A Legendary Tex Johnston Looks Back On High-Flying Career

One warm summer day back in 1925, an 11-year-old boy took his first airplane ride in a bi-wing open-cockpit plane, taking off from a Kansas pasture and landing in another pasture across the road.

The pilot, a barnstormer, was tall, square-jawed and handsome. He wore a brown leather jacket, a soft leather helmet and goggles. The boy wore bib overalls and the look of one transfixed.

When the propeller stopped turning, the boy clambered from the cockpit and grabbed the pilot's hand. "I love you," he said, "and I'm going to be just like you."

This touching incident occurs on Page 6 of a new and exciting book just published by the Smithsonian Institution.

The boy's name was Alvin then, but now he is known as Tex.

He would become a legend in aviation because, awakened to his true and only love above a Kansas pasture, he would take to flying like a homesick angel.

"Tex Johnston: Jet-Age Test Pilot" is the memoir of a full, exciting and very meaningful life. In sparse, modest terms, he sums up his career in a few words:

"In 1946 I became chief test pilot at Bell. In 1948 I was employed by Boeing as project pilot for the six-jet Boeing XB-47, the first swept-wing bomber.

"In 1952 I was project pilot for the eight-jet Boeing XB-52 that became the backbone of the Strategic Air Command. From 1954 to 1961 I was chief of flight test and project test pilot for the Boeing 367-80, prototype 707, the 707 series, and the KC-135 tanker, a version of the 707 design.

"It was thus that I was present at the creation of the jet age."

Tex, who is now 76, lives quietly up in Snohomish County in the Northwest he loves. For several years, writing in longhand, he put together this remarkable record of his flying career.

It is no accident that the Smithsonian chose to publish it. Though the book is rich in anecdotes and insights, it is as accurate as a pilot's log and a treasure for aviation historians.

There are test pilots and there are test pilots. There are the kind with derring-do, the glamour figures of movies and television, the "right-stuff" boys who take incredible chances in testing the integrity of airplanes.

Then there is Tex Johnston, quite another kind, a rarer kind in the dawning of the jet age.

He took breathtaking chances, to be sure, but he knew, as in the marrow of his bones, the mysteries of engines, the subtlety of air frames, of ailerons, of stress and temperatures, of thrust, of quirks and what caused them. He was an engineer aloft, a near-scientist of aeronautics.

A test pilot, a really good one, is more than just a flyboy. As a project test pilot, he had some 600 people working for him at Boeing. To Tex, all other things were irrelevant next to the sign on his office wall:

"One test is worth a thousand expert opinions."

The kid from the Kansas cornfields would one day grow up to be the primary test pilot of Bell Aircraft's legendary X-1, a cigar-shaped oddity, the first of the rocket-propelled planes that would break the mysterious barrier of sound.

Dissatisfied with test reports on the X-1, Tex flew it himself, then grounded it. He demanded a change in the trim system; then and only then would he allow it off the ground.

He writes proudly of this: "The X-1, with a modified longitudinal trim system and (Chuck) Yeager in the cockpit, flew into aviation history, the first supersonic airplane in the world."

"Jet-Age Test Pilot" is loaded with lore about primary bomber testing, the XB-47 and the B-52. His prose is sometimes irritatingly matter-of-fact but like catnip to aviation buffs; yet it can be understood by the most casual of aviation fans.

Tex is no name-dropper, but along the way he flew with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gen. Curtis LeMay and Charles A. Lindbergh and crossed paths with Howard Hughes. His recommendation for flight school was written by none other than William Allen White, the famed editor of the Emporia (Kans.) Gazette.

In his barnstorming days, Tex encountered a woman pilot - a rarity in those days - and they had a two-hour lunch. "I'm Al Johnston," he said. She smiled and responded, "My name's Amelia."

"She was not beautiful," he writes of Amelia Earhart, who became America's most famous and ill-starred aviatrix, "but her easy conversation and pleasing, radiant personality made a deep impression."

He describes, in detail, the now-famous slow roll he did with the original 707 over Lake Washington. But he tells, for the first time, that even before his dressing down by Boeing President Bill Allen, Allen invited him to dinner that evening.

Allen had another guest at his home that night. The guest jumped out of his chair when Tex arrived. "You slow-rollin' S.O.B.!" he cried. "Why didn't you let me know? I would have been ridin' the jump seat."

That was Tex's introduction to Eddie Rickenbacker, the famed World War I ace and later airline exec.

Tex went to work for Boeing at $10,000 a year, $2,000 less than he made at Bell Aircraft. Almost literally, the survival of Boeing itself rested on the piloting skills of this tall, soft-spoken, wry individualist who wore string ties and Western boots and had a streak of the rebel in him.

Knowing this, knowing that it was "betting the company" on Johnston's performance with multimillion-dollar aircraft, Boeing sent Tex to a psychoanalyst for evaluation.

As Tex tells it, the psychoanalyst turned out to be a woman. She was tall, magnificently tailored and very attractive and Tex thought, "I must be in the wrong joint."

The interrogation, Tex writes, was "juvenile," but he answered her questions. "Do you fly for money?" "Damn right." "Why did you choose Boeing?" "Because," Tex said, "I believe their new airplane will be the best in the world, and I want to help make it happen."

Finally, there was one question too many for the now grown-up kid from Kansas. "What do you like better than anything else in the world?" she asked.

"Copulation," Tex said, which ended the interview.

"And that's how," Tex concludes, "I was declared psychologically qualified to fly for Boeing."

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.