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A Navigation Lesson

In the spring of 1945 I was a cadet in the Advanced Flying Training program at Steward Field in Newburg, N.Y. Part of the course, near the end, was a long-range, daytime navigational flight. The route that my instructor selected was from Stewart Field to Roanoke, Va., with a landing to refuel, and then return. The weather was forecast to be excellent, but, as frequently happens, it was not.

Almost a third of the way to Roanoke I began to encounter a lot of clouds and rain. You could still continue under visual flight rules, but visibility, other than straight down, was very poor.

Somewhere near the halfway point, the engine of my single-engine T-6 trainer began to cough and sputter as if it were running out of fuel. So the engine would not quit on me, I switched from the main fuel tank to the auxiliary tank, and the engine began to run perfectly. This meant to me that there was no more usable fuel in the main tank even though the gauge showed almost 10 percent.

Some time later the engine began to sputter again, even though the auxiliary tank gauge showed about 15 percent. I felt I was very close to the planned course and that Roanoke was not too far off, even though I could see no good checkpoints at the moment. But in a few minutes I would be leaving level terrain and flying over a very mountainous area.

As the engine began running ever rougher, I decided it would be better to make an immediate gear-up forced landing, which would do relatively little damage to the aircraft, rather than continue on, have the engine quit over the mountains, and have to bail out with the aircraft a total loss. I didn’t know it then, but there was a problem with the fuel system, choking off the flow to the engines while there was still fuel available.

I made an excellent forced landing, secured the aircraft, and took off with my parachute on my back toward a farmhouse about a mile away. As I began to walk, I saw a little off to my right a man cultivating a small plot with a hoe. I altered course slightly to talk to him.

I had seen from my map that there was nothing in the area that could be called a town — only widely dispersed dots for very small villages. As I came up to the man, I picked out one of the dots and said, "Can you tell me about how far it is to this town, and in what direction?" He had his side toward me, and, without stopping his work, said in a rather abrupt way, "Never heard of it."

I was disappointed at the answer and a little annoyed by his manner, but I picked out another dot on the map and asked the same question about it. Again, he never stopped working, and gave the same reply in the same abrupt manner.

By this time I was getting quite upset, but I went ahead with one more question about another dot. His response was the same as before. This really made me mad. I guess I lost my cool and said, "Listen, you must be the dumbest man in the whole country. You don’t know anything, do you?" With this, he finally stopped working, turned to face me, and said, "Well, I know one thing. I ain’t lost!"

Author’s note: As it turned out, I was close to my planned route, and I did receive my pilot’s wings the next month, June 1945.