Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  As the F-105 was climbing to test flight altitude, Deke’s thoughts flashed like high-speed film to the time long ago when he had started flying. He recalled the announcement of war. He’d never even been up in an airplane, but somehow he knew the sky was where he belonged, and soon he was signing up for cadet training.

  He went through the drill like thousands of other cadets being hammered into skilled pilots. A year after signing up, in 1942, he had earned his silver wings, and he was on his way to combat. He flew B-25 medium bombers in Europe through flak storms and attacks by swift German fighters whose view of Deke’s bomber was always through a gunsight. It wasn’t a time for heroics. Just fly, bomb, fight to get back to base. When the Third Reich was vanquished, Deke was sent to fight in the war still raging in the Pacific.

  He went from the B-25 to the powerful A-26 Invader, a flat-bellied attack bomber. “That’s when I had the real fun,” he recalled. “Those low-level attacks of six Invaders flying abreast were synchronized thunder, right on the bloody deck, thank you, our props churning up salt spray from the ocean as we barreled in for the Japanese coast.”

  The Invaders flew in a formation so tight it seemed as if only one pilot was controlling all six planes. When Deke and his fellow pilots cut loose at a target, everybody firing in concert, they hurled destruction from no less than eighty-four heavy machine guns, ripping their quarry to shreds.

  The Pacific War ended, and Deke began the long climb to becoming a test pilot, spending most of the next two years on the ground. He doubled up on his academic and engineering subjects and in two years earned a four-year aeronautical degree from the University of Minnesota. He tried a desk job at Boeing Aircraft before heading back to the military, and Germany, where he cut his teeth on Air Force jet fighters.

  It was one jump up the ladder after another. Out of Germany’s lush forests and mountains to the California desert and test flying. Deke drove himself relentlessly in test pilot school and found, to his surprise and delight, that “Edwards was where I fit. I had the best job in the Air Force.”

  That was long ago. Now was twelve hundred miles an hour in the F-105 as he approached the test area.

  He checked communications with test control. Phil Connelly confirmed telemetry was on the mark. A quiet beginning for what could be a difficult test run in an airplane still full of hidden flaws.

  Deke began the run by pushing the F-105 into a tight decelerating turn from maximum speed. The test called for masterful flying that would gauge the turning capabilities of the craft. During that maneuver of clawing around and decelerating, he would wind the fighter down from twelve hundred miles an hour to less than three hundred.

  Most pilots would pale at the thought of flying in this manner. Deke knew his capabilities and was confident. He had plenty of air space in which to maneuver, the weather was great, and he’d be sliding down from thin to rich atmosphere where the fighter-bomber could get a better grip of the air.

  He sliced the turn closer and closer as the 105’s speed fell off sharply. Before him passed the constant blur of earth, horizon, sun, and sky.

  That’s when it happened. Faster than Deke could react, the F-105 snapped over violently into an inverted spin at high speed.

  The world below swam in a maddening whirl. The spin was the worst kind. He had to stop it, now.

  Stop the violent rotation. Get the nose down.

  He moved the controls precisely. The spin tightened. Blood pounded through his skull. He tried desperately to focus his vision as the 105 spun faster and hurled itself at the earth. All he could see was a blur. He fought to define the horizon and to keep from panicking.

  Where the hell was the horizon?

  Think!

  There was nothing to prepare Deke for the violent spin. No books. No theories worth a damn. No training manuals. What counted now were instinct and a native ability to figure out what was happening—quickly—and get the hell through the exit door.

  Inverted spin? That was it. Let’s try what we know . . .

  He worked his controls through the spin-recovery techniques that usually worked. No help. This was the meanest, most unpredictable bitch of a situation for a pilot to be in.

  He moved his controls through anti-spin motions. His head slammed sideways as the 105 reversed direction.

  With nothing to lose, Deke let loose of the controls. Maybe she’d come out by herself.

  Finally he could read his altimeter. He was down to twenty-seven thousand feet. Time mocked him.

  He let his senses float free to feel the negative centrifugal force pounding against his body. The negative g-loads were still increasing, forcing his body upward from his safety harness and pushing him away from his seat toward the canopy.

  Deke was thinking that he should be getting ready to bail out of what was swiftly turning into a death trap.

  He reached down to be sure he could reach the handle of his rocket-propelled ejection seat. First the canopy would go, the seat would be blown up and away, and then he would float free in his parachute.

  He couldn’t reach the ejection handle.

  He was trapped in the airplane.

  He forced himself down into his seat as hard as he could. He pulled up on the control stick, reaching, reaching . . . and now he could barely touch the lifesaving grip.

  He knew that he could get out of the spinning fighter. He had a few more precious seconds. He forced himself to wait while his mind worked furiously.

  In his mind he saw the 105’s speed brakes. They’re right there, he told himself. Right there on this plane’s ass. Right where they’ll—

  He hit the control for the speed brakes.

  Four huge metal panels splashed outward in the form of a beautiful metal flower that slowed the plane. It felt as if a giant invisible hand had slapped the airplane.

  The sudden drag threw Deke against his seat and banged the aircraft’s nose toward the desert floor.

  The violent oscillations eased and then stopped. The world was no longer racing before his eyes. He smiled. He was back in control.

  Well, almost. He was still spinning, but the nose was down and the controls were responding. The 105 kicked out of the spin, reversed direction, and spun the other way. Those speed brakes were working. The next attempt to stop the spin seemed to give him just a tad more control. He neutralized the controls. Rudders even, stick neutral, power off.

  The whirling motion of the planet slowed some more.

  But he was out of time as the 105 rushed down through the ten thousand-foot mark. He started reaching for the ejection handle because his time was just about all used up.

  One more try and—

  Whaaammm! She came out of the spin with a crashing motion.

  He had control. Good Lord, he really did. He had complete control and he pulled out smoothly, kept the nose down, and lost no time heading for the runway. The F-105 went onto solid ground like a painter’s brush.

  Deke parked on the flight line and shut the F-105 down. Mechanics swarmed over the airplane. They opened the bomb bay and found a mangled mass of aircraft parts that had been ripped to pieces and hurled from their mounts by the g-forces and vibrations.

  Deke stared at the nuts, bolts, rivets, and chunks of metal torn loose. He turned slowly to stare at the big hangar where Republic Aviation maintained its maintenance operation.

  Slowly he brought up his right hand, made a fist, leaving his middle finger extended rigidly.

  “Up yours, Mister Republic,” he said quietly. “Your one-oh-five has been spun, son.”

  By late 1958 there were other flyers ready to trade the title of test pilot for that of a NASA astronaut. One of those was a young naval lieutenant named Alan Shepard.

  Deke hadn’t met Shepard, but he’d heard of him. Alan had already gained a reputation as one helluva pilot, and stories had circulated about how he had been sent by the Navy to Edwards to wring out a souped-up Grumman F11F Tiger.

  This winged Tiger had a tough reputati
on and a nasty habit of biting back.

  On the morning of the test, Alan strapped himself into the Tiger, fired up, went through the pre-takeoff drill, and began rolling down the Edwards runway for his day’s pay.

  The F11F had been experiencing problems with reverse yaw that Grumman had tried to correct. When the experimental engine built up speed to twice that of sound and the pilot entered a turn, the aircraft violently spun around, swapping ends.

  Shepard was climbing to seventy-five thousand feet when the engine suddenly flamed out. “I had just enough time to catch my breath before I lost all cabin pressure and the canopy began to frost over,” he recalled.

  Shepard could barely see through his front windshield, but he had enough visibility to get a visual lock on the horizon to maintain balance and control. His pressure suit sealed his body in a tight grip and continued feeding him oxygen, and a quick scan of the control panel showed he still had the basic instruments with which to maintain directional control of the airplane. For a short while the F11F had been a lump of winged metal, zooming upward without power and losing speed. The still functioning instruments confirmed Shepard was in a slight turn and able to fly the Tiger along a wide arc in a downward glide.

  He laughed aloud suddenly. The word glide was a harsh joke. The F11F was gliding all right, but it was falling out of the sky like a Steinway piano in an unstoppable spin.

  Alan let the airplane descend for forty thousand feet; then, seven miles above the desert, he went through the engine-starting sequence to try to regain power.

  He let the plane fall another ten thousand feet into denser air with more oxygen and again primed the pump. There was no response. Ice coated the canopy, but through the gleaming frost Alan saw mountains in the distance growing larger with unsettling speed.

  About this time he began to worry a bit. He was using up the sky in a terrible hurry, and there was now a real chance he might terminate this flight by scattering the plane along the mountainous slopes.

  One more shot, he decided, and then it’s time to leave this mother. As the F11F fell like a rock through twelve thousand feet, the engine restarted! Immediately Shepard had full control, and as the windshield cleared he set up for a straight-in landing on the desert floor. He rolled to a stop, climbed from the cockpit, gave the F11F the time-honored finger, and met with his test chief to fill out his report.

  Then he headed for a bar where Air Force pilots waited with the needle. He didn’t care what they said. He needed urgently, as he put it, to regroup all his senses, to recover from the descent, and brace himself with some high-alcohol-content medicinal spirits. Besides, he could give as well as take the ribbing he knew was coming.

  The blue-suit boys always told the old story of how they caught a group of Navy pilots flying formation. “They must have been flying formation,” the rib went, “because they were all flying in the same direction. Sort of.”

  Alan didn’t mind the rib. In fact, he thought it was a pretty good one. But he, and every other carrier pilot, had one great advantage over the blue suiters. There wasn’t a land pilot alive, no matter how great he was, who didn’t hold the carrier jocks in enormous respect for their skill at living, working, and flying to and from a floating runway. There are few things that shake up a land pilot more than the prospect of searching an angry ocean for the bobbing and rolling gray slab that is an aircraft carrier deck.

  That’s in daylight. At night, in rain and fog and nasty winds, it is like being thrown into a rolling cement mixer. Any time an Air Force jock got his wind up with high-powered bragging, Alan would immediately offer him the job of flying his wing to a carrier deck. Somehow he never got any takers.

  Alan Shepard became one of the classics in carrier landings because he found them more interesting and challenging than frightening—or than being plain scared at risking his life with every plunge onto a carrier’s face.

  He figures it had to do with his childhood in East Derry, New Hampshire, where his father, a retired Army colonel, created in his son a love of tinkering, building, creating things that flew, rolled, or just plain hummed along. Topping the list were model airplanes, all kinds and sizes. Watching his models fly lit the fire within the youngster, and there was no dousing that flame. Next stop was the local airport for after-school odd jobs, working on machinery that rolled and other machinery with wings that flew. As a high schooler, Shepard was a walking sponge, soaking up information, analyzing, taking things apart and putting them back together, ever questioning, ever seeking and never being satisfied with what he was learning.

  Hard work, diligence, and high grades earned him an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. He could almost feel the gold wings of a naval aviator pinned to his chest, but the Navy does things its own way. It was off for a stint at sea before the greenhorn could be sent to flight training.

  Finally, the gold of his wings shone brightly on his uniform. Almost as brightly as his Tom Sawyer grin and his disarming charm.

  In 1950 Washington tapped Alan for a coveted assignment at the Naval Test Pilot School at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. The youngest aviator selected, he went immediately from test pilot school to flight test operations. For the next three years he was immersed in an intensive test program that produced the Navy’s fastest and deadliest combat aircraft. After three years Shepard joined the operational ranks as the new operations officer of a night-fighter squadron aboard the USS Oriskany in the western Pacific.

  One mission especially was memorable. He was strapped tightly within the confines of a dark Banshee jet fighter, preparing for a routine night intercept mission. The launch officer gave the signal, and the Banshee was catapulted into darkness. Carrier combat operations vectored Shepard to the radar-reported positions of bogeys—unidentified aircraft. Moments later Shepard confirmed the bogeys as friendlies—U.S. Air Force planes on their own mission. Everything was going as planned, and Shepard swung about in a wide turn to fly back to his carrier.

  It was simple going out for an intercept.

  It was a bitch going back.

  Weather rolled in fast, and Alan found himself above the overcast. Beneath the cloud deck he descended into heavy rain, flying strictly by instruments in the wet dark, following the homing signal from the carrier.

  Suddenly the Banshee’s electrical system rolled over and kicked feebly, leaving the airplane and its pilot severely handicapped.

  Some of Shepard’s radio systems died.

  His navigational systems were gone, inert.

  His radar beam flickered on and off, an intermittent pulse more maddening than useful.

  He was flying blind, and he did not know where he was in relation to the moving aircraft carrier.

  As many pilots do when the world starts coming unglued, he spoke loudly to himself. “Your navigational aids have gone south, and it looks like you’re gonna have to ditch, old buddy. You’re gonna have to set her down in that dark water and take your chances.” He paused and added another note of realism, “Your chances stink.”

  He had company crowding into the Banshee cockpit, an old enemy of pilots in just his circumstances: fear.

  Instantly he recognized the intrusion and knew fear could kill him faster than anything else.

  “Think, damn you,” he ordered himself. He scanned his panel, determined to make the best of whatever equipment was still functioning. It wasn’t much, but there was that old rule. You’re never out until you quit.

  He wasn’t quitting.

  He keyed his mike, seemingly a useless gesture. His radios were intermittent, so—

  “Malta Base, this is Foxtrot Two. Do you read? Over.”

  Astonishingly, through the storm, he received a reply.

  “Foxtrot Two, this is Malta Base. I just barely read you three-by-five. I say three-by-five but can read. Over.”

  Alan didn’t waste a moment in response.

  “This is Foxtrot Two, Malta Base. I’m in a little difficulty here. I’m IFR and my nav aids
are erratic. Need assistance.”

  “Foxtrot Two, do you wish to declare an emergency? We’re not picking up . . . Repeat, we don’t hold you on radar.”

  “No! No damn emergency, Malta Base,” he snapped. “I want to try a couple of things. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Roger, Foxtrot Two. Malta Base standing by.”

  The rain pelted the windshield. He was lost over a very dark sea. No navigation aids to steer him to the carrier. Radios cutting in and out that might die for good at any moment. One helluva sticky mess of maple syrup for this New Hampshire home boy, but he rejected punching out, dropping into the stormy sea by parachute. That meant giving real thought to ditching into the dark pit that was the ocean.

  Terrific . . .

  But declare an emergency?

  “Me?” he questioned aloud. “A fighter pilot? A carrier fighter pilot? Declare an emergency? No way!”

  It had nothing to do with being macho. Alan Shepard was way beyond that nonsense. Neither was the issue one of inability to live with failure. No ego trip involved here.

  To Alan, declaring the emergency which the carrier ops man felt was inevitable meant that he had already concluded in his own mind that he had flown himself into a hole from which he couldn’t get out.

  No way.

  Declaring an emergency meant that he couldn’t handle his airplane in this situation by himself. That radio call was a blatant admission that he needed help. To admit that, he swore to himself meant that somehow he had failed, he no longer had that special something to handle his own problems.

  Believe in yourself . . .

  Damn right. Time to reaffirm in his own mind that his confidence was unshaken, his skill as great as ever in using to the utmost whatever the Banshee had left to give.