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...cannot fully explain, particular flight has seldom been long out of my mind in the forty-five years since it took place.
An academic for the past thirty-six years at a number of different universities and in three different disciplines, I currently teach aspiring professional pilots at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University about aerodynamics, aircraft performance, and upset recovery. Recently our College of Aviation faculty in Daytona Beach, Florida, received an unexpected e-mail from Kara Oehler at National Public Radio. Ms. Oehler is investigating the hypothesis that brain activity stimulated by intense flying situations might result in aviators undergoing "out-of-body" experiences. She wondered if anyone on our faculty--many of whom have logged thousands of hours flying high performance swept-wing airplanes--could comment on this idea from the perspective of a professional pilot.
My initial response was that the idea is interesting but unutterably New Age. At first, I couldn't recall having experienced anything of this sort in my fourteen years of flying Navy airplanes on active duty and in the Naval Reserve. After further consideration, however, I realized that my brush with death in flight training might have involved something like the kind of experience Steven Kotler reports on in an article in Discovery that Kara had attached to her e-mail.
I don't know if what I saw in my misadventurous flight was an out-of-body experience. Most of the pilots with whom I flew in the Navy, and those I work with at Embry-Riddle today, would probably say that an out-of-body experience starts sometime after a fifth or sixth silver bullet on the rocks. I do know, however, that Ms. Oehler's e-mail is what catalyzed me to write down the story of what happened--and what almost happened--to me so many years ago. The undertaking has brought back many interesting details and memories. And for that I thank Kara Oehler.
Friday Night
It's eleven o'clock on a hot Friday evening in early October 1960, and I am having a drink with my flight instructor Jack Gunter at the bar of the Officers Club at Biggs Air Force Base in E1 Paso. We flew here from Naval Air Station Kingsville, Texas in a Grumman F9F-8T Cougar, a single-engine swept-wing jet trainer derived from the next generation of the F9F-2 Panther, a champion fighter featured in the 1955 Korean War film The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Film buffs may recall that this movie was made from the James Michener book of the same title starred William Holden, Grace Kelly, and Mickey Rooney, and received a Special Effects Oscar.
Jack and I had no intention of remaining overnight in El Paso. About two hours ago we should have been landing in Phoenix after a refueling stop at Biggs. The two legs of the flight from Kingsville to Arizona were the planned conclusion of my advanced instrument flight training, a formidable hurdle on the way to winning coveted Navy Wings of Gold and being designated a Naval Aviator. However after we land at Biggs--at that time a Strategic Air Command base--a B-52 bomber touches down on the field's single runway with locked wheel brakes on the right main landing gear. The result is eight blown tires, a huge airplane stranded in the middle of a very long runway, and a closed airfield. After an hour or so the field is still closed, night has descended, and Jack decides we should wait until tomorrow morning to fly to Phoenix. We call base transportation, take rooms in the Bachelor Officers Quarters, and eventually end up here at the Officers Club for drinks, dinner, and adventure.
Will the Engine Fail?
I came to Kingsville Naval Air Station from basic flight training at Whiting Field in Milton, Florida, where I flew the North American T-28C Trojan, a hefty single-engine prop-driven trainer. Except for its high visibility yellow paint job and the fact that it had a nose wheel rather than a tail wheel, the T-28 looked and performed very much like a typical World War II carrier based fighter airplane. To lubricate itself, the Trojan's very healthy Curtiss-Wright nine-cylinder radial engine consumed oil at about the same rate that my little black MG-TD roadster used gas. Flying the plane was a pure open cockpit, white scarf adventure. I never tired of the thrill of advancing the throttle at the end of the runway for takeoff. The engine's raucous 1,425 horsepower sank a pilot back in the seat hard, and the plane with its high lift straight wing leaped into the air as though it despised the prospect of remaining earthbound even one second longer than necessary.
The Trojan, however, had one characteristic that challenged a student pilot's mind. At low engine revolutions, the engine's supercharger was capable of ramming far more air/fuel mixture into the cylinders than their design strength could tolerate. It is no exaggeration to say that one could literally blow a cylinder off an engine by applying full throttle with the propeller control set for low revolutions. As a consequence, a pilot had to be very careful about throttle and propeller speed management to avoid damaging the engine by over pressurizing the cylinders--a situation known as overboost.
Overboost of an airplane's radial engine is an insidious kind of cumulative mistake that typically is paid for by someone other than the pilot who caused it. Imagine repeatedly over inflating and deflating a balloon until it eventually explodes during the ultimate inflation. This is the situation with cumulative overboost. An engine subjected to repeated abuse of this kind suffers gradual metal fatigue until one day a cylinder disintegrates and the engine fails. Standard operating procedures at Whiting Field required pilots to log accidental overboost situations so that inadvertently abused engines could be inspected to determine the extent of the damage, if any. However, since reporting an overboost was equivalent to declaring an act of unprofessionalism, some pilots wondered if every such occurrence eventually found its way into aircraft logs.
Apparently Naval aircraft maintenance officials had a similar concern. By the time I arrived at Whiting, the T-28 had been outfitted with a sensing system capable of giving a pilot advanced warning of an incipient engine failure. Long before a radial engine disintegrates from repeated overboosts or other anomalies, metal fatigue begins to show up as microscopic iron particles in the oil that lubricates the engine. Indeed, oil samples from the T-28 were routinely analyzed during periodic maintenance for the presence of such particles as a measure of engine wear. If engine fatigue becomes acute, larger pieces of iron may be picked up in the oil flow and carried to a portion of the lower engine called the oil sump. Some clever engineer dedicated to saving hapless pilots' lives conceived the idea of placing...
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