Free The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh by Winston Groom Page A

request. For Doolittle it was a dream assignment. The money was good and he got extra for doing trick maneuvers—his specialty.
    Doolittle’s first assignment was the government of Chile, and in April of 1926 he boarded a freighter and steamed through the Panama Canal with a crated P-1 Hawk in the hold and a skilled Curtiss mechanic as his traveling companion.
    Doolittle did not have a captive audience when he reached Santiago, a dirty, sprawling metropolis in the foothills of the Andes. Pilots from England, Italy, and Germany had already arrived to peddle their wares. “I wasn’t worried about the British or Italian models,” he said. “It was the German Dornier flown by Karl A. von Schoenebeck that was the greatest threat.”
    Schoenebeck, it seems, had been an ace in Richthofen’s famous Flying Circus that had clashed so often with Eddie Rickenbacker’s Hat in the Ring squadron on the Western Front. The flying shows would begin in June at the aerodromo El Bosque, on the outskirts of town.
    Ten days before the aerial demonstrations the Chilean aviators threw a party for the foreign fliers at their officers’ club, a handsome stone building in downtown Santiago dating to colonial times. As the party gathered steam, the visiting officers were introduced to the pisco sour, “a delightful specialty of the fun-loving Chileans,” which combines three ounces of pisco , a clear brandy of Spanish origin, with sugar, lemon juice, and ice (note: three ounces of alcohol in a single drink is more than twice the dose of a usual American cocktail). Let Jimmy Doolittle pick up the story from here.
    At some point the name of the silent film actor Douglas Fairbanks was raised, whose “balcony-leaping, sword-playing swashbuckling roles” had excited the fancy of the Chilean pilots.
    As the evening wore on, and after swigging several or more of the pisco sours, Doolittle announced that Fairbanks’s stunts weren’t particularly unusual. In fact, said he, all American children learn to do those things. Doolittle’s command of Spanish was not as good as he thought, but when that statement was finally translated the Chileans’ “eyebrows raised in doubt.”
    “Inspired by the pisco sours,” Doolittle said, “I upended into a handstand, and ‘walked’ a few paces.” This polished gymnastic exhibition delighted the Chilean hosts, who clapped and shouted ole! Doolittle then entertained them with a series of flips, which electrified the crowd and elicited even more handclapping and shouting.
    One of the Chilean pilots offered that he had seen Fairbanks perform a handstand on a windowsill, which struck Doolittle as “reasonable,” so he went to an open window, climbed through, and did a two-hand stand on the two-foot-wide ledge. This led to a one-hand stand, which, after more ovation, prompted the agile former boxer and gymnast to overextend himself, as it were, with a stunt from his tumbling days.
    “Grasping the inside of the ledge with one hand,” Doolittle said, “I extended my legs and body parallel with the courtyard, one story below. This isn’t difficult. Just requires a little practice and knowledge of body leverage.” Otherwise known as a one-armed body lever, this was an extremely difficult stunt, especially when “practice” was nonexistent.
    Reveling in the applause from his hosts, Doolittle held his precarious position for a few seconds until, to his dismay, he felt the sandstone of the ancient ledge he was holding begin to crumble beneath his fingers and break off. There was nothing to be done. The laws of gravity took over.
    Doolittle plunged about twenty feet from the second story to a stone courtyard, luckily landing feet first—if you can call breaking both your ankles lucky. That was the verdict when they got him to the hospital and X-rayed the damage. It was a sobering experience in more ways than one, as Doolittle quickly realized the foolhardiness of what he had done. A minimum of six weeks, the