My friend saw him disappear under the tail of his ship this time, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He didn’t know which way to turn, because he didn’t know which way the goof was going to pull up.
Suddenly he saw the nose of the other ship. It came up directly in front of his own nose. He knew the guy had overdone it this time and come too close. He pulled back on his stick, but felt the jar of the collision just as he did. It threw him up into a stall, and when he came out his motor was so rough he had to cut his switches. He had raked the tail of the other ship with his propeller, and it was bent all out of shape. He had also cut the tail off the drunk’s ship.
The drunk was evidently too drunk to get out of the cockpit because he cracked up with his ship. My friend managed to get his ship down without jumping. It was only a wonder, plus some neat flying on my friend’s part, that he wasn’t killed too.
A pilot should never be too stubborn with an airplane. I learned that early, fortunately, without coming to grief in the process.
Another pilot criticized my flying once. He criticized the way I was making my take-offs. Kidlike and cocky, just out of flying school, I took a foolish way of proving he was wrong. But he had me so riled by his caustic and nasty remarks about how I was going to kill myself if I kept that up that I flung out a challenge to him and felt I had to keep my attitude even when I saw I was overdoing the thing and thought I was going to crack up.
“If you think my take-offs are so dangerous,” I told him, “I’ll just go out there and cut my gun in the most dangerous spot of this dangerous take-off and land safely back in the airport.” And I stalked out, fuming, and got in the ship.
I took off toward the high trees at the end of the field, didn’t let the ship climb very steeply approaching the trees, and banked just before I got to them—exactly like I had been doing on the take-offs he had been criticizing. But I also pulled up sharply, just to make it worse. I didn’t want him to have any comeback. I cut the gun and started dropping back in over the trees into the airport. I should have put the nose down a little to cushion the drop, but I was mad. I’d show him the worse way. I wanted to gun it because I was dropping hard, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.