Hank Darmstadter had conquered his airsickness. He wasn’t sure whether this was because he had grown accustomed to the world turning at crazy angles or to being upside down, or because he had simply stopped eating when he knew that he was going to be flying.
He had been given his wings and his second lieutenant’s gold bar and sent to advanced training. Not in P-51s or P-38s or B-17s or B-24s, but in C-45s. The C-45 was a small, twin-engine aircraft built by Beech. It had several missions in the Army Air Corps, none of them connected directly with bringing aerial warfare to the enemy. It was used as a small passenger transport, and it was used as a flying classroom to train navigators and bombardiers.
Two weeks before Hank Darmstadter was to graduate from advanced training in the C-45 aircraft, he had, flying solo, dumped one. He had lost the right engine on takeoff, and if he had had one hundred feet less altitude, he would have gone into the ground. But the hundred feet made the difference, and he had been able to stand it on its wing and make a 360-degree turn and get it back onto the runway, downwind and with the wheels up, just as the second engine cut out.
Thirty seconds after he had scrambled out the small door in the fuselage, there had been a dull rumble, and then a larger explosion as the fuel tanks ignited and then exploded.
When he appeared before that elimination board, they had discussed the accident and Darmstadter, 2nd It. H.” as if he were not there. In the opinion of one of his examiners, if he was that far along in the course, he should have known and demonstrated the proper procedure to follow in the case of engine failure on takeoff. And the proper procedure was not to make a dangerous 360 and land the wrong way on the runway as Darmstadter had done, but to make the proper adjustments for flight on one engine, then to circle the field and gain sufficient altitude to make a proper approach (that is, from the other direction, into the wind).
Another of his examiners, to Darmstadter’s considerable surprise, had taken the position that since no one was with him in the cockpit, they didn’t know what had happened, and that it wasn’t really fair to assume that he had done what he had done from paniG; that he was entitled to the benefit of the doubt; and that Darmstadter’s best judgment had been to do what he had done.
There had been seven officer pilots on the elimination board. The vote-it was supposed to be secret, but the president of the board told him anyway–was four to three not to eliminate him. He would be permitted to graduate and to transition to Douglas C-47 aircraft.
The C-47–the Army Air Corps version of the Douglas DC-3 airliner–was supposed to be the most forgiving aircraft, save the Piper Cub, in the Army Air
Corps. Douglas was building them by the thousands, and each of them needed two pilots. They were used as personnel transports and cargo aircraft. Most of the C-47s being built would be used in support of airborne operations, both to carry paratroopers and to tow gliders.
Hank Darmstadter had understood that his glamorous service as an Air Corps pilot would be in the right–copilot’s–seat of a C-47 Gooney Bird. He would work the radios and the landing gear and the flaps, while a more skillful pilot would do the flying.
And that’s what he had done at first when he’d come to England. But then the system had caught up with him. He had received an automatic promotion to first lieutenant, based solely on the length of his service. It was the policy of the troop carrier wing commander that the pilot-in-command, whenever possible, be senior to the copilot. And Darmstadter had picked up enough hours, and enough landings and takeoffs as a copilot, to be qualified as an aircraft commander.
Ten days before, when his squadron had returned from a practice mission–in empty aircraft practicing low-level formation flight as required for the dropping of parachutists–the troop carrier wing commander had gathered the pilots in a maintenance hangar and told them Eighth Air Force was looking for twin-engine qualified pilots for a “classified mission involving great personal risk” and that those inclined to volunteer should see the adjutant.