Flying to the Moon Read Free

and it was nine months before I was finished with the T-6 and ready to try jets.
    In some ways a jet is easier to fly than a plane with a piston engine and a propeller. With a prop, if you change power abruptly, the nose veers to one side or the other. Called torque, this reaction must be compensated for by your feet pushing on the rudder pedals. With a jet engine there is no torque, so your feet are not nearly as busy and you can concentrate on other things. On the other hand, when you want power from a piston engine, the engine responds as soon as your hand moves the throttle. With a jet, especially the early jets, there may be a lag of ten or more seconds from the time you decide you need extra power until the engine finally speeds up enough to give it to you. This lag can be very embarrassing if, for example, you have waited until the last minute to realize that you are going to land short of the runway. In a jet you have to think further ahead.
    The first jet I flew was called a T-33. Built by Lockheed, it was a two-seat version of the Shooting Star, which was designed during the closing days of World War II. The Air Force is still flying some T-33s today, over thirty years
later, indicating that its basic design was excellent. The T-33 could climb up to nearly 50,000 feet and could go nearly 600 miles an hour. It carried enough fuel to stay up for three hours, but its ejection seat was very uncomfortable and my backside got numb long before two hours had passed. I didn’t envy people who stayed up in bombers or transports nearly a whole day. Nor did I think about how long it might take to fly to the moon. I just wanted to be a jet fighter pilot. Jets like the T-33 are smoother and quieter than prop planes, and more fun to fly.
    When I got my wings, after a most enjoyable year of flight training, I also got some great news. I was not only going to be a fighter pilot, but I was going to Las Vegas, Nevada, where training was given in the very best fighter, the F-86 Sabrejet. At that time (1953) the Sabres were battling the MIGs in Korea, and doing it very successfully. More than anything, I wanted to fly the sleek, swept-wing supersonic F-86, and I was delighted when I got my chance. Although trickier to fly than the Shooting Star, it was also more fun, it had only one seat, and above all, you knew it was the best. We new pilots felt honored to have a chance to master it, and we worked hard to learn as much as we could as fast as we could. Unfortunately, a few of my friends were killed in the process. Today flying is a lot safer, especially on airliners, but fighters have always been more difficult, especially in the early jet days.
    After graduating from Las Vegas, I flew the F-86 for four years, accumulating over a thousand flying hours in it. I got to see some interesting parts of the world from the cockpit of an F-86, all the way from the Mexican border to the eastern Mediterranean Sea. I saw the Libyan Desert,
where nomads tend their camels as they did a thousand years ago. I saw pieces of the great Greenland glacier cracking and falling into the sea to make icebergs. I saw the lush green of Ireland, and the bright blue sea of the Greek islands, and the yellow-gray haze of industrialized Germany. I saw Paris and London and Rome. I saw strange places and met people whose viewpoints were different from mine. I liked being an Air Force pilot. My sister’s husband was a pilot also, but he was a test pilot. His work, flying all kinds of new airplanes, sounded even better than what I was doing with my old F-86. So I went back to school, something I had never expected to do again, to learn how to be a test pilot, at the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
    Fortunately, in high school and college I had taken a fair number of math and science courses, because now I needed them to understand how airplanes really flew, and what made the difference between a good airplane and a bad one. I had