Rescued Pilot

For a year while on leave from Cal-tech, I got a job with United Airlines as a field keeper at Akron, Colorado. They were able to cut quite a distance off their flying time by establishing an emergency field and beacon which the government was slow in accomplishing. My duties were to take weather observations every hour and report them by radio to Denver.

One time we were in heavy fog when an Air Force Pilot was running low on fuel and needed to land. He couldn’t find the field so I had to guide him by radio. He zoomed by the field following a line of telephone poles but failed to see the field as he went by. Of course I had turned on our beacon to help him and guided him to do a U-turn and come back along the line of poles and talked him down to safe landing. He was heavily bundled in flight gear. After re-fueling his fighter plane he insisted on taking off again as he was on his way to visit his girl. The Denver operators cautioned him not to leave as the fog was very serious over quite an area, but he safely took off anyway. The next time I visited United Airlines headquarters in Denver I learned the dispatchers there had experienced a nervous attack listening to me talk down the plane as I was not qualified as a dispatcher and they were afraid of a law suit, however, it all worked out safely.

I used my time when not doing duties to pull a dumb stunt. As part of a weather study I had to release hydrogen balloons and track their course. I filled a balloon partly with hydrogen and the rest oxygen to make a nice explosive mixture, then made a long paper wick under the balloon which I lighted and released. It had just enough lift to rise slowly and drift over the town of Akron at a low level before the hydrogen exploded with a loud boom, which startled the residents, not knowing what was going on. I never got in trouble over that stunt. It was while working at that field that I listened to news reports of the developing serious war events in Europe.