At 10:20, almost exactly two hours after they had taken off from Pensacola, they landed at Valdosta, Georgia, where the airport had a Navy fueling contract. They topped off the tanks, checked the weather again, and were airborne at 11:05. This time, Ed’s student flew Dick’s student’s wing.
They made Maxwell Field, the Army Air Corps base in Montgomery, Alabama, at ten minutes to one. The officers’ mess there closed at one, and they just made it in time to eat. It was five minutes to three before they got off the ground again, with Ed’s student again assuming the role of flight leader.
An hour out of Montgomery, when they were just about halfway between Maxwell Field and Brookley Field, the Army Air Corps base in Mobile, Alabama, Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed Bitter clapped the speaking tube over his mouth and shouted to his student that he had it.
The student pilot signified his understanding of and compliance with the order by holding both his hands above his head. Bitter pushed the stick forward, and the Stearinan, the wind screaming in the guy wires of the wing, dove for the ground.
Behind him, Dick Canidy took the controls from his student and dove in pursuit. For fifteen minutes, sometimes right on the deck, sometimes climbing to eight or nine thousand, they engaged in a mock dogfight, always moving south, paralleling their original course, toward The Lodge on The Plantation.
By prearrangement, once they spotted The Lodge, Dick Canidy would break off the dogfight and fly out of sight of Bitter’s aircraft. He would swoop down the Alabama River with his wheels ten feet off the water. That always served to disorient student pilots. Bitter, meanwhile, would go down on the deck, fifty feet above the pine tree tops, and buzz The Lodge. He would then roll the Steannan, while flashing over The Lodge at no more than a hundred feet, straighten it out, and then shout over the speaking tube to his student: “You’ve got it. Take us to Mobile.”
Out of sight of them Canidy would do much the same thing to his student, and they would each complete the fifty-mile flight to Mobile alone. Over coffee in the snack bar at Mobile, the students would be told the reasons for this exercise; then they would make the final, fifty-mile leg home to Pensacola.
Ed Bitter’s student was usually the most disoriented. Not only were mock dogfights proscribed, but buzzing houses was NAS Pensacola’s version of a mortal sin. Buzzing a three-story antebellum Mansion sitting alone in the middle of twentyfive thousand uninhabited acres (with apparent disregard not only for life and limb, but for what would happen to him when the occupants–obviously rich and important-complained to the Navy) usually upset the student pilot to the point where he could be sarcastically reminded that when one is lost, and all else fails, one might consider having a look at the compass.
Everything went according to plan until it was time to buzz The Lodge.
Ed almost had the Stearman on its back when the engine quit.
In the time it took the sweep second hand on his aviator’s chronometer to move two clicks, two seconds, his emotions shifted from near rapture to abject terror. It was one thing to have an engine quit in the middle of a roll when you had a couple of thousand feet under you to recover. You just fell through-and recovered.
He had no more than one hundred feet of air beneath him.
A body in motion tends to remain in motion. So there was sufficient momentum to just barely complete the roll. Now nearly disoriented himself, he looked hastily for someplace to put the Stearman on the deck. There was nothing in sight. He was, he realized, surprisingly calm, about to crash his airplane. There was nothing he could do but put it into the trees, and hope that the nose would not go into a tree trunk.
And then the engine spluttered and caught. Sonofabitch wasfuel-starved.
But there was full power again. He inched back on the stick and picked up a little altitude. He looked frantically around for The Plantation’s airstrip, and saw it behind him. Fighting down the urge to make a steep banking turn toward it, he made a safer, slower, nearly level turn to line up with the runway. He had no idea of the wind. He was going in right now, no matter what it was.