Falling to Earth Read online

  I wanted to go back to Michigan because they had a course specifically for air force officers, with a focus on guided missiles. The course was quite specific to what the air force needed at the time. Ballistic missiles were becoming crucial to our national defense, and rocket airplanes were being built that could reach the edge of space. This was clearly the wave of the future, and I could see that it was better to be ahead of the wave than behind it. Most people in the class went on to work with ballistic missiles, but other pilots like me hoped to go into high-performance flight work. I wanted to learn as much as I could about subjects like control systems, instrumentation, and rocket propulsion. We did a lot of space-related work, which was important for both ballistic missiles and manned spaceflight careers. We also studied a great deal about trajectory analysis, orbital mechanics, and rocket propulsion. I didn’t plan to become an astronaut, but nevertheless I learned much of what I’d need for the job.

  I also thought about my air force career beyond being a pilot. Any good air force officer doesn’t obsess about flying. The air force is a management organization, and I looked forward to steady progression through the ranks. At some point that would mean I’d have to leave much of the flying to those under me, and I wanted to learn the necessary management skills.

  Once in Michigan, we rented a house only thirty miles from my parents’ home, which was great. Although I’d been happy to leave, I had still missed my family and it was good to be close again. For Pam and the girls, however, it was the same sad story. On the whole, going back to college was a huge mistake. I was busier than ever, and it meant even less time with my growing family. When one parent is away all the time, the other parent has a tough job. If that parent doesn’t complain, nothing changes. If the parent does complain, however subtly, the children will pick up on that feeling. The only way to ease that tension would have been for me to cut back on a career that was advancing rapidly, and I didn’t want to do it.

  With Pam and our daughters Merrill (left) and Alison, in Michigan in 1962

  I had so little home life because I was not just studying: I was also the air force operations officer for all of the other pilots at the college. In my two and a half years there, I had to give around thirty students their check rides, instrument training, and schedule their flying time. Add to those responsibilities studying for master of science degrees in aeronautical, astronautical, and instrumentation engineering, and it is little wonder that I was so preoccupied.

  Meanwhile, I looked ahead. I discussed my next move with two other pilots studying at the college. Jay Hanks was the head of academics at the test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and Bob Buchanan was the deputy commandant. I spent a lot of time with the two of them, and the more I learned about their work, the more I realized that test pilot school was a natural career path for me. It was the top of the ladder for all active aviators. I’d have a chance to further understand the airplanes already in use in the air force, while testing aircraft not yet in service. This experience would put me ahead of the curve, and position me for even higher-ranked air force positions.

  My hard work in Michigan paid off academically, and by 1963 I was all set to graduate from college. Bob and Jay had both strongly encouraged me to apply for the next test pilot school class. So I did, and hoped that such highly placed backers would ensure I’d soon be in California, testing the newest and hottest jet fighters. Yet a couple of months later I read an announcement listing the class members starting at Edwards that year. My name was not on it. I could have been upset, but instead I remained philosophical. Forget about it, I told myself, you just didn’t make the cut.

  About a week later, the secretary of the air force called me. Had I seen the list of people selected for Edwards, he asked, and had I noticed I was not on it? Yes, I replied, wondering where this call was going. To my surprise, he told me the air force had deliberately taken my name off the list. They had an exchange program with the Royal Air Force over in England and had decided to send me there instead. The exchange program had never been a great success because the American pilots had been unable to meet the academic standards the British required. My superiors had looked at my records, seen that I had a solid academic background, and thought I’d be a perfect fit. It sounded like a great opportunity.

  I had a six-month wait before the assignment in England began. Talking it over with some air force advisors, they thought that it would be helpful for me to go through an instrument pilot instruction course while I waited. Flying in England would mean bad weather. Plus the British did not use radar; they relied on directional radio beams to pinpoint aircraft positions. I would have little help when judging my position in the sky. So at Randolph Air Force Base, close to San Antonio, Texas, I spent a few months practicing flight using only instruments. After a couple of years living in one place, my family was leading a nomadic life once again.

  Before we left for England, I heard that NASA was accepting applications from jet pilots to become astronauts. It sounded like a good way to enhance my career, so I sent in my paperwork. I figured that I had nothing to lose. While I still wasn’t a test pilot, I had accumulated a lot of flying time and some good reports from my superiors. The answer I received back said, essentially, that timing was not in my favor. They wanted to talk to me, but I was going on an exchange program and they couldn’t interfere with my orders. I figured I would be in England for at least three years, and older than NASA’s age requirements by the time I returned. So, forget it, I thought: it just wasn’t in the cards for me to become an astronaut.

  Pam and I decided that all four of us would live in England while I attended the Empire Test Pilot School at Farnborough, in the south of the country. We also decided that if we were going to spend time in a foreign nation, we would not hide in an American compound and pretend that we were still at home. Since I was on exchange to the RAF, I would live as an RAF officer. The whole point of the program was to create good connections between the two nations, and living in the English community, rather than segregating ourselves like most American pilots, seemed like the best way to do it.

  When we first arrived in England in a military aircraft, a very helpful and friendly air force officer from Oklahoma met me at the bottom of the steps. His name was Bill Pogue, and he was also in the exchange program. Bill had been asked to welcome us to England and make sure we got to our destination in one piece. After a brief chat where he shared some helpful tips about the school, Bill put us in a car. That was the last I saw of him until a couple of years later, when he turned up again at the astronaut selection physical tests.

  Some of the officers who had gone over earlier paid hundreds of dollars a month in rent to live in an American enclosure, a huge amount of money back then. Instead of living with Americans, I asked my RAF counterpart who made my moving arrangements to find us an English house to rent. He located a beautiful five-bedroom bungalow in Crookham Village, with a large vegetable garden in the back. It was quite close to the air base at Farnborough, in the pleasant rural county of Hampshire, and cost about a fifth of the rent for the American compound. In such beautiful surroundings, I no longer felt sad about missing out on an Edwards assignment in the dusty California desert.

  My family became completely immersed in the British way of life. We went weeks at a time without seeing another American except in my classes. Our two daughters started school, and because they were still so young, they picked up English accents amazingly fast. To our amusement, Pam and I found that we now had two children who sounded like they were born and raised in Hampshire.

  It was a fascinating time to be in England. In 1964, after years of austerity following World War II, the country was coming to life again. You could feel it in the music; the Beatles were really making a big splash. Every Friday night we would have a party at the officers’ club. They’d pack a hundred people into a tiny room, play Beatles records, and we’d party all night long. I still consider my British friends to be the bes
t I ever had.

  Even though we lived in England, we threw a Fourth of July celebration at my house. A little insensitive, perhaps; after all, the British lost that war. However, I wanted to show my English colleagues how we Americans could throw a good party. My whole class came over to my home, as well as all the instructors. We had cold American bottled beer, hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato salad exactly as we would have served it in the States. At that time in England, these dishes were pretty exotic. Although the English pilots insisted on calling us “colonials” that day, they had a great time. The commandant of the school even showed up, in a full dress uniform with white gloves. He probably regretted that when he began to run around, playing a game where we threw raw eggs over the bungalow while others tried to catch them on the other side. Those white gloves didn’t stay clean for long.

  The British taught test flying very differently than Americans. We had to do everything by hand; there were no electronic recording devices. Back in the States, a big control room recorded the test data. In England, I measured data myself, took my own notes in the air, and wrote my own reports.

  Some may have thought the American, more high-tech approach was better, but I didn’t. I had to really think about what I was doing while learning to test fly in England, rather than rely on the ground to record everything for me. Perhaps because I enjoyed a hands-on relationship with cars and other mechanical things, I found this approach far more interesting. A handheld gauge told me precisely how much force I exerted on the stick when I pulled it, and I would use this in the air together with a tape measure and a notebook while carefully testing the aircraft. I could directly measure what happened whenever I made the slightest adjustment to the airplane. It sounds old-fashioned, for a pilot to be fiddling with a handheld force gauge while flying a jet, but by personally reading off the forces I placed on the airplane, I felt even closer to the machine. It was incredibly valuable, because I learned what it took to make each aircraft perform at its best.

  I don’t recall any of my American colleagues looking down their noses at this more direct testing method. In fact, we all really appreciated our time in England because, if we had been in the United States, we would only have been allowed to fly two different types of aircraft, maximum. At Farnborough, I flew at least thirteen varieties, from a tiny de Havilland Chipmunk propeller airplane all the way up to a Vickers Viscount airliner that could seat around fifty passengers. We flew a wonderful diversity of unique aircraft with intriguing names like Provost, Devon, Dove, Canberra, and Skyhawk. We even flew gliders: it was pilot heaven. The British philosophy was that we were pilots, so we should be able to fly anything. It was quite different from the American mindset of specializing in one kind of fighter jet.

  Most of the time, we flew Hawker Hunters or Gloster Meteors. The Meteor was the first operational British jet fighter and a potentially deadly airplane—not only for the enemy, but also for the pilot. It was tricky to fly, and in certain flight conditions the Meteor would become unstable and almost uncontrollable. The Hawker Hunter, on the other hand, was one of the best airplanes I ever flew. It was smooth, comfortable, easy to fly, yet very powerful. I loved to spin upside down and watch the world rotate around me. I fell in love with that airplane, and flew as many of my test exercises in it as I could.

  At Farnborough we’d start the day with academic sessions, then have lunch, often with a pint of beer, before we suited up and went flying. There were some British flying practices that weren’t necessarily better—in fact, I am sure they don’t do them anymore—and drinking before flying was certainly one of them. But that beer accompanied some of the most wonderful lunches I ever had in the military. I learned to love eating fish while I was in England, and I have never had Dover sole as good as I had at Farnborough. We’d finish up the lunch with a traditional English brandy-soaked trifle dessert with custard, empty our beer glasses, and head down to the operations area to go flying. Once there, we had one more lunchtime treat before we’d take to the air. The cleaning lady at the flight line office always had a big mug of hot tea ready for us. It was the strongest tea I ever tasted: you could probably have stood a spoon up in it. It was the perfect refreshment before a long flight and probably also helped counter any bad effects of the lunchtime alcohol.

  Farnborough was my first time living overseas, and I loved it. I didn’t have to learn a new language, which made adapting easier. As part of the training, we students traveled all over the island. We would pile into the Viscount and head off to airplane manufacturers in towns like Blackpool and Edinburgh. We’d visit anywhere and anyone related to aviation. I also found time to take Pam and the kids on some great trips to places like Bristol, Lancaster, the beautiful castles of north Wales, and the lovely city of Chester with its impressive Roman and medieval city walls and buildings. Learning how to drive on the left was intriguing enough. But even the roads were different. Some followed the path of old Roman highways, which would cut across the landscape in a straight line. Others, English-style roads, wound around the contours of hills, so there were few rises and dips to negotiate.

  To get around, I bought a Volkswagen Beetle. Like all cars in England, it was a stick shift. I drove to the store at South Ruislip Air Station every week to buy groceries and also to do something a little extra: I was the unofficial supplier of liquor for my British colleagues. With coupons from the American Embassy I could get it at the air force store for a dollar a bottle. English ladies had a particular liking for straight shots of tequila, so I had to buy extra bottles every week.

  I soon realized, however, that Pam didn’t want to drive the car. In my haste, I had never asked what kind she would feel comfortable driving. When we finally talked about it, I learned that she was frightened to drive on the left-hand side of the road. She also didn’t want to learn how to change gears. So I compromised with her and traded the Beetle for an American Oldsmobile station wagon with an automatic transmission.

  It was only a little thing, but it symbolized our growing disconnection. I found it strange: it seemed that she did not want to join me and fully adapt to British life. In fact, she felt a little intimidated by life in England. While I tried to do everything I could to make her comfortable, I increasingly felt I was alone in my interests and ambitions. The last thing I wanted to do was give up exciting opportunities and settle for comfort and familiarity, but I felt I was subtly being asked to do just that.

  I graduated second in my class at Farnborough. Not long before I did, the class from the test pilot school at Edwards came over for a visit. Among them was Chuck Yeager, a legend in the test piloting world because he was the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. Now, almost two decades later, he was the commandant of the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards, which trained pilots and engineers to test new and experimental airplanes. I didn’t know him personally at that time, but I had been told a lot about him. One of the stories was that he didn’t like pilots with a lot of education. Like a lot of World War II veterans, he’d never been to college himself. So it was a surprise when, almost as soon as Chuck stepped off the airplane, he tracked me down, introduced himself, and said that he needed me to come back and teach at his school.

  It was a flattering offer, but I had to tell him that I didn’t know if I could accept: I was in a formal three-year exchange program. I was scheduled to leave soon for another British flight test center, RAE Bedford, where the British were developing vertical lift aircraft. I would test vertical takeoff maneuvers and equipment. I was looking forward to this two-year assignment, because they had some really interesting and innovative testing going on.

  I could tell that Chuck wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He spoke with the commandant of the test pilot school, who in turn discussed it with the British defense ministry. They approved my return to the States, but the U.S. Air Force was still nervous about accepting. They didn’t want to do anything that might upset an international exchange program. I believe the discussion w
ent all the way up to the secretary of the air force before it was agreed that I would return to the States. In the meantime, I had graduated from the school, and no one had any idea where to assign me.

  While the decision was made, I marked time at the exchange office of the American Embassy in the center of London. I was placed in a small rented office above a Wimpy’s hamburger café, a couple of blocks from the embassy. It was frustrating: I wanted to keep flying, but instead I was stuck at a desk. There wasn’t much for me to do except for some nonsense paperwork, so I walked around and enjoyed London instead. It was Christmas of 1964, and the big stores gleamed with colored lights. It was the last calm moment in my career for a very long time.

  I was commuting into London from Crookham Village every weekday by train. One morning, I spotted a familiar face at the station: Robbie Robinson. He was a British pilot who had been on exchange duty in the United States doing top-secret work before becoming an instructor at Farnborough. Years later, it was revealed that he’d flown highly classified missions in U2 spy planes over the Soviet Union’s rocket testing sites, which the British officially denied at the time. I always had a lot of fun with him, as we got along so well; he had a great sense of humor. This morning would prove no exception.

  Robbie sidled up to me, we exchanged glances, and he whispered, “Follow my lead.” I guessed he had a prank in mind, so we entered the same rail compartment and pretended not to know each other. It seemed that no one ever talked on the train; they preferred to bury their faces in a newspaper. Robbie sat and read his paper, too. As the train started to move, he began to mutter to himself about the “damn Americans,” as if a story in the paper had angered him.