"Damn Fool's Job" (Cont'd)

One of the last things Test Pilot James H. ("Jimmy") Collins did before his final, fatal power dive was to list the crack U.S. test pilots. High on his list was Lee Gehlbach of Great Lakes Aircraft Corp., whom Collins rated "one of the ablest in the field" (TIME, April 1). Few weeks ago able Pilot Gehlbach announced he would take Jimmy Collins' risky place testing a new Navy fighter for Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. at Farmingdale, L. I.

What Pilot Collins thought of his profession was no secret. "It's a damn fool's job," he liked to say, "but it's easy money."

To such talk Pilot Gehlbach's answer is blunt and brief: "I'll fly anything, anytime, anywhere, for money, marbles or chalk."

His last job for Great Lakes was testing a new "torpedo type" plane designed for the Navy. Month ago he dived the wings off it over Ohio, jumped 8,000 ft. with his parachute. Last fortnight he went to work for Grumman at Farmingdale, still wearing bandages from the head injuries he received in bailing out. Early one morning he took the stubby X-737 up 25,000 ft., dived and stunted it for six hours while hundreds of spectators alternately cheered and held their breath. When he came down after the last dive he told observers he "wasn't unconscious once."

Last week he took the single-seater experimental fighter to the Navy's proving ground at Dahlgren, Va. for final acceptance tests. Carefully "beefed up" to withstand the terrific strain of power dives and pullouts, the ship was built to outperform and outfight any combat plane in existence. Gehlbach took it up 12,000 ft., kicked it over into a tight spin. The plane never came out of it.

"We saw Gehlbach wrestling with the control stick, vainly trying it at every conceivable position," Commander De Witt C. Ramsey, the Navy's official observer, told newsmen afterward. "Using an old pilot's trick, he even stood upright in the cockpit, hoping the wind pressure on his body would right the plane. Finally, at 2,000 ft., with the earth rushing at him 200 ft. a second, he bailed out and descended easily while the plane hurtled into a nearby pine tree."

Congratulated on his narrow escape, Pilot Gehlbach shrugged, joined Navy officials reviewing a motion picture of his flight. The Navy decided to do its future testing of difficult, dangerous X-737 in the new spinning-tunnel at the NACA laboratory, Langley Field, Va. (see p. 55).

A leader in his highly hazardous profession at 32, Lee Gehlbach became an aeronautical engineer because he was "a farmer's son who couldn't get used to getting up at 4 in the morning." Graduated from the University of Illinois in 1924, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, resigned five years later to become a free-lance pilot and consultant. Best known as a racing pilot, he won first place and $15,000 in the 5,541-mi. All-America Flying Derby of 1930, beating such famed speed merchants as the late Lowell Bayles and Jimmy Wedell.

He insists he really enjoys testing planes. Only protection he wears in power dives is a regulation safety belt. He never shouts while diving, unconvinced that it relieves the strain. Tall, slightly hunched, with brown hair and eyes, a ready smile, he makes his home in New York with his wife and son, lives well on his large earnings.

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