[The following takes place during US Army Air Force flight school in the midst of World War II.]
Not all accidents were fatal, but some were, and none were comical except once when an air cadet pilot got lost in his formation on a black night. Others were also lost and trying to find the lead plane. “It was awful,” McGovern said. “People were scared to death.” So this one pilot saw a little white light ahead. He started flying toward it, thinking that was the light on the wing of the lead plane. After a couple of minutes, his co-pilot tapped him and said, “You’re going 400 miles per hour.” The AT-9 could only do 150 mph. The pilot realized that what he was doing was mistaking the light, which was in fact on the ground, as being from the lead plane, and he had his AT-9 in a sharp dive. He pulled back hard, figuring that would pull the plane up, but as McGovern said, “That’s not the way it works – if a plane is going down and you pull the nose up, the plane keeps mushing down for quite a ways, until it loses its downward motion.”
Exactly that happened. The plane hit the ground, a big pancake in a plowed field. But the pilot, thinking he had hit the lead plane, ordered the co-pilot to bail out. The co-pilot promptly did so only to discover that his jump from the wing to the ground was over in about three feet. He yelled to the pilot, “Don’t jump, I’m in a cornfield.” The pilots walked back to base. The next day a truck had to pull the plane out to a grassy spot where it could take off. That night, according to McGovern, “I’ve never seen a human being so mad or so scared” as the colonel in charge. He pulled the trainees into the briefing room – about 150 of them – and said, “I want you sons of bitches to turn around and look at the guy next to you, because you’re looking at the biggest asshole you’re ever going to see in your life – and so is he.” The colonel said he ought to wash the entire class out. He called it the worst class ever at Pampa. “There isn’t one of you that deserves to get your wings.”
Note:
It’s worth pointing out that, later in the book, the author points out that this very class later graduated and was called, by that same Colonel, perhaps the best graduating class they had ever had.
Source:
Ambrose, Stephen E. “Training.” The Wild Blue: The Crews of the B-24. Simon & Schuster, 2002. 72-3. Print.
Further Reading:
That had to be terrifying