Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard--America's First Spaceman (20 page)

Abbot walked a few doors down from his office, entered the office of the admiral overseeing test pilot assignments, and had a word with him about Lieutenant Alan B. Shepard.

While waiting for a response during the slow-paced Mediterranean afternoons, Shepard would loiter in the ready room, sipping coffee and filling out some overdue paperwork. When he heard voices and spurts of laughter coming from the flight surgeon’s office down the hall, Shepard would smil
e, put down his papers, and walk over to chat with a decorated World War II hero, the man who would soon change his life.

Turner Caldwell, commander of Shepard’s air group (known as CAG, for “commander air group”), had become good friends with the
FDR
’s flight surgeon, who had also been a carrier pilot during World War II. Caldwell often walked down from his office to sit with the doctor and swap stories of flying and fighting. Shepard loved to listen in on these conversations, especially when Caldwell spoke of the bright red Douglas Skystreak he had flown into the history books the previous year.

Lean, slight, and deceptively fearsome, Caldwell had been a carrier pilot in the South Pacific, commanding one of the Navy’s first night flying squadrons. He once led eleven planes, all dangerously low on fuel, away from battle and to safety when their aircraft carrier was damaged too severely to let them land. After the war, Caldwell was selected to fly the Navy’s first experimental jets, which were then the fastest machines known to humankind. On August 20, 1947, he took off in the nail-polish-red, futuristic-looking Skystreak—he called it the “crimson test tube”—and ripped acr
oss a 3 km course at the salt flats of Muroc, California (later named Edwards Air Force Base). Caldwell, his body shaking like a loose piston inside the cockpit, pushed the jet to the brink of the speed of sound—640.663 miles an hour. It was the fastest any human had ever traveled, and Caldwell’s photograph appeared on the front page of newspapers across the country. Five days later, though, the record was broken, and two months after that Chuck Yeager took his X-1 rocket plane to 700 miles an hour, becoming the first to break the sound barrier. But Caldwell’s fame inside the Navy didn’t diminish. H
e rose to become one of the most respected and influential aviator-mentors.

Using the slow pace of the
FDR
cruise to his advantage, Shepard spent every free moment he could at Caldwell’s side, peppering him with questions about night flying, the Douglas Skystreak, and the other jets he had flown. Caldwell, pat
ient and relaxed, spent many an afternoon folded in a seat with Alan Shepard figuratively at his knee. Such informal connections, Shepard found, could mean a lot in the insular naval world.

After serving as Shepard’s air group commander, Caldwell was promoted to new duties at the Pentagon in early 1949 (ironically, his successor was killed in a Corsair crash immediately after taking off from an aircraft carrier). Shepard, meanwhile, was dispatched to another carrier, the USS
Midway,
for a few weeks on a cold-weather flying mission. Wearing a thick insulated suit that made movement and flying difficult, Shepard conducted flight experiments intended to pave the way for the Navy’s new specialty “all-weather” squadrons.

When that brief tour ended, he was scheduled to return to the states for shore duty—most Navy pilots, after their first carrier tour, served some time in an office. Shepard’s peers must have gasped when they heard he was headed not for shore duty but to the place they all wanted to be: the hammered-flat waterfront known as Pax.

6

Shepard should be court-martialed

The United States Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River Naval Air Station—known fleetwide as Pax River, or just Pax—was created to test the new jets the Navy had begun phasing into its fleet of aircraft in 1949. At the time an intense competition for superiority in the air had developed between the Navy and the coltish new Air Force, which was also testing the world’s latest and fastest jets.

To edge ahead of the Air Force, the Navy had circulated “aviation plan 65” in 1948, which called for the best naval aviators—those displaying “outstanding flying proficiency”—to be pulled from fleet duty and assigned to Pax River.

Turner Caldwell told his superiors that Alan Shepard was one of the best, and when Caldwell spoke, people listened. Doc Abbot also recommended Shepard, who in mid-1950 was selected from 150 nominees to join two dozen other exemplary flyers in the next class—class number five—at the Navy’s new Test Pilot School. It was more than a sweet assignment for a junior officer, it was unprecedented. At twenty-six, he was—once again— the youngest pilot in his class. But this time
his youth was nothing to be sheepish about. It was a badge of honor and his biggest break so far.

For a first-tour pilot to leapfrog his peers and reach the pinnacle of naval aviation required more than luck and skill. It required the kind of help Shepard got from Doc Abbot and Turner Caldwell. Other aviators grumbled that Shepard wasn’t a better pilot, just better connected. Indeed, Shepard admitted that he “may not have extra talent.” He had learned that an aggressive pursuit of his goals required him to rely heavily on helpers, mentors, and saviors. He would cultivate such men throughout his career. Just like the upperclassmen who “saved his bucket” when he got in troub
le at the academy, he gravitated toward such men—because he admired them
and
because they could help him. And in the near future one such mentor-savior would save Shepard’s career.

Shepard’s transfer to Pax in the summer of 1950 coincided with the first shots of the Korean War, which would soon pull many of his Navy peers into battle.

At the end of World War II, the United States had helped cleave Korea in half—an effort to keep the Soviet-backed northern half of the peninsula separate from the U.S.-occupied south. Two separate nations, North and South Korea, were created in 1948, but two years later North Korean troops invaded across the 38th parallel, and the United States—largely due to its commitment to contain communism—joined the fighting.

His transfer to Pax River was both a geographic and psychological divergence from the rest of the Navy. For Shepard, this was good and bad, because while he was headed to an aviators’ mecca, some of his Korea-bound peers—such as John Glenn—would soon make names for themselves as heroic combat aviators waging jet-powered aerial battles against
Soviet and Korean MiGs. But Shepard’s role as a test pilot was also an integral one in the greater struggle that came to be known as the cold war.

“Pax River,” on the shores of Chesapeake Bay in southern Maryland was, like Corpus Christi, a sandy, scrubby waterfront community turned vibrant by the influx of Navy hotshots. There wasn’t much of a town—just a grocery store, a florist, a couple of churches, and a grungy roadside watering hole called the Roost, where Shepard “drank cheap booze . . . and almost ended up in jail.” The summers were unbearably hot and muggy. Swarms of fat mosquitoes chased people inside at night.

As one pilot put it, “There wasn’t much to do in the lowlands of southern Maryland—except fly, and drink. Otherwise, it was a miserable place.”

But the flying . . . the flying was unlike anything Shepard had dreamed of.

After an intensive five months of classroom instruction, during which Shepard’s head was crammed with two years’ worth of technical training in trigonometry, physics, aerodynamics, and more, he was selected to continue working at Pax River for another two years. Assigned to the prestigious tactical test division, he began flying more often, at faster speeds, and at higher altitudes than ever. On the
FDR
he’d sometimes gone several days without a single hop. Now he was sometimes flying five different planes—most of them unproven experimental models— on the
same day.

By 1950 most of those planes were jets. Fast, complex, imperfect pieces of machinery, these were some of the most complicated mechanical concoctions humanity had ever produced. They allowed humans to travel one, two, and then three times the speed of sound. But they also leaked oil, creaked and groaned, spontaneously exploded, mysteriously spun out at high altitudes, and crashed without warning.

Often there was no time to learn the intricacies of each new plane. With the manufacturers constantly making modifications, the handbooks were often outdated. Shepard usually got a quick rundown of the jet’s quirks from another pilot, maybe a brief assessment like “she flies real easy.” Then he’d take off and learn the rest in the air.

“Training was very informal, to put it politely,” another early Navy jet pilot said. And sometimes that informality cost lives. Three months before Shepard’s arrival, two test pilots and two crewmen were killed in an experimental twin-engine Neptune patrol plane. At the time, Pax officials were becoming nervous about the occasional crashes and the many near misses; they raised the requirements for new test pilots (only those with instrument flying experience were accepted) and proposed expanding the classroom and training portion of each Pax tour from five months to eight.

Still, it was considered amateurish if a pilot needed a lesson or asked too many questions before flying any given plane. Such was the ethos of this boys’ club, where a man’s stock soared with each rejection of death. Shepard’s commander when he arrived at Pax, John Hyland, had gained fame during an air show for Navy dignitaries in which an osprey flew into his jet’s tail, forcing him to eject at five hundred or so miles an hour. In the days before automatic ejection seats, this required him to pop open the canopy and allow himself to be sucked from the cockpit. Just barely avoi
ding slamming into the tail, Hyland pulled open his parachute and plunged deep into Chesapeake Bay. A sea plane rescued him and delivered him to Pax. Besides a sore arm, his only injury was a bruised knee, which he banged on the bumper of an ambulance waiting for him on the tarmac. Hyland returned to the air show, took the microphone, and apologized to the VIPs for not bringing back the parachute’s D-ring handle as a souvenir.

The plane Hyland had been flying was an F2H “Banshee,”
which in time became Shepard’s specialty, the only jet he considered a worthy successor to his Corsair.

The Banshee was a twin-engine, straight-wing jet fighter with twice the power of the Navy’s first jet fighter, the FH-1 Phantom. The Banshee carried bombs, rockets, and cannons, could fly in rough weather, and could reach 586 miles an hour, just a hair shy of supersonic. McDonnell Aircraft built 895 of them, and the Banshee helped establish McDonnell as the rising star in the competitive aircraft manufacturing industry.

Shepard also regularly flew an alphabet soup of other jets—the F9F, F3D, F86, and so on, long, sleek, silvery tubes capable of maneuvers he could only dream of executing in his old Corsair. His job at Pax was to push each plane a little further each day. The tests, as he’d note in his log book, included airspeed calibration, stability and control, climb tests, buffet evaluations, and aerobatics. The goal was to get right up next to a “critical area”—that is, the point at which the plane might explode, spin, lose control, or stall—and then write up a report on the plane’s limits. Once he fou
nd the outer limits, he’d go out the next day and push the envelope a little further.

Shepard once took to the sky in a Banshee carrying full external fuel tanks—extra tanks attached to the jet for long-distance flying. He wanted to see if the tanks could withstand a high-speed roll. They couldn’t. As he began twirling his Banshee, the bolted-on tanks broke from the jet’s wings and blew two craters in a farmer’s field, while Shepard managed to bring the damaged and wobbling jet back to Pax intact. “He could fly anything,” one colleague said.

One of Shepard’s projects was to fly all over the United States to measure the contrail levels of various jets at various locations. Contrails are the vapor trails that snake behind jets. The Navy wanted to know at what altitudes the contrails of its planes were visible so that, in wartime, they could fly ab
ove that level and thereby avoid antiaircraft fire. Shepard spent many happy hours flying forty thousand feet above major American cities.

And when he returned to Pax, he’d usually swoop down over the brick rancher he and Louise had built on the Patuxent River and give her a supersonic heads-up that he was on his way home. Some days these flat-hats reached as low as a hundred feet. His commander told him to knock it off, though, when the manager of a local turkey farm began complaining that Shepard’s low, high-speed passes were freaking out his turkeys.

Shepard would soon take the art of flat-hatting—the earth-hugging feat he’d been introduced to at Corpus Christi but had yet to fully explore—to dangerous new levels. But at first he earned a reputation for an analytical mind, a mind that was constantly busy with questions of aerodynamics and engineering. He didn’t often show this egghead side of himself, but those closest to him realized that he never performed a test or maneuver (or, later, an illicit stunt) until he was convinced it wouldn’t kill him.

Nor was he afraid to sit at his desk and type out a lengthy, detailed, and highly critical report on one of his test planes. Shepard knew his job was to wring out a jet’s imperfections and to prevent imperfect jets from being used by the Navy. He spent long hours with Pax River’s engineers, discussing the most minuscule idiosyncrasies of a jet. “If it sucked, he’d say so,” one of Shepard’s commanders recalled. Another commander said Shepard “turned in some of the best reports we had.”

Shepard’s attention to detail eventually established him as one of Pax River’s most conscientious and hardworking pilots, and word of his expertise began to spread. One day an officer named James Stockdale (who would later spend seven years in a POW camp and become a vice presidential candidate) needed a pilot to perform a series of complicated ascents to high altitudes for a study on accelerated climbs. He chose Shepard not for his flamboyance but for his technical ability and precision.

Shepard tried to bring that same level of precision to his hobbies, too. He took up waterskiing and progressed quickly from two skis to slalom. With a friend, he built a ramp on the Patuxent River so that they could take turns jumping. Then he began trying to ski barefoot. Friends began to wonder if he was good at everything he did, this hipster with the gorgeous wife, the adorable kids (he and Louise had had a second daughter, Julie, in 1951), the sports car—and the world by the balls.

By that time Shepard already had a strong sense that he could “roll a plane a little better than the next guy,” as he put it. But as his luck held out and his superiors began entrusting him with riskier and more complicated assignments, he began to become more deeply convinced that he might be a little better than the rest. He knew deep down that he didn’t have more raw talent than some of the others, though he would never have admitted such a thing. He did, however, believe he worked harder and paid closer attention to the details of flying perfect tests. He began to push himself harder, a
nd the goal was always perfection, to show the bosses and his peers that he, in his own words, could “fly the best test flight that anybody had ever flown.”

But as soon as he learned to fly perfectly, the power of it seemed to supercharge his already swelling ego, and he began to experiment with flying recklessly, as if straightforward, glitz-free missions were now beneath him, as if he couldn’t help but indulge his dark side. His antics would take him to the brink of a premature end to his career.

When construction workers completed the first span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which connected Maryland’s mainland to its Eastern Shore across a narrow stretch of the bay, Shepard couldn’t resist. A couple of his colleagues had already flown under the half-built bridge. Shepard did them one better and looped the span—he flew his Banshee under it, over the top
, and then back under again. John Hyland, head of Pax River’s tactical test division, got wind of the stunt and called Shepard into his office. Hyland admired Shepard’s skill and his bravura. But he couldn’t condone such flights or every yahoo in a Navy jet would try it. He gave Shepard a stern lecture about the dangers of flat-hatting but decided not to report the incident to the higher-ups.