Yeager: An Autobiography

TO MOSCOW WITH JACKIE

In 1959, Jackie Cochran was elected president of the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the most prestigious international organization in aviation, and it was scheduled to hold its annual meeting in Moscow. Jackie decided to fly to that meeting in her own two-engine Lockheed Lodestar, a private passenger airplane that Floyd had bought for her a few years before. I had flown it with her a couple of times, but she had never before flown as far as Russia and wanted to take me along to navigate and be her copilot. So, the summer before my squadron flew to Aviano, Jackie made her pitch to the Chief of Staff, and I was granted permission to go on special assignment with her to Russia. The Air Force thought it was a rare opportunity to get an experienced military pilot in there to nose around. They gave me intelligence briefings, aeronautical charts and maps, long-range cameras, and plenty of film.

Playing James Bond, I wore civilian clothes and carried a civilian passport, hoping to pass myself off as Jackie's hired civilian copilot. Jackie was at her New York apartment getting ready, and by the time I caught up with her she was supervising last minute details at LaGuardia's private terminal. She never traveled light, but she outdid herself this time. As passengers we carried her private secretary, her maid, and her hairdresser, as well as a woman from the State Department to act as her Russian interpreter. The baggage compartment bulged. I crawled in next to her in the copilot's seat and just shook my head. That airplane must've weighed as much as a B-52, but she got us into the air with at least a couple of feet of runway to spare, and we climbed into the midnight sky.

Gen. Tommy White, the Air Force Chief of Staff, had written to base commanders along our route, ordering them to assist Jackie in any way. We planned to refuel at the air base in Presque Isle, Maine, and around two in the morning I called the tower and gave them our civilian identification number, November one three victor, the number on her tail. The tower refused to allow us to land, even when I told them that Jackie had permission. "Oh, sure," they replied, "so does Lana Turner." I told Jackie to set up her landing approach and told the tower "I'm declaring an emergency. You can't refuse permission under these circumstances." Hell, we were almost out of fuel. The tower informed me that if we tried landing, they would turn off the runway lights.

Jackie grabbed the mike: "This is Jacqueline Cochran. I am landing." As soon as we stopped rolling, the airplane was surrounded by air police, who clomped aboard, ordered us out, and escorted us under guard to base operations. Finally the base commander arrived, a bird colonel who obviously didn't read his mail, because Jackie's name meant nothing to him. "You people will leave immediately," he said. "This base is closed to all civilian traffic." I just waited for Jackie to blow, but she surprised me by smiling sweetly and asking, "Sir, may I have your permission to make a phone call? I have a credit card." The colonel nodded and Jackie began to dial. It was two-thirty in the morning. She said, "Tommy, sorry to wake you, but I've just landed at your base at Presque Isle, and I'm getting the idiot's treatment. Yes, sir, he's standing right here." She handed the receiver to the colonel. He was the first guy I ever saw talk on the phone while standing at attention. His face turned to chalk, and he muttered "Yes, sir" over and over as he got Roto-Rootered long distance by the Chief of Staff. When he hung up, he managed a small smile and said to Jackie, "Miss Cochran, you can have anything you need or want, including this air base."

Jackie signed for the fuel and left five bucks for the coffee we drank. And that's how our trip began.

Four days later we flew into Yugoslavia, after spending three hectic days in Spain, where Jackie was wined and dined as FAI president. From Belgrade, it was on to Hungary, and we flew through the Iron Curtain for Budapest. The Communists were strict about where we could overfly. A Russian navigator joined us in Belgrade to fly with us behind the Iron Curtain. They insisted on putting him aboard over their territory, and we were all ready for him. He sat down in the copilot's seat and the minute our wheels went up, I left the cockpit and locked the door behind me. We had rigged Jackie's cockpit gyro to deviate it. Up front, it appeared as if we were going straight ahead, when actually we were flying a great circle route. My maps showed all their airfields and I could control the cabin gyro from the master in the rear of the airplane. I got some great pictures of MiG bases before we landed.

When we finally flew into the Soviet Union, camera work wasn't on my mind. The weather was so rotten that we had to battle our way in. Over the Carpathian Mountains the Lodestar began to ice, and our navigator looked a little green. We were following his damned flight plan. He had diverted us to Kiev, instead of following our schedule into Poland where, he said, the weather was terrible. Kiev was an alternate and it couldn't be worse than Poland. The weather was so awful that we couldn't make radio contact with Kiev. and I began to wonder if maybe the navigator's bosses weren't setting us up to splat. Jackie did all the driving, while I studied the approach charts into Kiev. The navigator's English matched the damned weather, but he took the chart and pointed to a route different from what was printed, insisting that was the way to get in.

It was no time to argue, and we followed his route, Jackie lowering us through black clouds into pouring rain and heavy winds. Visibility was zilch, a really rough deal, with crosswinds blowing at 40 mph. But ol' Jackie laid that airplane down right at the end of the runway, on one wheel-a great piece of piloting-and set us down on a grass strip! The Russians must've really been surprised that we made It. I was sure they wanted to wipe us out. I figured that strip hadn't been used since World War II. But their guy on board looked even more relieved than the gals in the passenger section when we pulled up to a small shed and Jackie turned off the engines. Then she put on fresh lipstick, powdered her nose and combed her hair. She always left an airplane looking as if she had been to the hairdresser's.

I didn't say anything to Jackie. She was already paranoid about the Russians, worrying they would kidnap me if they found out who I really was. I thought she was nuts, but Floyd had planted that seed by remarking to her that he was surprised the Air Force had allowed me to go. I knew too much as a test pilot and TAC squadron commander. "Goddamn it," she said, as a couple of Russians in uniform approached our airplane in the wind and rain "I'm not gonna let you out of my sight." But the next day we flew into Moscow, and as soon as we landed Jackie was swept up in flowers and formal welcomes and whisked away. The rest of us had our passports taken away. They also took away our airplane; we wouldn't see it again until we left the country three weeks later. Meanwhile, the Russians made such a fuss over her, and she kept all of them hopping by changing schedules and adding dinners and receptions, that it was easy for me to go unnoticed, while passing myself off as her hired copilot.

I forget how many countries sent delegations to the convention, but she entertained them all. When she ran short of money, she wired her New York bank to send more via the American embassy. Those poor gals in her entourage could have used ten more in help because Jackie fired off as many phone calls, cables, and letters daily as our embassy down the street. Being a perfectionist, Jackie was stuck in the wrong country. The Russians did things their own way, and she was usually hopping mad. I'd try to get her mind on other things.

One day as we were leaving the hotel I teased her: "Hey, Jackie, did you know you had bow legs?"

She stopped in her tracks. "I do!"

"Yeah, I m surprised I never noticed it before." There really was nothing wrong with them, but for days afterwards I'd crack up seeing her sneak looks at her legs.

The Russians found out who I really was at their official banquet at the Kremlin. All their aviation honchos attended, and I sat across from Colonel Mikoyan, their chief test pilot, whose brother Arem designed the MiG, and whose father Nikolai was Soviet foreign minister. Ol' Sergei Mikoyan overheard somebody say "Mr. Yeager, please Pass the vodka," and perked right up. "Yeager,' he said, "the test pilot?" I admitted it gladly because up to then Russia had been a boring experience, mostly tagging around after Jackie, and I almost welcomed being kidnapped if it would be interesting. Mikoyan became very animated and pointed me out to the people with him. He introduced me to Andrei Tupolev, their famous bomber designer, and said, "We must meet and have a long talk."

The Russians sent a car for me the next day, and we met at an ice-skating hippodrome, not far from the Kremlin. There was a conference room upstairs with Kvass, their bottled soft drink, next to each chair at a large table. There were two guys with Mikoyan, "colleagues," he said. I noticed that every fifteen minutes one or the other of those two would get up to go to the bathroom-changing the tape in their recorders.

I was amazed at how much Mikoyan knew about me, even that I had test flown the MiG 15 at Okinawa. I told him, "Yeah, when I dove that thing, I sure wished you people had learned about a moving tail." He laughed. "My God, you actually dove in it? Anytime that nose dropped, my heart would stop."

It was interesting for me to learn how little flying time their test pilots logged compared to someone like me, who flew anything and everything all the time. Their total flight time wasn't a tenth of mine. But ol' Mikoyan was surprisingly knowledgeable about our new airplanes and their systems. He knew, for example, that I was leading a squadron of F-100s and began pumping me about its range and performance, and I told him only what had already appeared in Aviation Week. He was really eager to learn whatever he could about the F-104, our Mach 2 fighter the so-called missile with a man in it, and the sumbitch actually knew that I had done the military test flying on it. I said, "Colonel, as long as I'm in your country, how about giving me a ride in your new MiG 21?" He laughed. "Colonel, I will do it if you give me a ride in your 104."

At one point, he became very confidential and asked me what we were doing about trying to solve the problem of engine compressor stalls-shock waves forming inside the engine, causing flameout. The way he asked it was clear that they hadn't solved it, and I wasn't about to tell him that our engineers had. I just looked mournful the way he did. When I left I kind of searched myself to make sure my own pocket wasn't picked, that I hadn't accidentally told him something valuable. I was sure I hadn't, and those two tough-looking guys with him did not seem very pleased.

I never did get to ride in any of their military airplanes, but Tupolev and Mikoyan staged a dinner in my honor, and many of their top pilots and brass attended. Pilot talk is pilot talk the world over, and a lot of those guys had flown against the Germans in World War II, using our lend-lease airplanes. We had given them the good ol' P-39, the airplane I had trained in, and which, alone in our squadron, I had really enjoyed. So, we swapped P-39 stories, and they were delighted that I had flown hundreds of hours in an airplane they loved. They sure as hell didn't think we had sent them a dog.

Jackie had a half-promise that we could fly out of Russia via Siberia, over the Aleutian chain into Alaska. She wanted to end up at her California ranch and that route would save us three thousand miles. But as the time came to leave, the Russians changed their minds. Jackie was a tough old tiger, and she snarled and snapped at a couple of high-ranking Soviet generals to the point where I got nervous. Civilians just don't yell at generals and call them idiots. I grabbed her and took her aside and whispered, "Shut up, damn it, before they fly you to Siberia, not over it." But they did give her permission to fly out via Rumania. By then, I think, they were just glad to see the back of her. When we got to the airport, the KGB were crawling all over our airplane. They even took off some outside panels-looking for stowaways, I guess. They never did find my film and cameras.

A few days later I got some great shots of a MiG base as we were letting down over Sofia, Bulgaria, and that evening, I met most of those MiG pilots at the home of one of our embassy people. That's when I learned that a drunken diplomat is a bigger pain than hemorrhoids. Our guy laid on the vodka to loosen the Russians, but succeeded only in hammering himself and became obnoxious. He told the Russians, "I've seen you guys fly, and you're really not much. Colonel Yeager can take on six of you at once and wax you right out of the sky." Those Russian pilots plonked down their glasses and left without saying so long. I didn't blame them. Jackie was livid and I'm sure she complained about the diplomat's performance as soon as she got back. The guy was a fool, and a potentially interesting evening was ruined.

The next day was Jackie's turn to play the fool. She almost got herself clapped in prison. She wanted to fly on to Turkey, but the Bulgarians and the Turks are not exactly kissing cousins. Both countries prohibit direct flights, and the Bulgarians told her, "You can't go into Turkey from here. They won't permit it." Jackie picked up the phone and got a call through to the Turkish air force Chief of Staff, a pal of hers, and said, "Will you please tell these idiots that I can come into your country from anywhere?" Unfortunately, the Bulgarian air marshal understood English well enough to know that being called an idiot was not something he'd take from his wife, much less a rich American woman. If the guy had been carrying a pistol, I really thought Jackie would've been blasted. The air marshal snarled at her, "Madam, you have exactly one hour to leave this country. And you will fly via Yugoslavia." I got us the hell out of there.

By then I had had enough, but Jackie had her second wind. We flew back to Spain, arriving late at night over Madrid in some of the worst weather I've ever seen. St. Elmo's fire danced along our wings, and Jackie gave me the controls and went back to the passenger compartment to tell her worried entourage, "Don't worry. The best pilot in the world will get us down." Man, I had to be the best that night. When we landed there were six inches of hailstones on the runway.

We spent three days resting, then flew back to Paris for the annual air show. On our last night there we ate at a four-star restaurant, and Jackie got edgy watching the rest of us enjoying a perfect meal and excellent service. That's when she really got dangerous because complacency drove her nuts. But then, she saw her opening: a woman at a nearby table was feeding scraps to her poodle, and Jackie, who had a cleanliness fetish, went into a rage. The French love to bring their dogs to restaurants, and who in hell cared. Jackie called for the owner. "You're not going to allow that, are you?" When told that he sure as hell was, Jackie staged a big scene and stormed out.

On the homeward leg, we headed north to the Arctic Circle, and flew along the ice cap at 10,000 feet on a sparkling clear day, one of the most beautiful sights I've ever enjoyed in my years of flying. It was a tough but interesting trip, with a lot of hard flying and navigating, and when I got home, having been gone nearly two months, I told Glennis: "Goddamn it, that's it. Never, ever again." But I always said that after going on a trip with Jackie.