I Can Fly
My life-long involvement with things that fly.
©Copyright 1998, Carroll Williams all rights reserved.
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        "Boys, don't slam the door!"   Mother's plea fell on deaf ears. Six-year old Bob and three-year old Carroll leaped out of the house onto the front lawn.  "Mama, they are army planes," we yelled.  Some olive-drab biplanes flew slowly past.  "Look, you can see the men in them!  One of them is waving, he's waving!  He sees us."

        In 1937, my family lived on Fee Avenue in Melbourne, Florida.  Bob and I were typical boys.   We caught tadpoles in a little creek in the neighborhood, played tag with the neighborhood kids, and above all never missed an airplane passing over the town.  You could hear the sound of an airplane for miles before it came into view.  Whoever heard the sound first would yell "airplane."  Almost instantly the streets would fill with kids.  Everyone would wave wildly.  If we were lucky the pilot would see us and wave to us or rock the wings.

        The gleaming silver Eastern Air Lines DC-3 which passed over several times a week generated the most excitement.  The new Douglas transport evoked the cry of "airliner, airliner."  We tried to imagine the important people who could afford to travel this way.  They must all be rich, maybe they were even movie stars.

        In the fall of 1940, we moved to a house near the Melbourne airport.  The area was sparsely settled.  Bob and I tossed our balsa wood gliders into the air and watched them soar.  In the spring of 1941, our Dad bought each of us a large kite with an American flag design.  We flew our kites proudly until a voracious kite-eating tree devoured them both.

        My brother and I ranged farther a field when I was six.  We would leave the front yard and go to the airport.  There we watched the comings and goings of a small fleet of yellow Piper Cubs.  A single hangar sat at the edge of a grass runway.  We were on speaking terms with several instructors and student pilots.

        One Saturday afternoon a voice beside me said "Hey kid, you want to go for a ride in an airplane?"  I turned and looked into the face of a young man I had seen several times around the airport.

        "Yes", I shot back. "When?"

        "Right now."

        I climbed into the front seat of a yellow Piper J-3 Cub.  The young pilot reached across me and secured my lap belt.   "Just don't touch anything around you and everything will be o.k."   I grinned and shook my head in agreement.

        The pilot climbed into the back seat and belted in.  Another man stood in front of the airplane. "Contact," shouted my pilot.  "Contact," came the reply.  The man outside pulled on the wooden propeller.  The little four-cylinder engine coughed into life.

        My pilot pointed the airplane to the north and advanced the throttle.  The tail came up and we were off and climbing.  The ground fell away.  Suddenly I could see my whole neighborhood.  Below were the woods where we played.  Houses and cars began to look small.  We banked to the east and I caught sight of my house.  My mother was in the back yard.  I could see her clearly.  Wouldn't she be surprised if she knew what I was doing right now?

        We flew out over the Indian River.   Turning south we soon crossed over the new Melbourne causeway my Dad had helped to build.  Dad was an engineer with the State Road Department.  As we passed over the harbor, my pilot turned west and flew along Crane Creek.  Soon I could see the Melbourne Elementary School on New Haven Avenue where I was enrolled in first grade.   I couldn't wait to get back to school on Monday to tell all the other kids about my airplane ride.

        We swung around and the airport was in front of us.  The fat slick tires touched down in the grass and I felt the wooden tail skid make contact.  My first flight was over, but the dream had just been born.

        Several times we were privileged to see military airplanes land and stay a while at Melbourne airport.  One afternoon we visited with the crew of an army B-18 Douglas twin-engine bomber from the Orlando Army Air Field.

        One day at the airport we were discussing airplane development with a bunch of the neighborhood kids and some visiting military pilots.  My brother Bob said "In ten years airplanes will fly a thousand miles an hour."

    Several of the kids said "Aw, your crazy.  That ain't ever gonna happen."  I recalled that conversation in 1947, while reading about Chuck Yeager taking the Bell X-1 rocket plane through Mach I to a speed of 989 miles per hour.  I thought "Man, that's close enough.  That's only eleven miles an hour below a thousand.  And it has only been six years since Bob made that prediction."

        On another occasion a young Marine Corps pilot landed one of the nation's most advanced dive bombers of it's day.  It was a Douglas SBD Dauntless.  The young Marine gave us kids the royal treatment.  One by one he lifted us into the cockpit and let us look through the bombsight.  America was at peace. It was the spring of 1941.

        It is possible that barely over one year later, in June 1942, this young Marine aviator may have looked through this very bomb sight at targets on the flaming deck of Admiral Nagumo's flagship the carrier Akagi.  Many Navy and Marine Corps pilots gave up their lives while blasting the Japanese fleet at Midway.  I would like to think that this young aviator made it back to his family at war's end. I will never know.

        On December 7, 1941, we went for a Sunday afternoon drive.  When we returned home, our land lady came running to meet us shouting  "The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.  Turn on your radio and listen.  We are at war!"  My dad said "Oh no, that's my old home port."  Dad was a reserve naval officer who had been placed on active duty in July, 1941.  Our world changed suddenly.  We moved almost immediately to Fort Lauderdale and lived there while Dad helped Admiral Nimitz push the Japanese forces back across the Pacific to their home islands.

        "Hey look! It's a TBF Avenger!" we yelled.  The big torpedo bomber climbed slowly over South Side Elementary School.   The kids on the playground became accustomed to a daily procession of torpedo bombers.  Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station was home to several training squadrons.   One torpedo bomber pilot in the making, who flew regularly over our school yard, was George Herbert Walker Bush.  We had a picture of President George Washington on our classroom wall.  Little did we know that a future President named George was flying right over our heads every day.

        In 1947, my family lived in base housing at the Marine Corps Air Station in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas.  There were over five thousand airplanes parked on the base awaiting the smelting furnace. These war birds had been sold to a salvage company.  Every day a bulldozer dragged scores of airplanes to a spot in front of a furnace.  A huge blade was raised on a cable and dropped onto the airframe.  The pieces were then pushed into a furnace to emerge as aluminum ingots.

        Early in the process the salvage company had removed radios, instruments, and other parts and stored them in warehouses in hopes of selling them.  The market became quickly saturated and this practice was halted.   Airplanes went to the furnace with radios and instruments still mounted.    Neighborhood kids were allowed to scrounge almost anything we could carry home.

        The year I was thirteen I helped salvage many famous war birds.  I climbed into almost every type of airplane used in the Second World War and helped myself to whatever I wanted. I concentrated mostly on radios.   My brother Bob concentrated on flight instruments.  Together we made quite a haul.

        Our bedrooms looked like a military supply depot.  We dismantled some really neat stuff.  The kids in our neighborhood traded military surplus items the way other kids traded baseball cards.

        "Hey, I'll swap you a BC-348 radio for an altimeter and a directional gyro.  What have you got to trade?"

        "We've got a life raft and a Gibson Girl transmitter."

        "Hey, that ain't nothin'.  We've got a complete oxygen system out of a B-17 and all the bottles are still full."

        I discovered that oxygen really will support combustion the way my eighth-grade science teacher said it would.  I held a lighted match in my left hand and directed a stream of pure oxygen from an aviator's portable oxygen bottle into the flame.  It flared up and literally fried the skin on my index finger.  I learned a science lesson that day in the school of hard knocks.

        The world changed rapidly.  Sometimes it was better.  Sometimes it was worse.  I was eager to become an adult.  In 1950, Stalin urged his communist puppet North Korea to unify the Korean peninsula by force.  I was having difficulty concentrating on lepidopteron and coleopteran in biology and decided it was the manly thing to do to kick the communist invaders out of South Korea.

          I managed to enlist in the Marine Corps at the age of sixteen.  I told them I was eighteen.  The recruiters believed me.   I was off to San Diego.  Marching in close order drill I could see ground crews on the tarmac at Lindbergh Field preparing the huge Convair B-36's for test flights.   The Convair plant was just beyond the fence along the western perimeter of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot.  The thought occurred to me that the whole five thousand airplanes from Walnut Ridge had risen Phoenix-like to become this new fleet of gleaming sky giants.

            The Marine Corps was not misled about my age as I had hoped they would be.  At the end of boot camp my training battalion commander obtained my birth certificate.  I was given a general discharge under honorable conditions.  I was sent home to grow up.  My parents insisted that I finish high school but I had other plans.

        I joined the Air Force with parental consent on the morning of my seventeenth birthday.  The summer of 1951, found me working on the flight line at Barksdale Air Force Base.  I worked with veterans of the Pacific War on the Boeing B-29 Super Fortress bombers.  Looking at the B-29 always reminded me of the news photos showing the fire storm which swept twenty square miles of Tokyo and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.       

        Before long, the Air Force decided it needed my talents on jet fighters.  Every airman must do time in Texas.  It is almost penitential.  Air Training Command gave me the opportunity to gain a technical education second to none in the world.  Amarillo Air Force Base became home for six months of solid tech schooling.

        Suffolk County Air Force Base on Long Island, New York was there to protect the New York area from Soviet nuclear attack.  At the tender age of eighteen  I was given the awesome task of serving as a ground crew chief for an F-86D Saber jet fighter.  The airplane's combat readiness was my responsibility.

United States Air Force North American F-86D, my bird to maintain combat ready at all times.

        The life of a young air force officer was in my hands.  If I screwed up a pilot could be lost.  If I screwed up a jet interceptor might be lost.  If I screwed up and a soviet bomber got through, New York City could be lost.  I remembered Ben Franklin's wisdom.  "For the want of a nail the shoe was lost.  For the want of a shoe the horse was lost.  For the want of a horse the rider was lost.  For the want of a rider the battle was lost.   For the want of a battle the war was lost.  For the want of a war the kingdom was lost.  And all for the want of a horse shoe nail."  I was careful.   I was thorough.  To this day I am a nit picker and a stickler for detail.   It came with the job.

        For the first year of our married life my wife and I worked at the experimental flight test center at Boeing's plant number two in Seattle.  Mary became the lead flight test data transcriber for the Boeing company's 707 airliner project.  

        My wife was part of the engineering team that gave the nation and the world it's first commercially successful jetliner.  Several years later Boeing donated the prototype 707 airplane to the Smithsonian aviation collection at Silver Spring, Maryland. Technology ages much faster than we do.  Mary's bird now resides in a museum collection.

        I worked on the flight line on the first two prototypes of the B-52 bomber; the XB-52, and the YB-52.  Later that year I worked on the first five production B-52 bombers, numbers 2001 through 2005.  Some of my birds have gone to airplane Valhalla in the Arizona desert at Davis Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson and others are in the collection of the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, Ohio.  In April 2003, I discovered aircraft number 52003, the third production B-52 parked at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona.  It was spared the scrap heap because it was assigned to NASA for high altitude research.  It served as the mother craft launching the X-15 rocket plane from under its right wing.  While it was busy with this task almost all of the early production B-52's were chopped into aluminum scrap and pushed into smelters at Davis Monthan Air Force Base. 

        The Martin Company hired me in 1958, to work on the launch team for the first flights of the Titan Intercontinental ballistic missile.  Pad nineteen at Cape Canaveral was my work station.  One day a distinguished looking gentleman was introduced to our launch site crew.  We gathered around and shook the hand of Dr. Werhner von Braun.  

        Years later after a successful series of American lunar landings a Russian engineer remarked to an American engineer at an international space symposium in Geneva, Switzerland,  "Congratulations comrade American on landing men on the moon.  But you must remember, your Germans were better than our Germans."

        My last aerospace employment in 1960-61 found me working on the Convair B-58 Hustler super sonic bomber produced in Ft. Worth, Texas by General Dynamics.  The airplane was a marvel and a wonder.  It had a delta wing with four big jet engines and afterburners.  The Hustler carried a long sleek pod under its belly.  The pod carried jet fuel at both ends and a thermo-nuclear warhead in the center section.  Fuel would be used up on the way to a target, and the pod would be jettisoned to fall as the one and only bomb the aircraft carried.  This was a one-purpose airplane.

        Three young air force officers rode this sky chariot.  They could set the latitude and longitude of a target into the flight computer and the airplane would go find it.  A small glass dome on top of the airplane had a star-tracking eye.  The scanner would pick out a star according to the season, time of day, and the point of departure.  It would fix its gaze upon that star, and then pick another one when that one receded from view.  Between the star tracker and the on-board computer the B-58 could find and incinerate any city on the face of the earth.  My job was to make sure that the electronic flight control system always worked correctly and worked in concert with the bombing and navigation systems.

        The fall of 1977 brought me three experiences which I shall never forget.  I was teaching History and Economics at Arapahoe Community College in Colorado.  Several of my students knew of my interest in things that fly.  John Schold owned a hot air balloon.  He invited me to accompany him as he flew in the annual Albuquerque balloon fiesta.  Scott Borden was a member of our balloon crew and an accomplished sky diver.  We spent a gorgeous day floating lazily above the Rio Grande valley. Later at dinner, Scott invited me to join his sky diving class at Littleton Airport.

        One week to the day after my first balloon flight I leaped into thin air from the door of a Cessna 195.  There is no way to describe the adrenaline rush and the euphoria of hanging silently in the sky under the canopy of a nylon parachute.  I missed the landing target by a half mile.   The guys all teased me.  They nicknamed me "eagle eye."  We all agreed however that Mother Earth is the real target and with the help of gravity, you can't miss.

        The third milestone in the fall of 1977 was the re-birth of my private pilot training.  In 1951 I had trained for ten hours in an Aeronca model 7AC Champ as a member of the Barksdale Flying Club.  I had taken a few hours instruction in the Champ in 1957 in Wichita, Kansas while working at Boeing.  Now it was time to get serious again about becoming a private pilot.  By early December, 1977 I was ready to solo in the Cessna 152.   Gary Anderson, my instructor, climbed out of the airplane and said "Just go around the patch once and make a full-stop landing.  I'll be watching from the control tower."

        I taxied out and lined the Cessna 152 up with runway one-eight right at Arapahoe Airport.  I had done this many times.   "No sweat," I thought.  With throttle forward and Gary's weight no longer in the airplane, the little trainer leaped into the air.  I looked at the empty seat beside me.  The sudden realization swept over me that I was alone.  I shouted with glee,   "I can fly.  I can fly."

End

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