 Proudly we hail. New York City, where the American stage begins, here is another program with a cast of outstanding players. Public service time has been made available by this station for your Army and your Air Force to bring you this story. As proudly we hail, the United States Air Force. The story is entitled, Daring Young Man. This is the story of warrant officer Victor James of the United States Air Force, a man who loves his job and the job most people wouldn't envy him. He's a parachute tester. Our first act curtain will rise in just a moment. But first, how would you like to be a kingpin on the aircrew of a United States Air Force plane? That's the navigator. He's an aircraft observer, a commissioned officer, and he gets there by enlisting in the aviation cadets. Believe me, it's a great life, but only men young in spirit and years can fill this exacting job. If you can qualify, your advanced training by the Air Force will turn you into a first-class navigator. Then you will be a kingpin on the aircraft team. You'll be equipped with the finest navigation tools known to aerial science. See what your chances are for joining the aviation cadets of the United States Air Force. Full details are available at your nearest recruiting station or Air Force base. And now your army and your Air Force present the proudly-behaved production Daring Young Man. You know about parachutes and how they work. So did I, or so I thought, until I went out to the Defense Department's joint parachute facility near El Centro, California, way down at the southern edge of California's famous Imperial Valley. There I discovered that there was more to parachutes than I'd thought. And I found out a lot of things by talking to and watching the Air Force's boss parachute tester, warrant officer Victor James. He's a tall, slender, relaxed, easygoing sort of guy who was probably made as many parachute jumps as any man alive. Victor James, as I discovered, is a man who loves his work, which is fortunate for him. In fact, he says, it's the most wonderful sensation in the world. You hate to pull the ripcord. Victor James is a careful and meticulous workman. And I found out a lot more about parachutes and how they work in the job of testing new models by watching him work from the big open-ended cargo compartment of a fairchild flying boxcar, flying over the El Centro base. That's our photo plane, Mr. Banghard. It goes along next to us and takes pictures of what happens to our drops on the way down. Drops? Yeah, the things we're testing. Now take this. Come on, you men, get into it. Get that big one over to the ready position. Big one? It doesn't look so big. Well, we've got a couple of minutes before this test. The warning bell hasn't rung yet. Now, you see the big one. We make it up after it's gone through a small test on scale. You may be making sense, but you lost me somewhere. Somebody gets an idea for a new kind of parachute or instrument or something. Now, if we here at El Centro think it has merit, we make up a small test model to scale. Say one inch to a foot and test it out in a wind tunnel. I'm with you so far. Now, if it looks good in the tunnel, we make up a big one. Well, we'll try it. You mean you jump with a new parachute to test it? Oh, I'm not that crazy. Now, we make up the full-scale models and try them with instruments to check on their performance. Now, this one here is a ring slot shoot of a new design. Well, what makes it different from a standard design? Well, you'll see when we drop it. Now, you'll notice instead of a man to support, it has a couple of ammo boxes filled with weights. Oh, yeah, I see. Oh, the ready bell. I'll set kernel any time. There it goes. 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000. There she goes. A brightly colored parachute suddenly blossomed above the falling spinning package we've dropped. Automatic timer set for five seconds. Now, you see what I mean? It's a ring slot shoot. Well, it looks sort of like a donut with another donut in the hole. Yeah, that's what it looks like, all right. Now, we'll swing around and try another version. That one seemed okay. There's a ground crew and a jeep going to pick it up. Now, let's see. Three more drops were made, but none of them are successful. Well, maybe that's too much weight for that type of class. Why, Vic? What's going wrong? Air seems to be going right through. The parachutes start to open and then they're streaming, disragging instead of shaping like mushrooms. Now, I don't like it. I think I'll go talk to the kernel. Why should a shoot stream, as you call it? Well, you see they can stream if they're improperly packed, tied in too close. I'm not sure why. That's the reason we're testing. Victor James shoved a cigar in his mouth and climbed the ladder that led up to the flight deck. He came back a few minutes later with Colonel Leo Moon, the Air Force's head man at the El Centro base. Colonel Moon stood and looked at the three other packages ready to be dropped and he said... Well, James, that's about the way you figure those drops isn't it? He said they wouldn't open. That's what we thought too, but we had to try it out that way. Now, let's pick up the speed of it. Those were dropped at 150 knots, I think. Right. Now, let's bring it up to 190 and let's lower the weight some. Drive the next one at 190 knots instead of 150 and with a 400-pound weight instead of 500. Right, sir. We'll give it a try. Think it'll work now? Oh, yeah. The kernel knows what he's talking about. All right now, we're going to try it again faster. Take 100 pounds off that load. That should do it. All right, gang. We're on the course. Get ready. There you see, this time it's working the way it should. So did the others as they were pushed off into space. The time, the little training plane with the cameras would follow the load down and then return to take up its position near us. Well, last one today. Now, that's better. Always makes me feel bad when they don't open as they should. Well, I bet you'd rather have it happen to a dummy or a load of instruments than to you. Oh, no, I don't know about that. I've been in them when they didn't open or when they started to stream. Well, then how did you... Well, it's easy. When I'm testing, I always carry a spare. James tended to his business, checking on reports from the parachutes that had been dropped. I looked around the base, talking to people, and finally went into his office. It wasn't very big. Not as big as its title. Chief Test Operations Section 6311 Parachute Test Development Group. That office had a look as though it had been dusted off for my benefit. When Victor James came in with a sergeant by the name of Joe Tree, I asked about it. Well, yes, sir, this is my office, but, well, I don't like being in it much. Now, I'd rather be jumping than a desk. The way I figured, Ken, if they ever really make me stay here and sit in this chair, the country will be losing money on me. You know, I doubt that. But look, you promised to tell me what we were doing this morning and why. Testing parachutes. That right, Joe? That's right. Oh, this is Sergeant Joe Tree. He's my official knife sharpener. Hi, Joe. Hello, Mr. Banger. Knife sharpener. Yeah, you see, we've got all kinds of releases right when I'm testing them, so I can get out of them and use my spare. Now, the same way I carry a spare, I carry a knife that I know is good and sharp in case a release doesn't work. Well, Joe Tree now, he's a full-blooded youth Indian. And I figure if he keeps a knife sharp enough to scalp me, it's also sharp enough to cut me free. You don't have enough hair to scalp. But when I get through with a knife for you, it'll cut what little there is. I don't mean to split hair, gentlemen, but I still don't understand a lot of it. As I told you, somebody gets an idea. We make up a scale model and test it in a wind tunnel. And then the engineering officers who figure these things, they order a full-size model and we make it up and test it with weights and dummies. At least 500 tests that way. And then if it looks good, another 1,000 drops with a man riding the chute. Any time a parachuter gets a new model chute, the first question he asks is... What's the first question, Joe? How many live drops has it had? That's right. But it looks to me as though parachutes are about the same as they always were. Why all this testing and experimenting with them? Well, we're making changes all the time. You've seen chutes here that are regularly shaped. Others that are square, triangular, rings, made out of nylon, silk, rayon, cotton, paper, fiberglass, even almost everything. Now, we've tested chutes designed to carry a 200-pound man, others, for a two-ton truck. Yeah, but basically all chutes look the same. No, no, they've changed a lot. Whether they've changed a lot, they've changed a lot. Whether they look at it or not, they open faster than they used to. They're sure, they're safer. We've been trying to eliminate sway, so the man on the end doesn't swing like a pendulum and hit the ground on a downswing. We've been working on releases, so that once a man's on the ground, the chute doesn't act like a sail and drag him. No, we're working on improvements all the time. But why all the live jumps, can't machines record the shocks and stresses better than a man? Well, I remember one time, a new model was opening too fast sometimes and too slowly other times. Well, I made a live jump with it because I had an idea. I turned so that my body kept the air from the pilot chute and the big chute wouldn't open not for a long time. Not until I twisted my body away from the pilot chute and let the air get in at it. Yeah, but that was you, a smart and experienced jumper. What good did that do for others? Well, that's why they have people like me. It's only a tester who would get into a situation like that. Not a flyer who isn't used to jumping or who's maybe wounded or shocked or panicky, let's say. But I showed what was wrong with that chute and we put a little spring behind the pilot chute so that it jumped out and away. And after that, the chute opened on time. Every time. I get it. Vic, how did you happen to get into this kind of work? Not I happened? Well, I was a kid in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. The school flagpole needed a new rope and a coat of paint and I offered to do it for it. And I found out something. I like heights. And I found out something else. I could be paid for climbing. Well, I can see that you got off the ground, but what got you into parachute testing? Well, after that, I knew what I wanted to do. I joined a traveling air circuit that came through a town where I was painting a steeple. I went up in a plane and jumped and liked it. I cannot have discovered something. Being up high is fun, but falling is just plain wonderful. Well, the war came along and I went out to the Pacific as a chute tender. Afterwards, I did a lot of jumping at fairs and carnivals, and then I joined the Air Force. In other words, you stopped jumping for other people's amusement and started jumping with a purpose, right? Oh, I don't know. I just like to jump. The Air Force seemed a logical player. Yeah, I know. I know you've won a couple of air medals, too, and they don't give those away because they like the color of your eyes. Did you get them for any one spectacular jump? Well, one of them wasn't. I was a test jumper. One day, I get pulled off and told to report for a conference. Seems the planes were too far ahead of the bodies. We could go up in them higher than the human body could stand. Now, Ken, suppose you were up 40 or 45,000 feet and something goes wrong with your plane, you have to jump. No, brother. So, let's say you get out safely and you pull the ripcord and your parachute opens. You start falling slowly down to Earth, but by the time you get down to where it's warm enough to live, you may be frozen to death. Well, that's the kind of thing they were talking about. Finally, they turned to me. We've been able to get around a lot of the high-speed problems with aircraft by making certain functions automatic. We've got to do the same thing for parachutes. That seems reasonable, sir. We have to get the flyer out of the plane in such a way that he'll clear the after portion of the plane and won't be cut in two by the tail or rudder. Then we have to fix it so he falls freely through space until he reaches an altitude and temperature at which he can live and only then have his parachute open. A delayed opening. It has to be made automatic. Well, the flyer might have been heard or may have blacked out. We've been working on these. The time has come to try out automatic timing devices with live jumps. Yes, sir. Why not? Well, as you may have guessed, we've decided you're the man for the job. It'll be a whole series of high-altitude drops trying out automatic equipment. You'll be the first man to try some of the items. It's only fair to tell you these things. Well, that sounds interesting. I want you to understand. All of this equipment has been tried out under laboratory conditions first, but we can't be sure. Well, if you're trying to tell me that it might be dangerous, sir, I understand that. But if it has to be tested, someone has to do it and that's my job. If someone is going to be the first one to try out some of those things, it might as well be me. In fact, sir, I'd like to be the one. You're listening to the proudly-behaved production Daring Young Man, and we'll be back in just a moment for the second act. How many of you young fellows go down to your nearest city airport on a Sunday afternoon and watch the planes come in and take off? When you see the planes gliding down onto their landing strips, do you marvel at the skill of the pilots who fly them? And when you see the planes take off, then disappear into the horizon. Do you watch them out of sight, wishing you were there at the controls? Well, there's no more need for any of that wishful thinking. If you've got what it takes to be an aviation cadet in the United States Air Force, you too can fly the big silver birds. You have to be young enough and smart enough and well enough if you want to qualify as an aviation cadet. Only the best are accepted. Your local recruiting station or your nearest Air Force base can give you all the information. You're listening to Proudly We Hail, and now we present the second act of Daring Young Man. Warrant Officer Victor James, as the Air Force's chief parachute tester, began a series of jumps to test new and different kinds of mechanisms under varying conditions, making live jumps to try out mechanisms that had been tested over and over again, but by dummy and instrument drops. You see, now we were developing rocket and jet planes that flew faster and higher than we thought possible. A man can't just bail out of those planes, casually pull a rip cord and wait for his parachute to open. The only way a flyer could safely leave some of the new planes was to be shot out, ejected, seat and all. Well, this meant a lot of testing at different altitudes with different equipment. Vic, I've heard you talk about the hot seat. Is that it? Well, even before they started ejecting the whole thing, the seat, the pilot and all, the chair that got dropped, a chair with a lot of instruments fastened to it, yeah, we called it the hot seat. But then there came a point when the chair needed a live test. And I'd been chosen to be the first man to write it down. Let me recreate that scene for you, Ken, and we'll imagine that you were along for the ride. Okay. We'll be at Wright Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, Ohio. Now, Staff Sergeant Joe Tree will be there too. I'm being dropped from an old B-17 of Flying Fortress. Hey, what do you think of this, Ken? Here I am with a pack on my back, so to speak, air-testing a chair. Quite a chair. The way you describe it, it sounds as though Rue Goldberg invented it for one of his cartoons. Here's your knife, good and sharp. I could even scalp you with it. Thanks, Joe. Oh, I'm not going to need it, but if I do, it'll be in a hurry. Why in a hurry? Oh, we're making this drop from about 3,500 feet. Hard to give some man time to get his bearing. Opening bomb, babe. You know, you're sitting in a chair strapped in all right, sitting over a lot of nothing. We're going to slow down pretty close to a stall to drop you, James, and release you at zero. If anything goes wrong with the chair release, Sergeant Tree has another release right there with you. Almost 10 seconds. Right. Minus 10, minus 9, minus 8, minus 7, minus 6, minus 5, minus 4, minus 3, minus 2, minus 1. Drop. In the clear. One minute he was sitting there, and the next minute he was gone, chair and all. I watched him go down. How long for this one, Joe? Six seconds. It's on a timer. If that doesn't work, the boss there on the hot seat will be timing it, and he can set it off by hand. There it goes. On schedule, the little 40-inch shoot was released by the automatic timer. It seemed to stay motionless while the chair kept plunging down. But the line from the 40-inch shoot, as it's pulled out after being released, opens the seat belt that holds James in and also opens a 16-foot shoot. Knowing what was going to happen, I could watch it. There's the 16-footer opening up. Wait until its pull is felt. It'll jerk the chair right out from under the boss. It opened quickly, looking from above like a large white mushroom. The chair was swaying a little. All of a sudden, the pull of the big shoot made itself known, and Victor James slipped right off the chair. Through tests like this, the Air Force discovers the things that can go wrong, so they may be remedied. In fact, the more I learned about this remarkable business, the more impressed I was with the care and the attention the Air Force gives to every little detail. Well, these drops are all part of a program to see what the body can do and what it can't do and what should be automatic. The automatic man, that's what you want. No, no, no, no, no, not me. That's the last thing in the world. You know, in the old parachute, you pulled on the ripcord and the parachute popped out. And then it was worked so that the cord was pulled for you as you left the plane. Oh, static lines we're talking about. Now, suppose you're up 45,000 feet, say, and you have to bail out. Ah, you told me, you step out and you pull the ripcord or have it done automatically, and the parachute opens and you can't breathe on the way down, or you're free. Right, that's right. So you don't open the parachute when you're up that high. You wait until you're down to a reasonably safe level, just a couple of miles up. Now, maybe you've never jumped before, and by that time you're scared. Or maybe, and this is a lot more likely, maybe you've blacked out. Okay, so you can't leave it up to the flyer. You have the ripcord pulled automatically as he leaves the plane, and he still can't breathe on the way down. So we fooled around with automatic timers and stuff like that, things that I was testing. The system I like best works like a barometer by atmospheric pressure. When you leave the plane, what amounts of the ripcord is pulled, but the parachute doesn't open until the proper height is reached. Well, Vic, I don't see why the ripcord has to be pulled then when the flyer leaves the plane. Well, something has to set it off, the parachute, doesn't it? Now, you wouldn't want it to open every time you got below 15,000 feet while you were still in the plane, would you? Coming down for a landing, let's say. I get it, of course. Excuse me. Well, there have been questions about a lot of things. I'm testing one of these new models in a couple of days. You want to come along and watch? I'll be glad to watch, but just don't ask me to do it. Now, see, in a plane like this, it goes this way. Now, others are different. The principle is the same, but some of the details are different. Now, in a bomber like this, you reach up overhead and pull the lever, and that blows off the canopy. You really enjoy this, don't you? Oh, sure I do. Why? Well, your face lights up when you even talk about it. Well, between you and me, I'm having a ball. Now, a drop like this, I get maybe five or six miles of falling free. That's really something now, isn't it? For you, yes. Now, what about some of the other systems? No, the different systems aren't too important. The theory is the same in all of them. What about the one you're using today? Today? Well, I have to free myself of the chair and pull the ripcord, and then the chute won't open, I hope, until 15,000 feet. I've got to go check my assignment card, Colonel Moon's taking me up, and you're going up in another plane. Oh? And I'll talk to you on the radio as long as I'm in the plane. After that, I won't be able to. It's too nice to spoil with conversation anyway. So, I'll be seeing you. Happy landing. I found I was going up in a sleek and efficient-looking jet fighter. Colonel Moon and Victor James bundled up in baggy-looking men from Marseuse. Got into a T-33, two-place jet trainer. The clear plastic canopy that opened like a crocodile's jaw on hinges at the rear was lowered and snapped shut. Colonel Moon at the controls waved to me and they taxied out to take off. The pilot who was to take me up signaled that he was ready to go and waiting for me, so I got into the plane. However, there was another plane going up in addition. One with a lot of measuring and photographic equipment. We climbed, as the flyers say, like a homesick angel. I'd lost James' plane for a while, but my pilot hadn't, and soon we were going along quite close to it. And then we were joined by the photo plane, the three of us getting higher and higher, flying along together as though we didn't have a care in the world, as the one man in one plane wasn't going to be shot out of it in a minute. Well, what do you think? It's nice up here, isn't it? We'll be up high enough for me to try my jump in about two minutes, Colonel Moon says. I'll describe to you what I'm doing. We're on course now, about minus 30. I'm going to start talking at about minus 5, so he'll know what I'm doing. Right. This isn't a bomb. If you don't go up at the exact moment, it won't make too much difference. Right? Yes, sir. Minus 10? My right hand side, below the arm rest, about opposite the calf of my leg, is a lever. Minus 1, 0. Now. I raise a lever there. It blows off the canopy over our hands. It also brings into position another lever that I reach forward. As Victor James talked, I saw the canopy raise up and disappear as though a giant hand had just removed it. Then there was the crack of a shot and the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Right next to me, practically, James, sitting in his chair, looking perfectly comfortable. He just shot right straight up into the air like a live jack-in-the-box. He shot way over the plane, and then he started to fall, well behind the plane as it kept going forward, and his forward speed slowed. I kept watching James. He seemed to be hanging there in space for a long time before he started to fall. He told me it would take about 40 seconds before his shoot opened, but it seemed longer to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Colonel Moon and the T-33 suddenly started to dive, and for a minute, I thought it was out of control. But then I realized it was done on purpose. I couldn't see James wriggle free of the chair, but he must have because he was falling. And then, way below, I saw his shoot open. Back on the ground again, the first person I saw was Colonel Moon. I asked him why he'd scared me half to death that way. Oh, that? And there's only one canopy on a T-33. When James blew it off, it left me sort of exposed to the 67 degree below zero cold. Got an efficient heating system in the plane, but not that efficient, not without a canopy. As soon as James was clear, I went into a split-ass power dive to get down to a warmer altitude in a hurry. See, there's a little curved inner windshield, and I crouched under its protection and dove about 15,000 feet. Then I leveled off to make sure James was okay. Yeah, you see? Easiest pie, wasn't it? Yeah, most astound. Have you any idea how you looked? Sure. Oh, no, not me, but I've seen others. Well, how do you feel? Oh, me? I feel fine. I feel great. You know, Ken, I'm working on releases now. We haven't found a way as yet, not in any shoot rig I've tested. Now, wait a second. I'm all hopped up about what I just saw, for sure. That was just a routine jump. Now, you see, we're always working on something. Somebody's got to keep coming up with new ideas to make flying safer, and somebody's got to test the new ideas that have merit. Oh, say, Ken, did I ever tell you about the drop I made from a jet when I didn't have any goggles or mask or anything? No eye protection. No, Warren Officer Victor James had never told me that story, but I'd heard about it because he'd been given the air-metal for doing it. Has he got another air-metal for the series of jumps for the automatic timer and pressure openings? It's all part of what the Air Force's chief parachute tester does in the everlasting fight to make safety precautions keep pace with the speed and altitudes developed in this jet and rocket age. As James himself says, he just tests them, other people think of them, design them, work them out. Proudly we hail the officers and men of the United States Air Force Parachute Development Testing Center and Warren Officer Victor James, chief parachute tester for the United States Air Force at El Centro, California. Learn to fly. Serve your country in the air. Be an aviation cadet. You'll get the finest aviation training in the world from the United States Air Force if you're accepted. To qualify, you must be single, be between 19 and 26 and a half years old, and be otherwise qualified. If you can meet the test, join the world's best. Join the aviation cadets. When you successfully complete your training, you'll win your wings and become a commissioned officer. For complete details, visit your local recruiting station or your nearest Air Force base. Make flying your future. This has been another program on Proudly we hail, presented transcribed in cooperation with this station. Proudly we hail is produced by the Recruiting Publicity Center for the United States Army and United States Air Force Recruiting Service. This is Kenneth Banghart speaking and inviting you to tune in the same station next week for another interesting story on Proudly we hail.