The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  Doolittle’s next destination was Bolivia, and he flew the Hawk due south between the mountains and the Pacific coast, setting a new record of 11 hours, 23 minutes between Santiago and La Paz. Unbeknownst to Doolittle, however, Bolivia and Chile were having one of their perennial border disputes and he arrived to find his residence, the Stranger’s Club, surrounded by a thousand-man mob of angry and arson-minded Bolivians shouting anti-Chilean and anti-American slogans, including the stock insult “Gringo go home!” Newspapers had reported that Doolittle was in fact a spy for Chile, and he was presently being denounced from the streets to the halls of the Bolivian parliament.

  The Bolivian army arrived and dispersed the mob but authorities suggested that Doolittle leave town as soon as possible, advice he took to heart, since talk had begun of a firing squad. Airplane sales under present conditions were less than promising.

  His next stop was Buenos Aires, which would require flying over the Andes, a hazardous adventure in 1926. He would be flying at roughly 18,000 feet, and as high as 20,000 feet at some points, meaning that the air would be awfully thin, and extreme turbulence was not uncommon at those altitudes. On top of all this was the matter of his broken ankles. If he ran into trouble he would have no choice but to try to set the plane down.

  Nevertheless, on September 3, 1926, Jimmy Doolittle set another record by becoming the first American to fly over the Andes range (several Argentinians had done it, but more had perished in the attempt), and he broke the present speed record at that, making the trip from Santiago to Buenos Aires in 6 hours, 45 minutes. He was also, he pointed out, “the only man ever to fly over [the Andes] with two broken ankles.”

  In Argentina Doolittle gave the requisite aerial performances—minus von Schoenebeck as his foil—and managed to sell several more Curtiss Hawks, and following this he sailed for home.

  WHEN HE REACHED THE UNITED STATES in October 1926 Doolittle checked himself into Walter Reed Hospital because his ankles were still painful and not healing properly. The doctors were “shocked” when they read the X-rays. The healing was abnormal, but because of the length of time that had passed since Doolittle’s fall it was decided to let the healing continue without refracturing the bones. When his ankles were put in new casts he was sentenced to immobilization in the hospital for an indeterminate period of time.

  It was during this interlude that Doolittle ginned up the notion of performing the notorious “outside loop,” an aircraft maneuver that puts such enormous stress on both the pilot and the aircraft that many aviators believed it was impossible. Not Doolittle.

  Flying an inside loop is relatively easy because the pilot is on the vertical inside of the loop, where centrifugal forces hold him in place and his blood is not rushed to the head. In an outside loop, however, this is reversed and the pilot’s feet, rather than his head, are pointed toward the center of the circle. The body is subjected to mighty strains, including an ever increasing centrifugal force that pushes the blood to the brain with tremendous pressure. In addition, there was the question among aviators of what it might do to the pilot’s internal organs. And would he “red out” and become unconscious when he attempted to push the plane around on the second half of the loop? Let alone, the effects of all that strain on the aircraft.

  Only such a man as Doolittle could ask these questions with the apparent intention of testing them on himself.

  In April 1927, shortly after he was released from the hospital, Doolittle secretly began practicing the outside loop in the Curtiss Hawk. He took it one stage at a time, going through the bottom half, then going around and under, a sensation that was disagreeable at first, similar to hanging upside down for a long time on the horizontal gymnastics bar. The second half of the loop was the tricky part, because when the plane reached the bottom the pilot had to remain alert enough to put on sufficient speed and push the plane out the top.

  On May 25, 1927—four days after Lindbergh had soloed across the Atlantic—Jimmy Doolittle asked six of his fellow test pilots to “watch a patch of sky” about 10,000 feet up while he went into his stunt. At about 350 miles per hour Doolittle shoved the stick forward and began the loop. He saw red as the blood rushed into his brain. The g-force pressure was so great that it burst the blood vessels in his eyes, but other than that, and a great deal of “discomfort,” he had, that day, in fact achieved the seemingly impossible.

  His buddies got word to the newspapers and next day headlines had Doolittle as “the first man in history to perform the outside loop.” Reporters wrote that his eyes were completely bloodshot and that he had a ruptured lung (this last was untrue). When one reporter wanted to know how he did it, Doolittle replied with characteristic self-effacement. “Don’t know. I just thought it up on the spur of the moment.”

  When army brass got wind of Doolittle’s stunt many were horrified that now other, less experienced pilots would try it and wreck their planes. Orders were quickly posted banning anyone from attempting an outside loop.

  Soon the Curtiss-Wright Corporation came calling again. The company asked the army if it could reprise last year’s South American sales tour, again featuring Doolittle. Again the army acceded, probably in some measure glad to be rid of him, thus providing a new set of opportunities for Doolittle’s growing repertoire of adventures and misadventures.

  THIS TIME DOOLITTLE had two planes to show off. Besides the Curtiss Hawk there was a two-seat observation plane, the Curtiss 0-1, a civilian test pilot, William McMullen, and, lastly, two Curtiss mechanics, who assembled both planes when they reached Lima, Peru.

  When the Doolittle air show arrived in Bolivia, this time Doolittle was welcomed with open arms, the border dispute having blown over.

  In between demonstrations of the planes, the Doolittle team met an American gold mine manager named Charles Wallen who had just arrived in La Paz with a strange story to tell after a nine-day trek by burro from his mine a hundred miles into the jungle. He had come for medical supplies, he said, for some native mine workersa who, while drunk on their day off, enjoyed playing a dangerous game called probando la suerte (“trying your luck”). It worked this way: forty or so men would stand in a circle with their arms outstretched barely touching hands with those on either side of them. A quarter of a stick of dynamite with a long fuse would then be lit and passed from man to man. The man holding it when it blew up was considered sin suerte (“without luck”). Back at the mine, Wallen said, were a dozen or so Indians still alive from the last game but horribly mangled and tended to by the mine doctor, who had run out of everything but whiskey and quinine.

  Wallen needed to return with the medical supplies as soon as possible and Doolittle volunteered to fly him back. In the 0-1 with Wallen in the passenger seat, they flew above the jungle and dropped the supplies in a clearing near the mine. During the remainder of his stay in Bolivia, Doolittle continued to volunteer to fly emergency supplies out to the country’s many mines, and for this, before he left, President Hernando Siles Reyes presented him with the National Order of the Condor of the Andes, Bolivia’s highest decoration for foreigners.b

  Still merely an army first lieutenant, Doolittle for the remainder of the tour was wined and dined by prominent South American politicians and military officers—presidents, ministers, and generals—and he spread goodwill for his company and the United States, too, by setting every new flying record he could think of—record times flying between cities, over mountains, over jungles—connecting the continent by air.c

  WHEN HE RETURNED FROM SOUTH AMERICA on August 15, 1928, Doolittle had already begun to experience what might be characterized as an “organized midlife crisis.”

  He was thirty-one years old and still a first lieutenant; in those days promotions came with such glacial slowness that Doolittle couldn’t even contemplate when he might make captain. As it was, he had to support Joe and the boys, as well as his and Joe’s mothers, on his lieutenant’s pay. He was equipped with a doctoral degree in aeronautical engineering, as well a
s thousands of hours of flying time, but what did the world hold? Flying was his life, but what if there were no flying jobs outside the army? Flying was still perceived by the public as risky, and viable commercial passenger airlines were a decade into the future.d As he and Joe wrestled with these things, a prospect came his way that he considered the opportunity of a lifetime.

  It came via Harry F. Guggenheim,5 the handsome, dapper, fabulously wealthy scion of the Guggenheim Mexican mining empire, who had developed a love of flying. After graduating college at Cambridge University in 1913, Guggenheim bought a Curtiss seaplane and joined the U.S. Navy as a reserve officer. When America entered World War I he served as a combat flier on the Western Front and in Italy.

  In 1924 Guggenheim convinced his parents to set up a fund through their foundation, capitalized initially with $3 million, that was devoted to promoting air travel and making air travel safer. They made Harry a director and, later, president. Among the fund’s many projects was something called the Full Flight Laboratory at Mitchel Field, Long Island. Its goal was to develop instruments that would allow pilots to take off, fly, and land blind—using only the instruments as their guide. The concept was almost unheard of since the flying instruments of the day were so few and crude, and it was basically contrary to the customary practice of stressing that the pilot should simply develop good instincts and fly by them.

  Now with Guggenheim there was an organization, backed by big money, that was set up entirely to conquer the problem of low visibility or “fog flying,” because among the visibility issues—darkness, rain, snow—fog was by far the greatest killer. The answer of course was finding a way of flying blind. Would Doolittle join the team, Guggenheim wanted to know?

  If anyone understood the problems that were holding up progress in aviation, it was Jimmy Doolittle; he flew with them every day. He had been to the outer limits many times and seen the shadow of death. At the time there was nothing he’d rather do than find solutions to these problems.

  * This is the condition thought to be responsible for the strange flying death of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife and sister-in-law, whose plane dived into the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999.

  † Now home of the Cradle of Aviation Museum, the Nassau Coliseum, and Hofstra University.

  ‡ Cavalry, whose principal mission was reconnaissance, was only then beginning to employ motorized vehicles and armored tanks.

  § A “G” or g-force is a force of acceleration in excess of the normal force of gravity (or free fall).

  ‖ Some of the spectators thought that Doolittle might have struck von Schoenebeck’s plane with his own and caused the damage, but this was incorrect, as the German himself admitted. The unraveling of the wing fabric was a structural failure of the Dornier.

  a These people were known locally as “bad Indians” because of their penchant for murdering government tax collectors.

  b Wallen was so impressed by the airplane ride that he bought a Curtiss himself and later started a Bolivian airline.

  c For being the first pilot to fly over the infamous Mato Grosso, a remote and uncharted sea of vegetation some 350,000 miles square, Doolittle was elected to membership in the eminent Explorers Club.

  d In May 1928, the Guggenheim foundation began an experimental airline between San Francisco and Los Angeles using a Fokker trimotor that seated eight. It was called Western Air Express.

  CHAPTER 4

  CAN THOSE BE STARS?

  For more than an hour Charles Lindbergh had been waiting for the moon to rise.1 Squeezed as he was into the tiny cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis, he might well have been the loneliest man in the world, flying alone in the inky dark somewhere high above the North Atlantic while all around him towering thunderheads were pulsating and growling with pinkish-yellow lightning flashes. It was May 20, 1927. The meteorologist’s report that morning had indicated clearing skies. It was wrong. For the first time, he thought of turning back.

  Years afterward, Lindbergh mused about it in his book The Spirit of St. Louis. “Great cliffs tower over me,” he said, as he threaded his way among the giant clouds boiling with electricity, “[they] ward me off with icy walls. There’d be no rending crash if my wing struck one of them,” he said. “They carry a subtler death. To plunge into these mountains … would be like stepping in quicksand.”

  It was the sixteenth hour since he’d left Long Island’s Roosevelt Field; he’d soared across the Long Island Sound, over New England, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador, where he’d turned east across the great ocean. It had been four long hours since he lost both land and light, a final glance backward at sunset, past huge icebergs 10,000 feet below to the sun’s last rays on the silhouette of the mountains that stood out against the western sky. It was the last he would see of America for a while, and he felt almost as if he were traveling through outer space—displaced, unconnected. There was nothing now before him but thousands of miles of ocean. He was twenty-five years old.

  That had been four hours ago—the last of America—but now he wavered. It was nearly eleven p.m., and ahead the storm clouds piled up in great columns while Lindbergh maneuvered to wiggle through the valleys between them, which wasn’t always possible.

  The Spirit of St. Louis shuddered as it entered a turbulent cumulus and Lindbergh was sensitive to each jerk and spasm. It felt at times that some violent invisible hand had seized his aircraft and was determined to shake it to pieces. Inside the cloud was all black darkness, with no clouds below to judge for distance, no stars above to guide by. Nothing but the burning flash of his engine’s exhaust on the mist inside the cloud and the greenish-yellow radium of the glowing instrument dials saved him from utter blindness. He was in fact flying blind by the standards of the day—altimeter, compass, turn and bank indicator—these were all he had in the world to make the aircraft fly straight and level, along with every ounce of concentration he could muster to keep them in precarious harmony. No one had tried this before and lived to tell about it. That, too, was on his mind.

  It was cold and Lindbergh zipped his flight jacket tight and put on his leather mittens, but not his flying boots. That would come later, if necessary. He didn’t need to get too warm, too comfortable right now; it made him sleepy. He kicked himself for last night, when he had the chance to catch a few hours of sleep but didn’t, then couldn’t when the idiot “aide” his army reserve unit sent out kept disturbing him. Lindbergh had been awake now for thirty-eight hours, and his mind wandered back to home, to autumn in the Minnesota woods. It was still cold and he checked the altimeter—10,500 feet.

  A moment of panic: “Good Lord! How could I forget!”

  He snatched off a mitten and stuck his arm out the window, where a needlelike sting filled the palm of his hand. Ice. His flashlight revealed a shiny coating on the leading edge of the plane’s struts and wires. He must exit the cloud immediately and find open, drier air. But not too fast; many a pilot in such a situation has lost his life to vertigo. Watch the instruments, Lindbergh worried, before they, too, iced up and froze. Flying blind contradicts all of a pilot’s natural instincts and Lindbergh had to wrestle with himself to go slow. Turning too fast could fling you out of control. The airspeed indicator showed him slowing down, but too much and the plane would stall. Was it the ice on the wings slowing him? Another look with the flashlight told him yes, there was more ice, and then, abruptly, he found his way out of the cloud.

  “My eyes sense a change in the blackness of the cockpit,” Lindbergh wrote. “I look through the window. Can those be stars? Is this the same sky? How bright! How clear! Here’s something I never saw before—the brilliant light of a black night.”

  He decided to climb another five or six thousand feet, where the valleys between the mountainous thunderheads might be wider and easier to navigate. If he couldn’t find a pass to the east or south he’d have to turn back, he decided, back over Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New England, right back to where he’d started on the mud-soaked ru
nway of the airfield. He calculated that by the time he actually got back he would have been in the air at least long enough to reach Ireland. That would be something at least—New York to Ireland had never been done. It was worth a shot. Lindbergh steered on eastward; do it or die trying. In the passes between the thunderheads, occasionally he saw the stars that let him plot his course.

  The incessant thrum and vibration of the engine was lulling his senses. The instruments weren’t behaving right. Lindbergh had an earth-inductor compass, a complicated and finicky apparatus that was now gyrating so wildly its magnetic field seemed affected by the electrical storms. Likewise, the liquid compass overhead appeared to be out of order. If both compasses failed he’d have nothing but the stars, and if the storms blotted out the stars he wouldn’t know if he was flying north, south, east, west, or around in circles until he ran out of gas. He flew on.

  Imperceptibly, the sky seemed brighter and the edges of the clouds sharper. He had nearly forgotten the moon, but suddenly there it was in a valley in the clouds. Forming ahead and above, however, was an ominous layer, pierced by thick spiral columns from a second bank of clouds several thousand feet below, so that it appeared to Lindbergh that he was flying into some colossal temple in the sky. It was unnerving, as though he were entering the maw of a gigantic beast.

  His fatigue was now appalling; he wanted to walk around and shake it off but he was strapped into a narrow wicker chair in the cramped cockpit of the plane. He put his hand out the window to direct a stream of cold air on his face. That helped.

  His eyelids sagged and he couldn’t stop them. The walls of the temple began to close in and fog enveloped the Spirit of St. Louis. The ocean began to draw him like a siren’s call. He thought about crashing into it, wondering what it would be like. His muscles ached and his legs were cramped. There was barely room to stretch. He had the impression he was going nowhere, just hanging in the air. He needed to get out of the fog.