I
first became interested in flying when I was about nine years old. I was living in San Antonio, Texas, then, and there were several airfields nearby, and I used to wonder what it would be like to sit in a cockpit way up there, high above the green fields, and make the airplane go wherever I wanted. The first model airplane I ever made was of a famous racing plane called the Gee Bee. It had short wings and a fat, stubby fuselage with a huge engine in front. It looked sort of like a bumblebee, with a tiny cockpit perched way back where the vertical tail joined the fuselage. Only a few Gee Bee's were built, and they must have been very tricky to fly; eventually they all
crashed. I carved the model out of balsa wood, and painted it in red and white racing colors. On the sides of the fuselage I added its insignia, a “lucky” pair of dice. The Gee Bee could fly a circular course at over 250 miles an hour, which is slow today, but in those days that seemed plenty fast.
I got my first airplane ride when I was eleven, and the pilot even let me fly the plane a little bit. It was a twin-engined seaplane called a Grumman Widgeon (a widgeon is a kind of duck). I found it was very difficult to keep the plane going straight. The secret was keeping your eyes glued to the horizon and noticing whether the nose of the plane was creeping up above or falling below the horizon. If the nose fell, I was supposed to pull back slightly on the wheel, and vice versa. The more trouble I had, the more the pilot laughed! I was sort of embarrassed at the time, but when the flight was over, I realized that I had really liked it, and wanted to do it again. However, World War II started about then, and I wasn't able to fly again for a long time. Of course, during the war I read a lot about flying, especially about our fighter planes, which were shooting down the enemy. My favorite plane was the British Spitfire, which was a beautiful, graceful-looking airplane with a slender fuselage and a curved, elliptical-shaped wing.
After World War II, when the jet age started, I was a student in college, at West Point. When I graduated, I had a choice to become either an Army or an Air Force officer. I decided to go into the Air Force and give flying a try. I was worried about this decision, because if I flunked out of flying school I still had to stay in the Air Force, and I
thought that for a non-flier the Army would be a better career than the Air Force.
I got my first fright when I reported to flying school and flunked my eye exam. I could see fine off in the distance, but up close I flunkedâjust barely. The Air Force doctors gave me a second chance, and scheduled me for another exam a week later. I immediately consulted a civilian eye doctor, and he gave me some eye exercises to do, and I passed the second exam. Whew!
Then the flying began, and that was really fun. I flew a North American T-6 Texan. It was a yellow two-seater with a 450-horsepower radial engine, a low wing, and retractable landing gear. Generally I sat in the front seat, with my instructor directly behind me. When I did something wrong, which was often, he would yell and scream at me over the interphone, and I would get very nervous. The more nervous I got, the tighter I would clutch the control stick, and at the end of an hour my right arm would ache. I also worried because I am left-handed, and I had to learn to fly with my right hand, since I had to control the throttle with my left (it was way over on the left side). Gradually, however, I learned to relax, and I found that being left-handed didn't really make any difference. Between screams my instructor told me I was doing fine (I guess he just liked to scream), and I got to feeling fairly confident and at home in the airplane. At least I didn't have one problem that bothered a lot of my fellow students: airsickness. Flying in a plane just makes some people sick. Most of them get over it after a couple of weeks, but some never do, and they have to be “washed out” of pilot training.
After about twenty hours of practice with my instructor, he decided I was ready to fly solo. My first flight by myself was a little bit scary, but I found I really enjoyed being up there all alone with no one yelling at me. I never guessed that one day I would be flying solo around the moon, and enjoying that, too. However, learning to fly solo is just the beginning. Flying can be very complicated: to do it properly, one must learn to fly at night, and in bad weather, and in formation with other planes. All this takes a long time, 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 never thought about
that
before. By the time I had gotten my hands on an airplane, the test pilots had already wrung it out and had made sure that it was safe for me to fly. Now
I
had that responsibility, to check everything from A to Z, so that when a new airplane entered squadron service, there would be no surprises waiting for the new boy, the inexperienced second lieutenant. At the Test Pilot School I learned how to get as much information as possible from a new airplane in the shortest possible time. When I graduated, I stayed on at Edwards Air Force Base, and was assigned to the Fighter Test section. This was exactly what I wanted, but I was a little disappointed because at that time there weren't any new fighters to test.
Instead, I spent my time flying older planes which were being modified in various ways. It was interesting flying, and I got a chance to fly such airplanes as the North American F-100 Super Sabre, the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, and quite a few others.
I really liked my job as a test pilot; in fact, I thought it was the best possible job I could have, except for one thing. There were other people going a lot higher and faster than I was. They were called astronauts, and they had been picked from the ranks of test pilots. There were only seven of them, and I didn't know any of them, but some of my test pilot friends did, and told me stories about them. I was surprised to hear that they weren't supermen at all, but just test pilots (admittedly, a bit older and more experienced), who made mistakes just like the rest of us. I wondered what it would take to become an astronaut. The Air Force must have been wondering the same thing too, because at this time they renamed the Test Pilot School and started calling it by a much more fancy nameâthe Aerospace Research Pilot School. They also began teaching “space” courses, and they invited me to come back to the school to take some of them. So I became a student once again, and learned about what keeps satellites in orbit, and about how weightlessness affects the human body, and about how to fly machines without wings. After graduating I went back to my old job in Fighter Test, and waited until the Space Agency decided they needed some more astronauts. I only had a couple of months to wait before NASA announced it was going to hire a third group of astronauts. I had tried the year before to become a NASA astronaut, and had been rejected, but this time I was hopefulâ
because of the space courses I had takenâthat I knew more than before, and that NASA would take me.
The first thing I had to do was pass a physical exam that took a whole week. It was not a pleasant week, because I worried the entire time that they would find something wrong with me. Also, some of the tests were not pleasant. They took what seemed like a quart of blood, poured cold water in my ears (that makes you dizzy), and performed a lot of other tests which I didn't even understand. They checked the condition of my heart by making me walk on a treadmill that they adjusted to get steeper and steeper as the minutes went by. They stopped the treadmill when my heartbeat got up to 180 beats per minute, which is pretty fast. I also took written mental tests and had interviews with psychiatrists. Some of the questions seemed strange, like: “Are you a slob or a snob?” You had to pick one or the other. I picked “snob,” although I don't think I am one. Somehow I didn't want to pick “slob.”
After a week in San Antonio, Texas, where the physical exam took place, I went to Houston for an interview. It was conducted by Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard, two of the original seven astronauts, and some other technical experts. The questions were designed to see how much we knew about NASA's plans for flying in space, and to determine what (if anything) we might contribute, based on our experience as pilots. I had studied a lot about Gemini and Apollo, the two spacecraft which were supposed to fly next (after Mercury), and I thought I gave good answers to most of the questions. But some I did not know; for example, I knew practically nothing about the Atlas booster, the one that was used to put a Mercury spacecraft into
orbit. Incidentally, the astronauts always call their machines spacecraft, not capsules. Capsules are something you swallow.
I went back to Edwards Air Force Base after the interview and began the long wait to hear whether or not I would be rejected again. I figured this was my last chance, because I was just one year below the age limit of thirty-four, and I thought it would be years and years before NASA would pick any more astronauts. They already had sixteenâthe original seven plus a second group of nine. After a month of waiting and worrying, I got a phone call from Deke Slayton. He said they would take me, if I still wanted to work for NASA. If I still wanted to? He must have been kiddingâI had been thinking about nothing else for the whole month. Deke didn't sound the slightest bit excited, but I certainly was, and so was my wife when I told her. She also had been nervous during the long wait. Our oldest child, Kate, was only four years old, too young to understand what was happening. I soon found out that NASA had selected fourteen of us. These men would all become close friends in the coming years. They were a grand group of people, easy to live and work with, and I enjoyed being with them. Their names were Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders, Charlie Bassett, Al Bean, Gene Cernan, Roger Chaffee, Walt Cunningham, Donn Eisele, Ted Freeman, Dick Gordon, Dave Scott, Rusty Schweickart, and C. C. Williams. And, oh yes, I almost forgot, Mike Collins. Of this group of fourteen, three would orbit the earth, three orbit the moon, four walk on the moon, and four would get killed. There is a lot of luck in this life.