Klink and I decided to cut short our stay at Pensacola and to work our way as far west as time would allow before it was necessary for me to leave for Brooks Field.
We had promised to take one of the ladies of the post for a short hop before leaving, and on the morning of our departure I took off for a test flight before taking the lady over Pensacola. Just after the ship had left the field and was about two hundred feet high over the bay, the motor “reved” down to about five hundred. I banked around in an attempt to get back to the field but lacked by about fifteen feet enough altitude to reach it, and was forced to land in the sand hills less than a hundred feet from the edge of the flying field. The first hill wiped off my landing gear and one wheel went up through the front spar on the lower left wing, breaking it off about two feet from the fuselage.
A quick survey of the plane showed that we would require a new landing gear and propeller in addition to the material required to splice the spar.
The Navy hauled the plane into one of its large dirigible hangars and allowed us to make use of its equipment in repairing the damage. We purchased a spare landing gear and a propeller, then built a box frame around the broken spar and after gluing all the joints, screwed it in position and wound the splice with strong cord, which was then shrunk tight by several coats of dope. In this way the splice was made stronger than the original spar had ever been.
When we were not working on the ship we made several trips to the old Spanish forts which protected the city during the days when Florida still belonged to Spain. These are in an excellent state of preservation and contain a number of passageways, one of which is supposed to lead underground between the two fortifications, but although we searched carefully for the opening to this tunnel we never found it.
In all we spent about a week repairing the plane and when it was ready to fly once more I tested it with an Irving parachute borrowed from one of the officers of the station. That was the first service type of chute I had ever worn and I experienced the unique feeling of not caring particularly whether the ship held together during the tests or not. I put that Canuck through maneuvers which I would never have dreamed of doing with it before, yet with the confidence of absolute safety.
The advent of the service parachute was a tremendous step forward in the advance of aviation. It gave the test pilot a safe means of escape in most cases when all else had failed. It permitted formations to fly closer in comparative safety and in short allowed flyers to learn more about their planes than ever before. All this contributed to the ever-increasing knowledge of practical flying which makes possible the safety of present air commerce.
The airplane parachute has developed with the rapidity of the planes themselves. For years descents with chutes were made from balloons, but the first jump from a plane was by Capt. Berry at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1912. His parachute was a comparatively crude affair and of no use in an emergency. Ten years later, service type parachutes had been perfected which were strong enough to stand any strain the weight of a man’s body falling through the air could place on them, no matter how many thousand feet he fell before releasing the parachute from its pack; and today, fifteen years after Capt. Berry made the first jump from an airplane, every army and air mail pilot is required to wear a parachute.
The test flight over, we lashed a five gallon can of gasoline on each wing and followed along the Gulf of Mexico to Pascagoula, Mississippi. There was a small crack half-way down the back of the Canuck’s gasoline tank and when the gas no longer oozed out through the crack we knew that the tank was half empty. By carrying the two gas cans we obtained an extra hour’s cruising range, and when the main tank became low I would pour their contents into it through a short length of steam hose. In this way we expected to make longer flights between landing fields and partially make up for the time lost at Pensacola.
From Pascagoula we went to New Orleans, landing in the race track north of the city. Then to Lake Charles and from there to Rice Field at Houston, Texas. At Rice Field we installed three fuel tanks under the top wing and center section, which gave us twenty-seven gallons extra capacity, or, in addition to the five gallon cans lashed on the wings, a cruising range of about four hundred miles.