Fighter Pilot's Heaven: Flight Testing the Early Jets

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During the Gulf War of 1991 the entire world was amazed at the sophisticated weapons used by the American forces. Television captured vivid pictures of bombs literally flying down ventilation shafts, and there were stories of airplanes that were invisible to radar detection. The conflict displayed wonders of technology put to a destructive purpose. The roots of that technology go back many, many years.

America, between the two great wars, was almost backward in the development of military weapons and certainly primitive in the airborne weapons arena. Civilian airliners of the thirties were faster than bombers. The most sophisticated aircraft of the era were often civilian racing planes. World War II changed all of that. That ultimate effort may well have represented the pinnacle of the American civilization. Vast changes were wrought in the tools of air warfare.

Don Lopez has written one book, Into the Teeth of the Tiger, that describes his part in World War II. As a newly commissioned, nineteen-year-old aviator, he fought in China, became an ace, and participated in the early evolution of American air weapons supremacy. Upon his return to the States, before the end of the war, Lope was assigned to Eglin Air Force Base and began a career as a test pilot, proving and improving the aircraft that had done so much to win the war. His days at Eglin were spent in that slow and often dangerous process of test and evaluation. He was one of the first American pilots to fly the Bell P-59, America's first jet aircraft. He participated in every fighter development in the immediate postwar era and, in addition, was selected by the Air Force to attend one of the first classes of the Air Force Test Pilot School at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.

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