We descended south from Flagstaff into the northern embrace of the Sonoran Desert. Bone dry 115-degree afternoon air shimmered in the distance. Our old used car didn’t have air conditioning. Pregnant wife, cat, and I soon felt the summer blast furnace blowing in from the open wing vents. It was far different than the cool damp air of our Oregon home. We settled into an affordable duplex in Chandler, not far southeast of Phoenix. Inside air was conditioned somewhat by a droning evaporative swamp cooler on the roof; muggy slightly cooler air bathed us. There were visitors. We fell asleep each night to the clacks of tiny Ladybird beetles from the adjacent field of cotton as these intruders fell from the cracks in the ceiling onto the kitchen floor and into the bathtub. Morning routine included sweeping them out the back door or swishing them down the drain during my shower. The little beetles controlled pests in the cotton fields, often aided by low-flying aircraft dispensing a spray of chemicals.
A newly minted second lieutenant, I had turned in my orders at Williams Air Force Base. There, I got it, or would get it: Undergraduate Pilot Training. I was assigned to John Black Flight. But first things first: welcoming briefings, pay records, forms to fill, training manuals, boots, flight suits, John Black shoulder patches and name tags to sew on. I walked proudly around the base those first few administrative days. Training was obviously in full swing. Jet aircraft were seen and heard overhead in the landing patterns: the pudgy side-by-side T-37 Tweety Bird primary trainer; the sleek, tandem T-38 Talon supersonic trainer. This was the real deal. They got my heart racing. Testosterone outpaced the development of my frontal lobes.
Training in the jet-powered Tweet would have to wait six weeks. Eager students all, we were bused south each day to the Casa Grande airport. The airspace there was not as crowded as it was at Willie, and certainly no need to mix aircraft with far different airspeeds. Through various programs leading to commissioning, and on our own, some of us had a private pilot’s license and a few, like me, had accumulated nearly 100 hours of flight time and the experience that went with it. Some had only been aircraft passengers. The introductory program at Casa Grande would normalize things, ensuring that we could not only take off, land and perform basic aerial maneuvers to Air Force standards, but also fly by the Air Force book: strict adherence to checklists and procedures; radio communications discipline.
One bright sunny desert morning, we boarded a blue Air Force bus at Willie for our first trip to Casa Grande and read the instructor assignment sheet thrust in our hands. It showed the layout of tables and instructors’ names. We clambered off the bus in fresh flight suits and spread into the flight briefing room. Each table had a seated instructor and a tented cardboard placard with his name. Instructors at Casa Grande were civilians contracted by the Air Force. Without saying anything, our assigned white-haired instructor just motioned for the five of us to sit down as we each found his table. He spoke with difficulty. “My name is Neal Morris, Mr. Morris to you. I’ll be your flight instructor for the next six weeks.”
The words were simple enough but hardly any of us understood them. His voice was hoarse, gravelly, and raspy. He sounded like he was trying to clear his throat. He noticed our blank stares and repeated himself to be understood with louder raspy words. We tried not to stare at the hole through the front of his throat. He covered it with the fingertips of one hand when he spoke. When not covered, we faintly heard the breath of life flowing through that hole. He asked our names and our flight experience: flight hours and aircraft types. His sage lined face nodded slowly as we spoke in turn, he taking the measure of his share of the students of John Black Flight. It turned out that we all had a fair amount of pre-Air Force experience piloting aircraft, likely the reason we were assigned to Mr. Morris.
Air Force flying was replete with procedures; our lives depended on the emergency ones. We also learned some secrets. They weren’t written down in the manuals we were given. We learned them on our first ride with Mr. Morris.
The aircraft was a T-41 Mescalero, a two-seat version of the popular Cessna 172 high-wing aircraft with tricycle landing gear and a propeller driven by a gas engine. For those of us who knew how to fly, it was familiar and comforting.
On the ramp, he watched me inspect the aircraft. I pulled the wheel chocks away. Mr. Morris hefted himself into the instructor’s right seat; I joined him in the left. I noted a restriction. It hadn’t been mentioned at the table but there it was, white letters engraved into a black plastic plate fastened above the instrument panel – NO SMOKING . Silent, he just flipped his hand for me to continue. Through an open side window, I called out a verbal warning to stand clear of the propeller, started the engine and checked its gauges as it came up to speed. I requested and received clearance from the tower and taxied to the engine run-up area at the end of the runway. Everything checked out at increased power and magneto settings. Cleared for takeoff, I took to the air and departed the pattern, proud that Mr. Morris just watched and touched nothing. I climbed out in the planned direction to the planned altitude in the training area near the airfield, as we had discussed at the table.
I glanced over at Mr. Morris, his movement caught my eye. He leaned forward, reached under his seat and released a catch. With his other hand, he pushed against the side of the instrument panel. The seat slid back to its maximum rearward extent with a metallic clunk. Mr. Morris then took a more comfortable posture. He leaned back with butt slid forward, legs extended. He was getting comfortable. I thought maybe his aging back hurt.
I watched in confused amazement. Mr. Morris reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a pouch of HALF and HALF pipe tobacco followed by a packet of cigarette paper. He rolled his own after wetting the thin paper edges with his tongue, spilling some tobacco shreds in the process. Out came an engraved Zippo lighter. He snapped it open. With the flick of his thumb, a flame appeared. With fingers against the hole in his throat, sucking with collapsing cheeks, the gnarly cigarette lit. He inhaled deeply with that familiar look of relieved satisfaction seen in smoking ads and on the faces of smokers everywhere. Mr. Morris released the catch of his side window. The slipstream sucked out the smoke. I continued the climb.
Mr. Morris timed it perfectly. When I reached the intended altitude and leveled off he had finished his smoke. He pinched-out the small burning cigarette butt with wetted finger tips and flicked it out the window. There didn’t appear to be much to catch fire in the barren brown Arizona desert below. He leaned forward, released the seat catch, grabbed the under-edge of the instrument panel and pulled himself forward to where his feet could rest on the rudder pedals and his hands could reach his control yoke. He didn’t say anything but merely motioned with a tilted hand to do a turn to my left, which I did. As I rolled out wings level, he motioned for me to do it again. I did. He still wasn’t satisfied. He pointed to his chest and slapped my right hand away from my yoke, leaned next to my ear with a raspy, “I got it.” Hands off the yoke, I gave him control of the aircraft. He demonstrated a very precise 360-degree turn with 30-degrees of bank, rolled wings level and pulled the throttle to idle to quiet the cabin a bit. He leaned very close to my right ear again, put fingers to his throat and spat out, “Damn it! Watch your altitude! Give me a better turn.” His firm direction was laced with graveled overtones. Then it was onto steep turns and a stall recovery series, as he had covered in the pre-flight briefing. Each was followed by hoarse admonitions and salty hard-to-understand advice.
Mr. Morris glanced at his wristwatch and gave a hand gesture to descend and pointed to the Casa Grande airfield to my left. I powered back followed by radio calls to the tower. It would be a few minutes before I would enter the outside downwind leg of the traffic pattern. But there was enough time for Mr. Morris to enjoy another strong cigarette with his seat again slid all the way back. I pretended not to notice. Pointing to the NO SMOKING sign would be impertinent; any such thoughts were sucked out the window.
As I approached entry to the downwind leg, he slid his seat forward. No doubt, he should be in position to take control should I err in trying to touch the wheels to the runway. No worry, I greased it on with wheel chirps. I slowed then turned off onto the taxiway. With a raised flat hand, he motioned for me to brake to a full stop. I did. He pulled the throttle to idle, but not for conversation. Reduced prop wash enabled him to open his side door wide. He used his handkerchief to sweep out any shreds of HALF and HALF or their ash. Done, cabin cleaned, he motioned for me to continue to the parking ramp. I put chocks around the main wheels and said nothing.
There was a lot of student chatter in the bus on the way back to Willie. I sat with my table mates. We compared our introductory flights. We leaned close together, spoke quietly, asking about the cigarettes and the taxiway procedure. Our stories matched. We all had difficulty understanding Mr. Morris. We then wondered aloud about the hole in his throat. An Air Force pilot for Casa Grande operations was sitting near. He let us in on Mr. Morris’ not-so-secret physical condition. He had been a heavy smoker. The hole through his throat, a tracheostomy, was necessary to bypass where a cancerous tumor had been removed. This life-saving surgery had been recent, and he was still on contract. We were his first students with his new verbal condition. Poor Mr. Morris, we all thought. We would try very hard to understand him, on the ground and in the air, not stare, and certainly not bring up the subject of his vocal impairment, or the cigarettes. We were also told that he had instructed aviation cadets at Williams Field during World War II. We did not know his age; but with snow-white hair he looked weathered, worn out. It was only 21 years after the war. Back then, he may have been too old to be drafted but was old and experienced enough to teach others to fly.
We fumbled with our conflicting thoughts. Mr. Morris had throat cancer but he still smoked, inhaling pipe tobacco, no less. Was he that much addicted and had just given up, wanting to live a shorter more enjoyable life? Had the cancer spread, making a few more cigarettes trivial? It was certainly not our place to ask. Then there was Air Force policy about smoking in the aircraft. Would, or should, we turn him in? Good Lord, no! This man was an icon; he had taught aviation cadets to fly for the war effort. If asked about his in-aircraft smoking by stiff-necked Air Force supervisory types, would we lie? We later agreed that we would not betray him. We became adept at automatically making the short stop on the taxiway, without being asked, for him to clean smoking debris out of the cabin. The five of us did this for the remainder of our six weeks of T-41 training when we flew with Mr. Morris. We kept his not-so-secret. Others, fellow instructors, maybe even supervising Air Force officers, probably knew, and just looked the other way.
During the remainder of my training out of Casa Grande, I sharpened my flying skills to Mr. Morris’ standards. Solo flights were mixed with dual instruction and check flights. On some flights with him I met syllabus requirements with minimal instruction, leaving time for other things beyond smoking. On one flight, he slapped my hand from the yoke. “I got it,” he rasped. He throttled the engine to idle. As loudly as he could, he forced his question into my ear, “Have I spun you?” Well, no, he hadn’t. I certainly would have remembered. While an eager student pilot, I wasn’t so eager to see the T-41 in a more-dangerous flight condition: both wings stalled, one more than the other, one wing chased by the other like a dog chasing its tail, nose pointed steeply toward the approaching ground. I was pretty sure that the aircraft was built strong enough to handle ham-fisted spin recovery, but you never know. Keeping the wings attached to the fuselage was sort of important. I felt a little more comfortable thinking that surely Mr. Morris knew how to handle spins or he wouldn’t have asked. But he was tempting, or ensuring, his fate with his continued smoking. Would that attitude extend to tail spins? I meekly shook my head … no … he hadn’t spun me. He flew steep turns, left and right, checking the airspace beneath us so as not to spin down into a hapless unsuspecting pilot. He leveled the wings, reduced power to idle, and pulled the T-41’s nose up into a steep stall. I cinched my lap belt tighter. Before the stall buffet started, he caged the attitude indicator which depended on a spinning gyroscope. But there was something he had missed, or just ignored. Right next to the little NO SMOKING sign was another: TAIL SPINS PROHIBITED . I guessed that if adherence to no smoking was flexible, so was compliance with the no tail spins edict.
The little Mescalero shook as turbulent air flow over its wings drained away lift in fits and starts. As its nose dropped in response, he put in a full boot of left rudder and pulled the yoke all the way to his chest and held it there. If not, the aircraft would have recovered by itself with the pilot merely having to level the wings and pull the nose up to a level attitude. Aircraft designed for general civilian aviation, like the Cessna 172, must be forgiving to all manner of pilot inputs, including those leading to a tail spin and recovery. Mr. Morris held the aircraft in the spin for four turns; I counted as the brown desert hypnotically approached. The fuselage creaked and rattled with sounds I’d never heard before. He finally figured that I had had enough fun, glanced at the altimeter, and recovered from the spin quickly and smoothly. The only thing different was the big grin that framed his face. He pointed to the control yoke and pointed to the airport. I replied, “I got it.” The familiar clunk of his seat and the smell of smoldering HALF and HALF tobacco accompanied our return to Casa Grande.
Between barely-heard gravelly-voiced commands, smoke breaks, tails spins, hand slaps, and “I got it,” I figured that I had been immersed in all corners of Mr. Morris’s unique flight training regimen. I was wrong. Another flight yielded some extra time to be used up for things not in the Air Force training syllabus.
With irrigation, some of the desert had been turned productive. Green fields of cotton were easily seen from the air against brown desert surroundings. From the ground, including my back yard, the sights and sounds of cotton growing and harvesting operations were seen and heard beyond tractors and trucks. It was the spraying of chemicals from the air by a different fraternity of pilots: crop dusters. When the wind was sufficiently calm so that released chemicals settled down on the fields of choice, they flew just a few feet off the ground and missed power lines and poles by equally narrow margins. We were not surprised to learn that Mr. Morris had been a crop duster to supplement his aviation income when training military pilots had slackened between wars.
On my last flight with Mr. Morris, I successfully demonstrated a flight maneuver. If not tobacco, there was time to burn. He slapped my hand away from the control yoke. “I got it.” I thought he was going to demonstrate the same maneuver, only better. But, no, he just put the T-41 into a steep descending spiral that just happened to be near a field of cotton planted in long straight rows. I made sure to keep my hands and feet away from anything to do with flight as we neared the ground, very near. We were at full speed about five feet above a plowed field approaching an adjacent field of cotton on the other side of a road with poles and power lines. I could see that our line-of-flight was directly and precisely in line with the rows of cotton. At the very last minute he pulled up and over the lines, missed them by a few feet, then dropped down on the other side to the level of the cotton branches. I heard a slight thrashing sound from the nose wheel as it brushed the top leaves of the cotton plants. I looked down. The left landing gear tire was below the height of the plants as was the wheel on the right side; he straddled the row. It was precise flying with tolerances of inches. I glanced over and saw his familiar grin, wider this time. He had let me into a different corner of his flying world in the unknown number of days he had left. I felt honored. There were power lines at the other end of the field. At a seemingly very close distance, he pulled the T-41 up then into steep-banked slow-speed turn, crossed over the same power lines flying back in the opposite direction, back down to plant level, and straddled the row adjacent to the first. He pulled up again, just clearing the power lines at the other end and started a climb back to student-training altitude before returning control back to me. “I got it.” I heard the reassuring clunk. There would be time for a smoke.
All of us in John Black Flight made it through the six weeks of T-41 training at Casa Grande. We honed our skills and had learned to fly the Air Force way. We looked forward to flying jets, to becoming “top guns” even though the movie by that name had yet to hit the screens. For us five, we were proud to have been part of Mr. Morris’ life, exposed to his unique attitude towards aviation, flight, and its regulation. He certainly was a unique character. Mr. Morris shook each of our hands firmly when we boarded the blue bus back to Willie for the last time and wished us a raspy “Good luck.”
John Black Flight gathered daily, early morning one week, afternoon the next, in a T-37 flight briefing room near the Willie flight line. The tables had different instructors; they were Air Force pilots. A few had flown in combat. My instructor had flown sorties in the hostile skies of North Vietnam. Like Mr. Morris, he, too, looked at life in the skies a little differently. After I demonstrated good touch-and-go landings at a remote auxiliary airfield, he requested control confirmed with “I got it.” With the touch of a violin player, we screamed across the desert trying to knock needles off the tops of Saguaro cactus.
One afternoon, as we prepared for training flights according to the scheduling board, an instructor walked in and called our attention for an announcement he was about to make. We thought that it would be about the weather, some flight restriction or safety advice. It was not. It was much worse. He soberly announced that Mr. Morris had died with family and close friends by his side. Mr. Morris’ students at Casa Grande now had different instructors at different tables. We glanced across the room at each other and slowly shook our heads.
Before heading home, the five of us agreed to stop at the Officer’s Club. We ordered five shots of whiskey then clinked and raised them in a farewell toast to a most memorable and unique man. Then it was down the hatch. There was a pipe smoker at the bar, the aroma prompted our memories. Silently, in our minds, when we set the shot glasses back down, we faintly heard a raspy “I got it” – for his final flight that followed.
Robert Wright completed a 27-year Air Force career (four times a commander, retiring in the rank of full colonel) followed by 11 years on the Washington D.C. Beltway (managing military research and development) then began writing in retirement, self-publishing: You’ve Got Rocks (non-fiction, anthology of memoirs); The Brass (non-fiction, world-famous pub in Portland, Oregon); 3FTx – Timed Terror (fiction, suspense/terror); Nudging Nyame (hard science fiction, suspense/terror).
This article first appeared in an issue of In Flight USA aviation magazine.
Stills are from “The Year of 53 Weeks,” a 1966 film featuring the year-long training program of Air Force pilots, available on the US National Archives YouTube channel.