"Damn .Fool's Job"

Blond, curly-headed James R. Collins was sitting around the restaurant at Roosevelt Field Hotel with other unemployed pilots, smoking, sipping coffee, jesting casually about his profession. Since 1929 when he quit as chief test pilot for Curtiss, he had been a free-lance specialist on power dives.

"It's a damn fool's job," remarked "Jimmy" Collins, "but it's easy money."

It paid him $1,500 per job, but jobs were scarce and, at 31, he had a wife and two children to support. They had been on his father-in-law's farm in Oklahoma for months because he lacked money to feed them. It occurred to him that some of the yarns he swapped with fellow pilots might make good reading. He had always been interested in writing, had conducted a lively correspondence with George Bernard Shaw. He decided to write an article about how it feels to be a test-pilot.

He called it "Return to Earth," sent it to the Saturday Evening Post, was paid $500 for it, saw it published in February. Excerpts:

"... I had to pull out of a 10,000-ft. dive hard enough to push the g (gravity) reading up to nine, and pull me down into my seat with a force equal to nine times my own weight, or 1,350 Ib. . . . I took off and went up to 15,000 ft. and stuck her down to 300 m.p.h. I horsed back on the stick and watched the accelerometer. Up she went, and down into my seat I went. Centrifugal force, like some huge invisible monster, pushed my head down into my shoulders and squashed me into that seat so that my backbone bent and I groaned with the force of it. it drained the blood from my head and started to blind me. I watched the accelerometer through a deepening haze. . . . I was blind as a bat. I was dizzy as a coot. I looked out at my wings on both sides. I couldn't see them. I couldn't see anything. ... I could feel my guts being sucked down as I fought for sight and consciousness. . . . My eyes felt like somebody had taken them out and played with them and put them back in again. . . ."

Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson (New York Daily News), longtime aviation enthusiast, read "Return to Earth," thought it showed writing ability, decided it was a shame that such a fine young man must risk his life to feed his family. He wired Author Collins, offered him a $100-per-week job as a newspaper columnist, writing about aviation.

Pilot Collins accepted promptly, was soon put to work turning out a column, "Flying Stories," which the Daily News published weekdays, syndicated following its initial appearance last month.

Settling down to the security of a newspaper career, Pilot Collins brought his wife and children east fortnight ago, installed them in a Long Island apartment, decided to give up test-piloting for good just as soon as he cleaned up his contract with Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. to test a new Navy fighter.

One day last week he went out to the Grumman factory at Farmingdale, L. I., climbed into the stubby little biplane, put it through a series of terminal velocity tests. Because it was his last testing job, and because it was his son's second birthday, his heart was high. His sister, whom he had not seen in years, was on the ground watching his farewell to test-flying.

Finally he was ready for the tenth and last dive. He climbed to 10,000 ft., leveled off, jammed the stick forward. How a test pilot feels in that final dive earthward "Jimmy" Collins had described in his Satevepost article:

"... I had one more to go. I hated that one more. Everything had been so all right so far, and I hated to think that something might happen in that last dive. I thought of the wife and kids as I climbed for altitude. It was a swell day. I checked everything carefully. I rolled over into the dive and started down. I caught a glimpse of the blue earth far beneath, so remote. . . ."

All those on the blue earth last week could see of Pilot Collins was a whizzing speck, shooting headlong down out of the sky. The speck got bigger. Suddenly a wing fluttered loose from his plane and drifted away. Then the whole ship seemed to break up in midair. The motor tore out, plunged into the middle of a street. The wing landed in a field half a mile away. Spinning wildly, the fuselage fell among the tombstones of Pinelawn Cemetery.

Some boys ran to the wreckage, picked up Pilot Collins. He was smiling feebly. "Pull me out, boys," he gasped, "I'm all through." Someone wiped the blood from his face with a handkerchief. "Never mind that," he whispered. "I'm done." They lifted him out of the debris and laid him on the grass to die. Soon the photographers arrived.

Few test pilots are famed and few live long enough to get rich on their fat earnings. Fortnight ago Pilot Collins was asked to name offhand the crack U. S. test pilots. His list:

No. 1: Eddie Allen, longtime test pilot for Fokker, Lockheed, Douglas, Northrop and until last week chief test pilot for Chance Vought Corp., East Hartford, Conn. Described by Collins as "the best test pilot in the country," Allen is also a noted aviation engineer and writer on technical subjects. Last week General Manager Edward Vernon Rickenbacker announced his appointment as chief engineer of Eastern Air Lines.

(Ex-No. 1: Bert Acosta, onetime [1923-25] chief test pilot for Curtiss-Wright, famed as "the bad boy of aviation." Frequently in official bad graces because of intoxication and stunting, Acosta was finally grounded in 1929. Since then he has been mostly jobless. Fellow pilots still rate him top.)

No. 2: Vance Breese, test pilot for Douglas, Northrop, president of Aviation Express Co., oldtime airmail pilot.

No. 3: Bill Croswell, chief test pilot for Curtiss since 1929 when he succeeded Jimmy Collins.

No. 4: Lee Gehlbach, test pilot for Great Lakes Aircraft Corp., well-known racing pilot. Collins rated him "one of the ablest in the field."

Power dives involve terrific physical strain, frequently cause ruptured intestines, broken blood vessels in the brain. To protect themselves during the "pullout." some pilots wear a wide leather belt, others tense the muscles of the abdomen and neck by shouting.

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