25 Famous Flights

25 FAMOUS FLIGHTS

COLLECTOR’S EDITION

25 FAMOUS

FLIGHTS AIR & SPACE/SMITHSONIAN COLLECTOR’S EDITION

HISTORIC FIRSTS, HEROIC SAVES, DESPERATE MISSIONS

North American X-15

WINTER 2017 | AIRSPACEMAG.COM

WINTER 2017 AIRSPACEMAG.COM

ABOVE THE TR THEY WERE THE FIRST AMERICANS to fly sustained

combat, in some of the most dangerous skies in history.

Of the 38 pilots who flew for France in the Lafayette Escadrille between 1916 and 1918, nine were killed; another six were shot down or injured. By the time the squadron entered the fight, combat aviation was two years old and had already changed. Aerial observers had become so useful to ground commanders that air forces sought, fiercely, to rid the skies of enemy observation aircraft. On October 5, 1914, a mechanic in a Voisin III biplane with a hand-held machine gun shot down a German Aviatik reconnaissance craft, and dogfighting was born. A year before the United States entered the war, the Lafayette Escadrille gamely took up the practice.

One in the squadron, James Norman Hall, led a dual 14 | AIR & SPACE airspacemag.com

life during the war; he was both soldier and reporter.

He volunteered as a machine gunner in the British Royal Fusiliers in 1914 and survived six months in the muck and blood of the trenches. After returning to the United States and writing a book about his experiences, he returned as a correspondent for the Atlantic to cover the already famous Escadrille. All the while he wrote for the magazine, he trained to be a fighter pilot, and eventually he joined the squadron he was reporting on. He continued to fly for the United States in 1918, when the U.S. Army absorbed the unit, always keeping with him a small book of romantic poetry.

Hall shot down four enemy aircraft and was shot down twice himself. The first time, he was wounded, passed out in a dive, came to, pulled out, and passed out again as the airplane landed in a trench. After the

Š PHILIP MAKANNA/GHOSTS

From observer to warrior and back.

CROSSINGS ■

ENCHES In the markings of a French squadron, this SPAD XIII, the type James Norman Hall flew across Europe, was restored and is maintained by the Aeroplane Collection of Paso Robles, California.

A fast, capable fighter, the XIII did not enter the war until 1917.

second, he was thrown into a German prison camp.

He never lost his writer’s gift of observation, and after his release at the war’s end, he realized that he had, as he later wrote, “an opportunity not to be lost, for it would never come again.” He wanted to fly across the entire Western Front, to get the first look at the whole battered, awful landscape. In late November 1918, with approval from General Mason Patrick, chief of the U.S. Army Air Service, Hall went to the Orly airfield, near Paris, was given a brand-new SPAD XIII, and left for what many pilots would later fly in many wars: an assessment of battle damage. Hall’s was not an official mission, but a private reflection on loss. “I followed the Marne past Meraux, Château-Thierry, Épernay, and at Châlons turned northward until I came within view of the inconceivable desolation of the old front,” he

wrote. “As I passed over the ruins of…Souain—how often I had seen it from the air!—I was conscious of a quickening of the pulses, and instinctively I began to look in all directions, overhead, behind, beneath, for the presence of enemies.”

Flying “in great serpentines” in a “general southeasterly direction,” he was astonished at the quiet. “I had not imagined finding such complete solitude so soon after the fighting had ceased…. Insofar as I could tell, not a sound broke the stillness of that grey winter world save that of my own motor.” In his memoir, he recalled the great pilots of the war and his comrades in the Escadrille, “the best of them dead.” He had written earlier of the horrors that embroiled the now-silent ground: “The worst of it was that we could not get away from the sight of the mangled bodies of our comrades.… One thinks of the human body as a beautiful, sacred thing. The sight of it dismembered, disemboweled, smeared with blood and filth and trampled in the bottom of a trench, is so revolting as to be hardly endurable.”

He came upon a place where he had seen a German aircraft burst into flame and its crewmen, all on fire, leap to their deaths. But unlike the earth, the sky was not physically wounded. “It seemed strange that the air above those desolate battlefields should not be scarred as they were, giving evidence of the events that had taken place there,” he wrote.

It is improbable that another pilot flew from one end of the European battlefield to the other, as Hall had done, but a 1918 book, Notes on the Interpretation of Aeroplane Photographs, makes clear that many other observers looked down on portions of the killing fields of World War I. The book begins, “In the British Army, the whole trench system of the enemy is photographed from a standard height of 6,600 feet at least once every ten days.”

Hall did not record where along his journey he reached his goal. Climbing through a cloud bank and into bright sunlight, over the roar of his motor, he heard music in his head—Dvorák’s New World Symphony. He lived the rest of his life in Tahiti, preserving the solitude of his final flight, writing poetry, and collaborating on adventure stories, including Mutiny on the Bounty. His headstone there bears the first lines of a boyhood poem, written about his Iowa home: Look to the northward stranger/Just over the hillside, there/Have you in your travels seen/A land more passing fair.

■ ■ ■ PAUL GLENSHAW FAMOUS FLIGHTS COLLECTOR’S EDITION AIR & SPACE | 15

BOMB RUN on BREMEN A mission of the Mighty Eighth.

ON THE DAY IT SENT MORE THAN 100 HEAVY BOMBERS

to strike Vegesack, a northern district of Bremen, Germany, the U.S. Eighth Air Force had two missions. The first was to destroy the Eighth’s highest-priority target: German submarine construction yards. The second was to prove the effectiveness of U.S. daylight bombing so that Eighth commander General Ira Eaker could resist efforts to change his command’s strategy to the nighttime, area-bombing technique favored by the British.

To increase accuracy, Americans also employed formation bombing. On a bomb run, each bombardier in a formation of 36 bombers kept his eyes on the lead aircraft so that all 36 would drop their bombs at precisely the moment they saw bombs fall 46 | AIR & SPACE airspacemag.com

from the lead. A mission could succeed or fail, depending on the performance of the lead bombardier.

On the March 18, 1943 raid on Vegesack, the responsibility for the success or failure of B-17 squadrons in the 303rd Bomb Group rested on the shoulders of Jack Warren Mathis, a 21-year-old first lieutenant from San Angelo, Texas, and the bombardier in the B-17 The Duchess. The raid was the 303rd’s first mission to Germany.

As The Duchess approached the target, the squadron was being rocked by heavy flak. Pilot Harold Stouse handed off control of the airplane to Mathis through the B-17’s automatic flight control equipment, which kept the aircraft straight and level for the bomb run by linking the autopilot with the bombardier’s

© PHILIP MAKANNA/GHOSTS

GREAT SAVES ■

Norden bombsight. While Mathis was guiding the B-17 with slight adjustments to bring the target into his crosshairs, there was no possibility of evasive action. Suddenly a jagged piece of metal ripped into the bombardier-navigator compartment. Both Mathis and navigator Jesse Elliott were hurled back against the bulkhead. The flak had broken through one of the windows in the nose, making the compartment, as author Jay Stout reported in Hell’s Angels: The True Story of the 303rd Bomb Group in World War II, a “bitter cold cyclone of glass and debris.” With one arm shattered and a mortal gash in his side, Mathis dragged himself to the bombsight, adjusted the settings, and released the bombs.

“Bombs,” he said. The stunned navigator looked at his crewmate’s

Wearing the red triangle of the 303rd Bomb Group in 1944, the Lone Star Flight Museum’s B-17 flies out of Houston, Texas.

collapsed body and finished the call: “away.” The trailing B-17s released their loads.

After the Vegesack raid, Eaker received a message from Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had been among those urging the Americans to switch to night bombing. “All my compliments to you and your officers and men on your brilliant exploit, the effectiveness of which the photographs already reveal.” Jack Mathis was awarded the Medal of Honor and buried in San Angelo.

■ ■ ■ LINDA SHINER FAMOUS FLIGHTS COLLECTOR’S EDITION AIR & SPACE | 47

THE VOYAGES OF

JOHN GLENN Two trips to space, 36 years apart.

PORTRAIT & SUNSET: NASA

BY ANDREW CHAIKIN

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DANGEROUS MISSIONS ■

THE FIRST AMERICAN TO ORBIT EARTH was the last of the Mercury 7 to leave us, in December 2016. Over the

course of his 95 years, John Glenn was many things—war hero, test pilot, U.S. senator, devoted family man.

But to the public he will always be the quintessential astronaut. And he earned that stature—as well as lasting

NASA

fame and world admiration—based on only two spaceflights.

Shortly after 8 a.m. on February 20, 1962, technicians at Now the Atlas was arcing over the Atlantic, following the curve Cape Canaveral, Florida, closed the side hatch of John Glenn’s of Earth. Glenn kept up a steady stream of reports on his instruments Friendship 7, sealing the 40-year-old Marine pilot into his tiny, to Shepard; everything was working perfectly. The Gs built to nearly one-man spacecraft. After a series of schedule slips that winter, 7, then, with a change less dramatic than he’d expected, fell to 1.5 this would be NASA’s second attempt in less than a month as the booster engines were jettisoned, right on schedule. The sky to launch the first American turned black as the remaining into orbit. From this point on, engine continued to speed him Glenn’s only contact with the toward orbit, the G-forces buildoutside world was through ing once again to nearly eight the headphones in his heltimes normal. At last, five minmet. Fellow Mercury astronaut utes after liftoff, 100 miles above Scott Carpenter, connected Earth, the sustainer engine cut by a landline from the Atlas off and Glenn felt the onset of rocket launch center 750 feet zero-G. Under the control of the away, kept him informed on automatic sequencer, the capsule the progress of the countdown. separated from the Atlas and During a break in the preflight turned 180 degrees to its proper checks, Carpenter took advanattitude, blunt end first, for the tage of the lull to patch in a flight. He was in orbit, the first phone call to Glenn’s family American to get there. in Arlington, Virginia, on a Friendship 7 was flying with private channel. John’s wife its nose pitched 34 degrees Annie came on the line, soundbelow the horizon, so that outing rock-solid. Glenn told her side the capsule’s trapezoidal what was happening inside window, Earth appeared to be the capsule, and about the blue receding. After all the worries Florida sky he could see out about the possible debilitathis window. Before they said ing effects of zero-G, Glenn goodbye, Glenn reached back felt adapted within seconds across the years to a ritual they of reaching orbit. Not only had repeated each time he had was weightlessness no probgone off to war: “I’m just going lem; it was pleasant. He passed down to the corner store to get over the dayside of Earth with a pack of gum.” amazing speed; as he overLiftoff of Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962. Glenn was the first “Don’t be long,” Annie to launch on an Atlas rocket. Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom flew the Indian Ocean, the replied on cue, holding back had made short, suborbital hops on the smaller Redstone. sun descended into his view, tears. a white ball as bright as an arc At 9:43, with the landline now disconnected, Glenn listened lamp. It reached the western horizon and slipped beneath it, as Alan Shepard in Mercury Control counted down the final sec- spawning brilliant rainbow bands of color that stretched across onds. What he couldn’t hear was Carpenter’s send-off: “Godspeed, his field of view. Glenn had always been what he called a collecJohn Glenn.” At zero, Glenn felt the Atlas’ engines come to life, tor of sunsets; he remembered them, he said, the way someone and a faint roar penetrated the capsule. Three more seconds passed as they built up to full thrust, then hold-down clamps at the base of the rocket released and he started to rise. “We’re Condensed and excerpted from the e-book under way,” he announced, his voice vibrating with the engines’ John Glenn: America’s Astronaut, by Andrew power. Carpenter had told him that after going in circles in the Chaikin. Order at airspacemag.com/glenn. centrifuge all those times during training, it would feel good to be accelerating in a straight line. He was right.

FAMOUS FLIGHTS COLLECTOR’S EDITION AIR & SPACE | 73

APACHE The Taliban vs. the world’s deadliest helicopter.

82 | AIR & SPACE airspacemag.com

BY ED MACY

DARING RESCUES ■

AFTER 22 YEARS IN THE BRITISH ARMY, which included a tour in Afghanistan, Ed Macy was eager to begin civilian life, but because of a shortage of experienced weapons officers on the Apache AH Mk.1, he was recalled. In 2007, as part of an effort to contain a resurgent Taliban, Macy was sent on a raid on Taliban headquarters in the Helmand province, farther south than any British troops had ever been.

Lieutenant Colonel Rob Magowan’s battle group mapped the Taliban main supply route from Pakistan, locating five staging areas where fighters and supplies were concentrated. These became the primary targets for the Army Air Corps’ Operation Glacier. Macy’s company, the 656 Squadron, Apache helicopter company—call sign “Ugly”—was tasked with destroying the route, beginning with a site near the village of Koshtay and moving steadily north. The success of the first raid paved the way for the second part of Operation Glacier.

The following excerpt is from Apache, by Ed Macy (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009). In a few instances, names of individuals have been changed to protect their safety.

© CROWN COPYRIGHT/MOD (2)

FOR THE FIRST TIME THE TALIBAN WERE ON THE

defensive. The brigadier wanted to keep it that way.

The Royal Marines had taken a pasting from the Taliban in the three months since they’d arrived in September 2006. Now we’d given a bit of the pasting back. The order came down to launch Operation Glacier 2 as soon as possible.

The mission was to destroy the Taliban’s main forward operating base in southern Helmand. It was a giant, high-walled rectangular compound, 200 meters long by 100 wide [220 by 110 yards], on the banks of the Helmand River where the Green Zone borders the Desert of Death in the west. It was extremely well fortified, with stone and adobe walls 10 feet high and three feet thick, and guard towers at each of its four corners. It was known locally as the Jugroom Fort.

The assault would be done by the 120 Royal Marines of Zulu Company, 45 Commando, with supporting fire from 105-mm light guns and the Scimitar armored vehicles of C Squadron, the Light Dragoons.

Colonel Magowan, commander of an intelligence unit, planned the operation, and it was an excellent one.

First, the place would be pummeled relentlessly with a massive bombardment from fast air and artillery. It would begin at midnight and last for four hours. An incredible total of 100,000 pounds of bombs dropped by B-1s would test the Taliban’s resolve. If they still wanted to stay around and defend it after that, the fort would be every bit as significant as the colonel thought.

Then, at 4 a.m., he would launch a ground assault, move into the fort, and effectively plant an International Security Assistance Force flag on its ramparts—a red flag to the Taliban’s raging bull. They would counter-attack with all available manpower—probably with their trademark encirclement maneuver. Zulu Company would then withdraw swiftly just before In southern Afghanistan, where it’s difficult to tell friend from foe, Taliban commanders could be overheard in radio transmissions exhorting their soldiers to capture a coveted Apache: “I want you to bring down a Mosquito.”

FAMOUS FLIGHTS COLLECTOR’S EDITION AIR & SPACE | 83