The Power of Testimony

RAY AND BETTY WHIPPS
by the sound of my clambering in through the window
at night, having returned from a not-​ quite-​ legal trip into
town, the priest would only ever greet me the next day with
a smile and the words, “Did you have a good time in town
last night, Whipps?” I never drank or smoked on any of
these trips; the camaraderie with the other guys was enough
of a lure.
When it came to flying, however, things were serious.
We knew that landing on an aircraft carrier would require
a high level of skill and would offer zero margin of error—​
we’d heard that so many times over the past several months
that we could recite it in our sleep. But once we were at
Gonzaga, we found out precisely how hard it was. The technique
required the pilot to be able to approach at the perfect
speed, stall the engine at the perfect time, and touch down
at the perfect spot to allow the plane’s landing gear to catch
on the cable strung across the deck. Once hooked onto the
cable, the plane would be brought to a sudden stop a short
way down the five-​ hundred-​ foot landing strip. If you hit the
cable too fast or missed it entirely, and if you couldn’t get
up enough speed to take off again by the time you ran out
of strip, there was virtually nothing to prevent you and your
plane from going into the ocean. With the carrier traveling
at speeds of up to eighteen knots (twenty miles per hour),
there was almost no way you’d make it out alive.
The Navy Air Corps wanted its pilots to be skilled and
bold and undeterred by fear, so as soon as we’d mastered
the basics of flight, we were encouraged to experiment.
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