Read Online The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh by Winston Groom - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Winston Groom
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Southwest. By the time he reached the Arizona border he had been in the air close to fifteen hours and the monotonous drone of the engine was lulling him to sleep. Then, out of an otherwise clear sky, a light rain began to fall, which the prop wash threw over the top wing in a steady icy stream that dripped down the back of Doolittle’s neck, annoying him to the point that he stayed awake.
Late that afternoon he landed in San Diego on the Pacific, twenty-two hours and thirty minutes after he had taken off from Pablo Beach on the Atlantic, becoming the first person ever to cross the continental United States in less than a day. Accolades great and small issued from the national press and the popular new medium of radio.
This was Doolittle’s first brush with national fame. He received congratulatory letters not only from the chief of the Army Air Service but, more important to him, from General Billy Mitchell, whom he greatly admired. It also earned him his first Distinguished Flying Cross, for demonstrating “the possibility of moving Air Corps units to any portion of the United States in less than 24 hours.”
M EANWHILE, THE D OOLITTLES had started a family, beginning with James Jr., born October 2, 1920, then John, who came along June 29, 1922, both at the post hospital at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. When Joe wasn’t looking after the boys she had a Chinese cook teach her how to prepare Mexican food and acquired some odd pieces of furniture to make a home. In time, the Doolittles’ residence, humble as it was, routinely became a kind of center of gravity for the best and brightest on the posts where they were stationed. There was always food, drink, and laughter, and serious, intellectual conversations as well, and a warmth that grew out of lasting friendships formed amid the gray trials of army life.
Following a year of service as a test pilot and performer in aerobatic exhibitions, Doolittle took advantage of an army program to study for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the fall of 1923 he, Joe, and the two boys moved into an apartment near Cambridge. As a master’s thesis Doolittle planned to compute the aeronautical stresses and forces it would take to break up a plane in the air—with himself as guinea pig.
He took planes for test flights and pushed them to their outermost limits, diving at speeds often exceeding 200 miles per hour, inducing cracks in the structural frame and other components just short of having the plane come apart with him in it. It was an extremely dangerous way to find out a plane’s limitations, but the only way. Using delicate instruments he found, for instance, that the habit of some pilots to tighten the bracing wires running along the wings in fact promoted wing failure.
Doolittle also investigated pilot blackouts induced by these speeds and maneuvers. Again, flying alone, he used himself as a guinea pig. He found that any extended acceleration of 4.5 G § resulted in a complete loss of consciousness, and further he concluded that if such acceleration continued for more than ten to twelve seconds it would be fatal.
The thesis was such a success that a paper developed from it was translated into a dozen languages and circulated abroad, earning Doolittle international fame as well as his second Distinguished Flying Cross. He applied for, and was granted, the opportunity to study for his doctorate at MIT.
The subject of his study was the effect that wind velocity had on flying an airplane. Doolittle chose this as a theme because he knew experienced pilots held differing opinions about it, and he wrote the paper so as “to be understood by the average pilot.” But when he turned in a draft of his doctoral dissertation his advisers rejected it.
On further inquiry, Doolittle was told his paper wasn’t studious-enough looking, that it needed more mathematical calculations, graphs, charts, etc.; in other words, it
Late that afternoon he landed in San Diego on the Pacific, twenty-two hours and thirty minutes after he had taken off from Pablo Beach on the Atlantic, becoming the first person ever to cross the continental United States in less than a day. Accolades great and small issued from the national press and the popular new medium of radio.
This was Doolittle’s first brush with national fame. He received congratulatory letters not only from the chief of the Army Air Service but, more important to him, from General Billy Mitchell, whom he greatly admired. It also earned him his first Distinguished Flying Cross, for demonstrating “the possibility of moving Air Corps units to any portion of the United States in less than 24 hours.”
M EANWHILE, THE D OOLITTLES had started a family, beginning with James Jr., born October 2, 1920, then John, who came along June 29, 1922, both at the post hospital at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. When Joe wasn’t looking after the boys she had a Chinese cook teach her how to prepare Mexican food and acquired some odd pieces of furniture to make a home. In time, the Doolittles’ residence, humble as it was, routinely became a kind of center of gravity for the best and brightest on the posts where they were stationed. There was always food, drink, and laughter, and serious, intellectual conversations as well, and a warmth that grew out of lasting friendships formed amid the gray trials of army life.
Following a year of service as a test pilot and performer in aerobatic exhibitions, Doolittle took advantage of an army program to study for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the fall of 1923 he, Joe, and the two boys moved into an apartment near Cambridge. As a master’s thesis Doolittle planned to compute the aeronautical stresses and forces it would take to break up a plane in the air—with himself as guinea pig.
He took planes for test flights and pushed them to their outermost limits, diving at speeds often exceeding 200 miles per hour, inducing cracks in the structural frame and other components just short of having the plane come apart with him in it. It was an extremely dangerous way to find out a plane’s limitations, but the only way. Using delicate instruments he found, for instance, that the habit of some pilots to tighten the bracing wires running along the wings in fact promoted wing failure.
Doolittle also investigated pilot blackouts induced by these speeds and maneuvers. Again, flying alone, he used himself as a guinea pig. He found that any extended acceleration of 4.5 G § resulted in a complete loss of consciousness, and further he concluded that if such acceleration continued for more than ten to twelve seconds it would be fatal.
The thesis was such a success that a paper developed from it was translated into a dozen languages and circulated abroad, earning Doolittle international fame as well as his second Distinguished Flying Cross. He applied for, and was granted, the opportunity to study for his doctorate at MIT.
The subject of his study was the effect that wind velocity had on flying an airplane. Doolittle chose this as a theme because he knew experienced pilots held differing opinions about it, and he wrote the paper so as “to be understood by the average pilot.” But when he turned in a draft of his doctoral dissertation his advisers rejected it.
On further inquiry, Doolittle was told his paper wasn’t studious-enough looking, that it needed more mathematical calculations, graphs, charts, etc.; in other words, it
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