Pilots

At the age of 32, Kevin Eldridge makes his living restoring and flying World War II aircraft. Seventeen hundred of his 2,100 flight hours have been in vintage warbirds. He has flown aircraft for a number of motion pictures, and he is a competitive Unlimited-class air racer. But on March 19, he also became one of only a very few civilians eligible to join the Caterpillar Club, an organization reserved for people who have bailed out of an airplane — for survival, not sport.

Eldridge was racing the 4,100-hp F2G Super Corsair at the Phoenix 500 Air Races March 19 when a catastrophic engine failure led to an in- flight fire. As the flames appeared that would soon trail 75 feet behind the racer's fuselage, Eldridge's ground crew ordered him to bail out. Almost all race pilots, competitive aerobatic pilots, and air-show performers wear parachutes in case of just this kind of situation. Emergency bailouts are extremely rare, however, and Eldridge soon discovered that reality is a very different experience than the ideal scenarios discussed in classes and textbooks.

The Super Corsair was a modified World War II Navy fighter owned by the Fighter Rebuilders restoration shop in Chino, California, where Eldridge works. Powered by a Pratt & Whitney R-4360 28-cylinder radial engine, it raced at speeds greater than 400 mph. Eldridge had helped build the racer in 1982 and was crew chief when Steve Hinton, who owns Fighter Rebuilders, flew it to a national championship in 1985. The Phoenix races marked the fourth time Eldridge had competed in the airplane. He was on the third lap of a heat race when the engine started running rough. "I pulled the power back, but it still kept running rough," Eldridge remembers, "so I pulled up and called a Mayday."

In Unlimited-class air racing, pilots fly an oval pylon course approximately 100 feet off the ground. In any emergency, the first order of business is to trade some of that 400-plus-mph speed for altitude. As Eldridge climbed to about 3,500 feet agl, his ground crew could see white smoke pouring out of the underside of the engine. Then, as Eldridge puts it, "all hell broke loose."

The engine started vibrating violently, then quit, making a lot of expensive-sounding noise in the process. Eldridge cut the mixture and began preparing for a dead-stick landing, but his crew radioed that he was on fire and to bail out.

The Corsair, as with many racers or aerobatic airplanes, was designed for performance, not stability. As it slowed following Eldridge's pull-out, it flew increasingly right-wing and nose heavy. After Eldridge disconnected his oxygen hose, headset, and seat belt and let go of the stick to slide back the canopy, the airplane immediately nosed over and to the right. He grabbed the stick again, rolled in more nose-up trim, and tried again to open the canopy, knowing he had only a few seconds from the time he let go of the stick before the airplane would roll sharply to the right.

Because the Corsair has floor runners rather than a solid floor, Eldridge had to jump up on the seat to stand up. From there, the book says to dive out of the cockpit toward the trailing edge of the wing. But when Eldridge tried to jump, his left foot got stuck on something, and he couldn't move. By then, smoke had filled the cockpit, and he knew there were 150 gallons of very inflammable fuel sitting right in front of the cockpit bulkhead. "I remember pushing down on the side rails of the cockpit with everything I had," he says, "and I couldn't get out. Then, finally, I broke loose and just flopped over the side. The plane was still going over 220 mph, and the air pulled me out."

The trouble Eldridge had getting out of the cockpit probably caused his first injury, a double compound fracture of his lower left leg. It also led to a more serious problem. Because Eldridge was unable to dive away from the airplane, his head and arm hit the horizontal stabilizer as he departed the racer. Despite wearing a helmet, the impact broke his neck and his arm. Although the kind of neck injury he sustained often is fatal, Eldridge suffered no permanent damage and is expected to recover fully. He also was fortunate in that he was using a sturdy military parachute; at those speeds, a lighter sport parachute would have ripped apart. As it was, two panels in his parachute were completely blown out, stress holes appeared in more than 50 percent of the rest of the material, and the band holding the bottom of the canopy together was torn two thirds of the way through.

Eldridge had planned to take a parachuting course this summer so he would be better prepared for an emergency bailout. In retrospect, he says the course would not have helped that much. "It might help take some of the strangeness of it away," he explains, "but what I would have learned would have been pulling the D-ring and landing, and I didn't have a problem with that. The biggest problem I had was getting out of the airplane."

What might have helped, he says, would have been to spend more time on the ground thinking about and practicing bailout procedures. "When I went through my emergency procedures, I'd think about how I'd handle an engine failure or a dead-stick landing," he says, "but I never thought I was really going to bail out."

After his experience in Phoenix, Eldridge says that all pilots who wear a parachute need to make the actual bailout procedures a definite and regular part of their emergency procedures thinking. "Anyone doing that kind of flying should also try sitting in the cockpit and going through bailout procedures step by step on the ground," he says. "They might find that getting out of the airplane is a lot harder than they ever would have thought. But if they're familiar with how to do it, they will react better."

Eldridge knows he is lucky. But his experience has not dampened his enthusiasm for flying warbirds or racing. "You know you're taking on some risk, but I'm pretty competitive, and racing's addictive," he says. When asked if he still plans to take a jump class this summer, there is no hesitation in his answer. "Nope," he replies with a wry smile. "Been there, done that."