Free Kelly by Clarence L. Johnson

purchased could climb to an altitude of 23,000 feet. And they wanted proof, not just the word of a flight test engineer or pilot. They required that we fly to that altitude with a sealed barograph, an instrument that automatically records barometric pressure.
    At that time, the prevailing opinion was that you should not breathe any more oxygen than necessary at altitude because of the threat of oxygen poisoning. And, of course, all we had to breathe with was a cigarette holder connected to an oxygen line. It took us three flights before we reached the altitude requirement. We’d climb and climb and not make it. Finally wechanged airspeeds and some other factors and managed to reach the desired altitude.
    But when we landed, I felt so ill that someone had to drive me home. I literally fell onto the bed and practically had to hold on to keep from falling off. I was really, really sick. It was a frightening experience, and sparked my continuing interest in oxygen systems, pressure suits, and pressure cabins from that day to this. I’ve had ample opportunity since, in the light of later developments, to respect those early pioneering tests of Wiley and others.
    Some of our other test equipment in those days was as primitive as that cigarette-holder oxygen system. But it worked. To determine the drag of the tail wheel in flight tests on the Model 12A, I rigged a standard fish-market scale to the wheel and strut—just in front. The drag force would register on the scale by causing the arm to move. In this case, it showed that the drag was not important enough that we need make the gear retractable.
    The first flight of the Model 14 was one I won’t forget. Marshall Headle was pilot and I was flight engineer, having worked on design of the new wing flaps and a good deal of the rest of the airplane. It was an important flight. No one had been able to put the Fowler flaps on a commercial airplane successfully. They weren’t the usual wing flap that was lowered to act as an air brake. They slid backward out of the wing and added effectively to wing area, allowing a large wing for landing and takeoff control and a small wing for speed in flight.
    Lockheed didn’t yet have its own wind tunnel, but I had run a great many tests at California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in Pasadena, where Lockheed and six other aeronautical companies would rent tunnel time. I had set the design conditions for installation of the flaps in the airplane and was confident that I knew something about it.
    We took off from the old runway behind the factory, and when we got to altitude and started to lower the flaps for the first time to test their operation, there was a “bang.” The flaps went all the way down and we couldn’t raise them. We had losthydraulic pressure in the system—not a serious defect but critical at the moment. We experimented with different approaches to getting the airplane back on the ground and discovered that the slower we flew the more the flaps came up. Not too healthy a situation for a landing—at least, not with the limited runway length we had.
    But I happened to recall, fortunately, that at about a 20 percent flap setting there was a bend in the flap tracks that would stop the flaps. So we went on in for a landing with flaps free; and as we slowed and they came to that 20 percent setting, they held that position and we landed safely. Most of our Lockheed aircraft now have triple or quadruple redundancy in hydraulic as well as other key systems.
    At the time of the Model 14 flight test program, I still hadn’t learned my lesson about not taking on more than I was authorized to do. We had a lot of work to complete and I wanted to get on with it. On one Sunday when our chief pilot Headle wasn’t available, I prevailed on another pilot, “Mac” McCloud, to fly the plane while I went along as flight engineer. He was a licensed pilot but hadn’t been checked out in that airplane by a qualified pilot.
    I had no