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 SUMMARY
This book describes NavCad (Naval Cadet) ground school and flight training with vintage, dangerously worn-out, pre-World War II trainer aircraft, the SNJ Texan that accounted for so many accidents including an average of at least one fatality for each month of flight operations at Pensacola in 1954 and early 1955. Highlights include my year as the Cadet Battalion Commander; glorious weekends of searching for my "One True Love" on the famous white sands of Pensacola beach; finally "shooting down" my flight instructor after losing too many mock aerial dogfights with him; being the first NavCad to fly the new T-34 Mentor basic training aircraft at Beechcraft while at home on Christmas leave; knocking out the loud-mouthed boxing instructor in the first round of a three-round demonstration bout (he called several Marines including me "girls"); and being honored as the only NavCad inducted into the Confederate Air Corps, which at that time was comprised of only southern born Marine and Navy gentlemen fighter pilots who fought in World War II and the Korean War. At several of our monthly midnight steak and keg parties, it seemed that I was the only pilot there who had not shot down at least one Japanese aircraft. I could not have picked a worse time to enter the Navy Flight Training Program. The pre-World War II basic training aircraft, the SNJ Texan was worn out from the actual rigors of simulated aircraft-carrier operations.Various parts such as engine nacelles were falling off fusillades in flight,flight control cables were flight control cables were common and at least a dozen pilots-students and instructors-were killed during one year. After 14 months in the program, I was assigned a badly damaged but unrepaired SNJ that was declared-as I was flying at 10,000 feet altitude-to be not only too dangerous to fly, but too dangerous to land. As I crashed in a swamp, the engine, both wings and the tail assembly were ripped off and the cockpit cage flipped inverted and on fire as I was submerged unconscious under the brackish water. Fortunately, a Navy Crash Crew arrived at the crash site almost as soon as I did, and Navy Corpsmen worked to resuscitate me until I began breathing again. Those injuries ended my military flying career. SAMPLE SEA STORY "I Crashed, Burned, And Darn Near Drowned"
On the day that my SNJ Texan aircraft crashed, burned, and I darn near drowned in the brackish waters of that stale Florida swamp, everything was initially A-Ok and cooking on all burners. That was, indeed, another fine day for an hour or two of solo aerobatics hijinks in the severe-clear morning sunshine. In my seldom humble opinion, aerobatics in the wild, blue yonder are the most fun that a young cadet pilot can have with his clothes on. Unfortunately, when I added power to begin my takeoff roll, that previously damaged old bird hiccupped, sputtered, and then just sat there on the duty runway blocking traffic. My assigned SNJ suddenly did not have enough power to even begin the takeoff roll. So I eased off the manifold pressure and signaled the cadet pilot on the other side of the runway to go ahead and take off before me so that I could checkout that possibly significant hiccup. However, that blockhead just sat there looking at me like a village idiot while the lines of SNJs following each of us got longer. Anxious to get the heck out of the way of the rapidly forming queue, for some darned reason I thought "Aw heck, let's go for broke," and pushed the manifold pressure to full take-off power again. Well darned if I didn't start rolling just as the other cadet woke up and decided to finally do the same thing, so that both of us were accelerating down the runway side by side, but with a fairly safe lateral space between us. That was not as unusual as you might think because I had done that forbidden ploy intentionally on several night takeoffs in order to stick close to Bob, my usual wingman who had a lot better night vision than yours truly. So I figured that mildly iffy situation was no big deal; that is, it wasn't until my main landing gear wheels lifted off the runway and my SNJ lost the lateral friction between my rubber tires and the runway tarmac. Immediately, my right wing snapped up from the horizontal and came very close to being fully vertical. Startled, I was sure that I was just about to drag my left wing-tip on the tarmac, cartwheel right there on the runway, and bow out in a big ugly ball of explosive fire and black greasy smoke. At the same time, I felt like a huge, open hand was underneath my airplane pushing me hard to the left toward the swamp and that other cadet's SNJ as well.  A Good Day To Thrash a Few Clouds
Instinctively, I slammed full right joy stick and kicked hard right rudder, but my plane continued flying to the left while I crossed directly over the other cadet with my left wingtip passing within inches of his open canopy. As I looked straight down at him from only a few inches more than the length of my SNJ's left wing above him, he seemed to go catatonic as he stared straight up at me as if I was the avenging angel of death. That poor guy had really big blue eyes. I could see them as plain as day. Unable to recover, I grabbed my radio microphone and yelled "Mayday, Mayday, MAYDAY, I'm going down. I'M GOING DOWN!" The control tower operator calmly responded: "Ahh Roger. Where are you, Mayday?" I yelled back at him: "I'm right in front of you, DAMMIT!" Again, the tower calmly replied: "Ah yes, I can see you now." Days later, at the post-accident analysis meeting, I recognized the tower operator—Roe Messner, who later married Tammy Faye Baker the televangelist—because he was our batboy when his older brother Bobby and I played for the championship T-Men Little League baseball team in Wichita, Kansas, way back in the summer of 1945 when I was 12 years old. Like somebody important often said: "It is, indeed, a very small world." With my SNJ still out of control and barely flying in that extremely dangerous attitude—especially since I was flying that close to the ground—I was sure that I would "buy the farm for Mom and Dad," and was just about to be null and void. With the manifold pressure still firewalled at full takeoff power, I had already passed over the edge of the wet-lands swamp that laid parallel to the far north end of the runway. After pulling up my landing gear and the rest of my wing flaps, my wings rotated through straight and level, then further to the right for a change as I stayed fairly low to pick-up as much airspeed as possible. Just when I was sure that I was about to snap into a steep-turn stall and flip over inverted to crash into the brackish black water only a matter of feet below me, my SNJ somehow righted itself once again. At that faster airspeed, my wounded old airplane headed for altitude like a homesick angel. As terror turned into relief, I knew that I was still in deep doo doo, but at least I had beaten the odds one more time. However, I wasn't out of the frying pan by a long shot. The Flight Safety Officer—a Navy lieutenant commander who was a friend as well as one of the good ol' boys in our still somewhat clandestine Confederate Air Corps back when the CAC was composed of current and former Navy and Marine fighter pilots—he got on the horn and told me to take that sick old junker to altitude and give it a stall test. So I carefully flew up to about 9,000 feet altitude and then stalled my SNJ in the normal wings-level attitude. Bad news: the darned thing stalled violently with a snap. That was not anywhere near normal. At more than 22 knots of air speed too soon, that was a complete surprise. Then, it did not recover from that spin in a turn and a half as advertised. In fact, it spun continuously, totally out of control until I was several thousand feet below the 5,000-foot mandatory bailout altitude before I could get it sorted out and somewhat under control when I picked up air speed by dumping my SNJ's nose even further downward. Apparently perplexed, or maybe he was just stalling to buy some more time to launch the Air/Sea Rescue's PBY amphibious aircraft, the Safety Officer told me to fly back up to a 12,000-foot altitude and stall that sick old junker again. However, that time he wanted me to read him the decreasing airspeed numbers down to the exact onset of that unusually violent, snapping stall beginning with the wings level. It was gut-check time because I had to maintain a faster air speed while gaining altitude or my SNJ could have snapped into a stall on the way back up to altitude. A chilling revelation, I realized that could have happened the first time when I had not understood the aerodynamic danger of the normal climbing speed in that condition. But like any good Marine, I followed orders and did what I was told to do, and had darn near essentially the same results. The consensus quick-look analysis indicated that my SNJ was no longer capable of flying at about 22 knots above the normal stalling speed in a wings-level and otherwise clean configuration. Furthermore, it was not a good idea to execute a Navy/Marine full-stall carrier-type landing, or even approach the duty runway in the standard racetrack landing pattern where it could stall even sooner while in a turn; i.e., possibly at 30 knots or more above the normal stalling speed and too darned low to recover from that stall and subsequent spin. Also, I was fairly sure that I would have to bail out after falling more than eight spinning turns or so. However, I really did not want to do that, especially since one of my guys had recently bailed out at below 5,000 feet and was killed when his parachute did not fully open. That was definitely on my mind at that time, so I stuck with that sick old SNJ a lot longer than I should have. Silly me.
"I CRASHED, BURNED, AND DARN NEAR DROWNED"
the Story Continues Click Here |
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