than World War II, the Korean War invigorated the American economy, marking the origins of what Eisenhower would one day call America’s “military-industrial complex” and making corporations such as Douglas and North American increasingly powerful and wealthy. As part of its transition, the Navy was retiring most of its propeller squadrons and replacing them with new jet squadrons. Air groups typically consisted of four different squadrons, and Air Group 19 was among the first groups to switch from three squadrons of propeller planes and one squadron of jets to the reverse: three jet squadrons (including Shepard’s VF-193) and just one prop squadron.

  Jig Dog had tried to handpick talented jet flyers for his new air group, but there weren’t many to choose from. That’s because most were reserve pilots who hadn’t flown since World War II. Very few had flown jets at all. “I was lying, cheating, and stealing to get the best aviators,” Ramage said. He chose Shepard partly on the advice of Bob Elder, who after Pax River had been named commander of Shepard’s sister squadron, VF-191, another of Air Group 19’s new jet squadrons, nicknamed Satan’s Kittens.

  It’s hard to explain to a nonpilot what makes another pilot great. It’s not like in sports, where speed or strength can be timed or measured. In flying, expertise is assessed in subtle ways. It’s based on trust, and people trusted Alan Shepard. “At that time, friendships were strong and you knew who the good pilots were,” Ramage recalled. “Pilots know pilots. Elder was a pilot’s pilot.” And if Elder said Alan Shepard was a good pilot, that was enough for Jig Dog. “Al was very much in demand,” Elder recalled.

  As the Oriskany set sail and training missions began, Jig Dog quickly discovered that few of his men had Shepard’s aerial finesse in a jet. The F2H Banshee—soon
to be celebrated in James Michener’s novel Bridges at Toko-Ri—was designed to be an all-purpose jet fighter. During his rigorous testing of the Banshee at Pax River, Shepard had proven to the Navy that the jet could fly high and low, fast and slow, at night and in the cruddiest of weather. But when it came to landing softly on the deck of a moving ship, the Banshee wasn’t an ideal match for the Oriskany.

  The Oriskany was a “straight deck” aircraft carrier, an elongated, moving football field with hydraulic catapults punching aircraft into the air in one end zone, and in the other end zone, nine rows of cables to catch the tailhooks of landing aircraft and snap them to a halt. One problem with the straight deck was that if a plane’s tailhook missed the landing cables, the plane barreled ahead toward rows of parked planes. Barriers were supposed to catch such errant planes, but sometimes those barriers snapped, or the incoming plane bounced or rolled over them, and the planes slammed into other fuel-laden jets, scattering (or sometimes slaughtering) sailors. Years later the Navy would replace carrier decks like the Oriskany’s with angled decks—such as those Shepard had tested at Patuxent—that had separate lanes for takeoffs and landings.

  The inexperience of Jig Dog’s men was betrayed by the deeply gouged landing area of the Oriskany’s hardwood deck, whose pitted and chunked teak planks had to be constantly replaced. The men were coming in too high and fast, cutting their power too close to the ship, causing their planes to drop too hard.

  In the complicated hierarchy of an aircraft carrier, the aviators were the big dogs, but they were essentially guests of the Oriskany’s captain, Charles Griffin, who assembled the pilots on his banged-up deck one afternoon. Tall and thin, with a triangular face, Griffin was generally a quiet man, a history buff who liked to read history lessons over the ship’s loudspeakers. But this day he loudly chewed out his pilots. “Stop damaging the flight deck,” he told Air Group 19. Jig Dog then coined a phrase that became the mantra of the group: “Don’t dive for the goddamn deck.” Shepard, who’d performed more carrier landings—in jets and on straight decks—than just about any other aviator in the air group, helped teach the others how to approach slower and lower, to avoid stalling and land gently without killing themselves or their colleagues.