I tried the stick a few more times. Each time I yanked it back hard it came up against the same obstacle at the same point. I decided to take a chance that it would stay jammed where it was.
I came in low ’way back of the field with almost all of the back travel of the stick taken up, holding the nose up with the gun. I had to land with the tail up high, going fast. I bounced wildly, used all the field, but made it all right.
I made an immediate inspection to find out what had jammed the stick. I couldn’t imagine what it was because I had taken all the loose gadgets out of the ship before I had gone up.
I found a corncob pipe that the ship’s owner had been looking for for weeks. He had left it in the baggage compartment and had never been able to find it. It had slipped through a small opening at the top of the rear wall of the compartment and had evidently been floating around in the tail of the fuselage all that time.
When I did the outside loop it had been flung upward by centrifugal force and wedged into the wedge ending of the upper longerons at the end of the fuselage. The flipper horn was hitting it every time I pulled the stick back, preventing me from getting the full backward movement.
Only the bowl of the pipe was left. It was lodged sidewise. Had it lodged endwise it would have jammed the stick even farther forward, and I would have had to jump or dive in with the ship. I would have had to jump quickly, too, because I didn’t have much altitude when I started that second involuntary outside loop.
A friend of mine was once chased and rammed in midair by a drunken pilot. If you have ever been approached on the road by a drunken driver you have some idea of the predicament he found himself in when this drunk started chasing him. Of course, he didn’t know this guy was drunk, but he knew he was either drunk or crazy.
My friend was an army pilot. He was flying an army pursuit ship from Selfridge Field, Mich., to Chicago and was circling the field at Chicago preparatory to landing when he was set upon by the drunk, who, evidently still living in the memory of his war days, was trying to egg my friend on to a sham battle, trying to get him to dogfight.
He saw the DH, which was a mail ship of those days, approach him first from above and head on. He had to kick out of the way at the last moment, or he would have been hit on that first pass the guy took at him. The guy pulled up and took another pass at him. He kicked out of the way again and started wondering since when had they turned lunatics loose in the sky. He didn’t have much time for wondering, because the guy kept taking passes at him. Finally, the guy took to diving down under him and pulling up in front of him. He seemed to think that was more fun than just diving on my friend, and he kept it up.