I thought of the wife and kids as I climbed for altitude. It was a swell day. I checked everything carefully. I rolled over into the dive and started down. I caught a glimpse of the blue earth far beneath, so remote. Then to the instruments while I crouched and hated the mounting stress of the terrific speed. About mid-dive I saw something in front of my face. It took me a second to recognize it. It was the Very pistol, used for shooting flare signals at sea. It had come out of its holster at the right side of the cockpit and was floating around in space between my face and my knees. I grabbed it with my throttle hand and started to throw it over my left shoulder to get rid of it, but quickly decided that that wouldn’t be such a smart thing to do. A three or four hundred mile an hour slip stream was lurking just outside there. It would have grabbed that pistol and dashed it into the tail surfaces, and it would have been good-bye airplane. I fumbled it from one hand to the other and finally kept it in my throttle hand. I noticed that I had allowed the ship to nose up out of the dive ever so slightly during that wrestling match, and I spent the rest of the dive nosing it ever so slightly back in. That nose-back-in showed up as negative acceleration on the vee-gee recorder. And in addition to that, although I pulled out to nine and a half g on the accelerometer, something had gone wrong with it, because the pull-out turned out to be only seven and a half g on the vee-gee recorder.
The navy threw that dive out, so I still had one more to do. Still one more, and by then one more was a mental hazard difficult to overcome. I have a morbid imagination anyway. I knew that the motor and prop had taken a severe beating so far. Maybe one more would be just too much. Maybe something—something that had eluded inspection, perhaps—was just about ready to let go, and I was so damned near the finish. Besides, although I am not superstitious, the rejected dive made that last one the thirteenth.
They gave me a check for fifteen hundred dollars the next day and canceled my insurance. My old car wouldn’t have got as far as Oklahoma, and wasn’t big enough anyway, so I had to break a new one in on the way down. I was back with the family in good shape, but they still had to eat, and fifteen hundred dollars wouldn’t last forever, so I was looking for another job. I thought I had one coming up ... a diving job!
[COLLISION, ALMOST]
I took off from Newark with about a seven-thousand-foot ceiling after dark. The ceiling came down as I went farther and farther into the mountains toward Bellefonte, but it didn’t come down too much. I got to Sunbury, about fifty miles from Bellefonte, and started into the worst part of the mountains. Then I hit snow.
I went over the first big ridge on the blinkers, closely spaced red lights between beacons in bad spots. It was thick in the valley beyond, but I could just make out the beacon on the next ridge.
I flew up to it, couldn’t see the next beacon, went on past from that beacon as far as I dared, but couldn’t find the next beacon without losing that one. So I went back to it.
I made several excursions out toward the next beacon before I could find it without losing the one I had. Then I couldn’t find the next one.
I circled and circled about fifty feet over that beacon on the mountain top in the driving snow. I couldn’t go backward toward the last one. I couldn’t go forward toward the next. I was quite sure the next was the field beacon at Bellefonte, but I didn’t dare go out far enough to find it.