I remember when
my mother took me to Kingman, Arizona
We had to get off at a station to change trains
There were Indians there at the station
She said, “Stay around me or the Indians
will steal you,” so I walked right up to them
and I said, “they don’t look very dangerous.”
That’s true! I was four going on five.
—Warren Halter
I'd wish to get out of here.
I lived in the Panhandle a few years.
I had my own plane & I’d fly into Texas.
I flew acrobatics in Oklahoma.
I taught acrobatics and exhibitions .
I did difficult stunts
at the Phoenix Airfield.
I’d wish to get out of here.
I’ve done everything with a plane
that a plane is capable of—
loop de loop, stall and roll, you name it.
I always wished for wings to fly with.
When you step out that door
you’re holding up air
clear up to the moon.
—Warren Halter
Reminds me of a dustbowl joke: like the woman said: I’ve never been to Iowa, but I’ve seen it fly by. When I learned to fly in 1972, they said you wouldn’t find any clouds at 18,000 feet because there was no moisture but that wasn’t true. Well, I’ve seen clouds over the equator at 40-50,000 feet. I remember in Phoenix, it’d get so hot at night, to escape the heat, we’d strip down to our undershorts and fly those open airplanes up to about 5000 feet just to escape the heat, but sometimes it’d be hot up there with an inversion layer, with all that dust from Iowa, we’d have to climb some more, but then it got too cold, and there we’d be freezing in our undershorts. After 8000 feet there wasn’t air enough to hold us up. We’d take run right up into the stars, flying by the seat of our pants.
—Warren Halter
HOT AIR
The Japanese used to send up hot air balloons with bombs attached, and let then drift to here. The Americans didn’t want the Japs to know it was successful. It was all hush-hush, not in the papers.
One day at Falcon Field, someone spotted one of those Japanese hot air balloons. I looked up and all I could see in that Arizona sky was the sun. I looked closer and eventually I saw a tiny speck.
They sent up a fighter pilot and he climbed up, up. 15,- 20,000 feet, 21,000 feet...Small planes weren’t pressurized in those days...they carried oxygen masks. And there it was, a small speck way up there. No matter how close he got, it stayed a small speck.
The pilot had the most difficult job of the war, to fly up and shoot it down. He finally gave up. Came back down and landed the plane. Turns out, what they were looking at was Venus. He sure had the most difficult order of the war, all right: and that was to shoot down Venus!
—Warren Halter
I met Amelia Earhart. Paul Mance gave her flight instruction on long distance flight. It wasn’t the plane, but navigation error that brought her down.
Amelia was friendly, she would talk to anyone within reason. She wouldn’t talk to me, but I had breakfast with her once. I wanted to talk to her but I didn’t want to intrude.
She never was stuck up from what I could see. I remember some movie fellahs walked by her and asked to take her picture and she said “I think I’m more of a pilot than a picture actress.”
—Warren Halter
We used to take people up for thrill rides in open planes, One tough fellah said he didn’t want to fly flat and level but he thought he could bring me some good business. so I took him up and pulled it up into a vertical stall, did a spin, a loop. He was so white-knuckled, his were hands gripping the sides. Don’t think he ever flew again. As I was circling around the field, you could see them all come running on the ground to see what all the commotion was about. He said, Now look. See all the business I brought you?
—Warren Halter
An instructor had his student in the back of the stunt plane. It was well-braced for acrobatics. But the kid shoved the stick too hard and the plane lurched up so hard he was thrown out of the cockpit. It threw the kid up out of the seat. Scared the hell out of both of them. Luckily he slid back and got caught up on the vertical stabilizers, so the instructor held him up as he brought the nose of the plane down so the kid could scoot back into his seat. We all had parachutes, seat shoots they were called. But that kid, I bet he never flew again.
—Warren Halter
During the war, I was not in the military, but I was a flight instructor at Thunderbird Field, training American pilots and also training Chinese students. But it was damn-near impossible due to the language barrier. We had to teach them acrobatics. They didn’t like that very much, to fly upside down, having to right the planes and so on.
Roosevelt & Chang Kai Check had an agreement. We flew C 4s strong enough to climb the Himalayas. None of them had ever driven a car. An American boy might sit in his father’s lap and learn to drive a tractor. Their biggest problem was a lack of depth perception. They could either perform or we’d have to wash them out and we couldn’t do that, wash them out, or they’d lose face.
I had one pilot who couldn’t land his plane. He didn’t exactly know where the ground was. He didn’t have depth perception. They tested his eyes. He was off the map, his eyesight was so bad. The Chinese officer washed him out immediately. But 2-3 months later, I saw him back in another regiment. I said, “What the hell are you doing here?” He said, “I come back, I come back! I change my name and I come back!”
—Warren Halter
When I was about 4, I had a horse who tried to jump through a fence but didn’t quite make it over the gate. He slammed on the brakes at the last minute and I was thrown. Naturally, we were worried about the horse and wanted to look after the horse to see if it was all right. But the Chinese cook, Jim Chinaman, we called him, would have none of it. See, he was very fond of me. He was so mad, all he could say was, “Kill the goddamn horse, kill the goddamn horse.”
—Warren Halter
No comments:
Post a Comment