Mach One

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Text originally published in 1954 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

MACH ONE

BY

MIKE LITHGOW

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

AUTHOR’S NOTE 6

FOREWORD 7

1 11

2 16

3 23

4 29

5 37

6 47

7 53

8 60

9 74

10 79

11 85

12 91

13 98

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 104

AUTHOR’S NOTE

MY SINCERE THANKS are due to Vickers-Armstrongs for permission to write this book, and also for the use of a number of the photographs appearing in it.

FOREWORD

BY

CHARLES GARDNER

YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ (OR, IF YOU LEAVE forewords till last, as I do, you will have already read) a book written by one of the foremost test pilots of our time. It is an exciting story dealing with exciting events, but, in my reading of it, not all the true worth of Lithgow’s narrative is laid easily on the surface. The skimming of this book by a quick eye will give you many facts, but it will not give the real essence of the matter, which has to be sought for below the word-level of the phrases which the author has used.

When he wrote this book, Lithgow faced an old problem which must always hedge around the personal writings of men who have accomplished deeds: he had to steer between the Scylla of even the appearance of shooting a line, and the Charybdis of understatement. It was natural to lay a course a little nearer Charybdis—which is what Lithgow has done.

There are, however, other factors involved. The main one is that men, who are daily engaged on the kind of work which Lithgow does, do not look at things in the same light as you or I. They do not even measure events by the same kind of yardstick. It is not so much a question of understatement, but—if Lithgow will forgive me—of ignorance: ignorance that anyone could regard anything he has done, or has ever done, as being in any way unusual.

This is, I am afraid, a rather difficult point to put over. It is certainly not a question of lack of imagination or sensitivity. There never was a good test pilot yet who was not bursting with both. It is in imagination and the quickest of appreciative minds that the heart of test flying lies. The technical and scientific accomplishments can be taught in a classroom, and the necessary flying skill can be acquired by anyone willing to learn—but the qualities of mind and character, and the will to mental and physical pilgrimage, these are things which have to be inborn.

The test pilot lives in the wide boundary between art and science, and in this twofold allegiance is the probable answer to the difficulty. He is never personally satisfied that he has done justice to both his masters, and therefore cannot see why ordinary undedicated people regard him as having achieved anything of note at all.

As a quick illustration of this, I recall that at the Farnborough Show of 1953 Lithgow and Morgan had brought the crowds to their feet by a supersonic dive in formation in two Swift fighters, followed by a 700 m.p.h. fly-over at about ten feet above the runway. It was a stirring and unforgettable piece of flying. After he had landed I found Lithgow downcast and worried because the supersonic bangs attendant upon the dives had not been heard loudly enough in the public enclosure. For him the afternoon was labelled as a failure and nothing would convince him otherwise. It is, therefore, to my mind, this striving for absolute and usually impossible perfection which makes men like Lithgow genuinely disregard everything they do which falls short of their ideal. Hence their difference in outlook, their ultra-conservative choice of words, and all the other self-deprecation which we conveniently label as modesty.

For that reason, you, the reader, have to do a little more than just take in the surface words of this book. You have to look a little underneath them and use your own imagination to evaluate Lithgow’s achievements, not by his rather isolated measurement of deeds, but by ordinary everyday values. You have, in fact, to substitute for the Lithgow factor throughout the equation.

I confess that there were times in reading this book when I could have shaken the author to make the words come out a little more twopence coloured. Mainly they were when he was describing events of which I had some personal knowledge, and which I knew had hidden away within them much more than Lithgow allows to appear.

I will, if I may, give two examples.

In chapter 7 he tells us of his successful attempt of the 100 kilometre closed circuit record in the Attacker jet fighter. He mentions that the visibility was bad; that it was difficult to align himself with the legs of the course, and that pyrotechnics were used to guide him.

It so happens that I went down to watch that record attempt, and without going to journalistic extremes of over-statement, let me add that the bad visibility was so bad as to amount almost to a fog. I, for one, would not have cared to have been doing circuits and bumps round the field in it in a Tiger Moth. When Lithgow took off he was lost to sight before he was over the aerodrome boundary, and his reappearances during the attempt itself amounted to brief glimpses of a metallic burr flashing in and out of the surrounding mists. I said as much as this, and maybe a word or two more on the B.B.C. that night, to be told later by Lithgow that he had not known how difficult it all was till he listened to the radio. But the point is that it was as difficult as that—and there is in existence a rather shadowy film of the proceedings which proves it.

A more recent event was the setting up of a new world air speed record in the Swift F.4 at Tripoli last October. I was much in Lithgow’s company during that expedition and I know something of the difficulties and frustrations with which he was beset.

The first practice runs—which subsequently turned out to be those which were recognised for the record—were made at an average speed of over 735 miles an hour at a height of about 50 feet or less on a bumpy day with an outside temperature of 100° F. Allowing for friction-heat, the temperature in the cockpit must have been unbearable, and Lithgow’s special cooling suit had packed up. So had his oxygen/RT mask, which he had to hold in one hand. Finally he was unable properly to see the end-of-the-course markers. These things he briefly mentions as merely annoying incidents—an appraisal which was not shared by any of the professional writers who were present. I shall never forget Lithgow standing in an office in the Swift hangar at Idris Airfield just after he had landed. He was wearing only pants and socks, while sweat rolled in rivers down his face, arms and body. In one hand he held a bottle of lemonade and in the other a cigarette. Both hands were, I am sure unknown to him, shaking with nervous and physical reaction as he quite quietly dictated an immediate technical report on the flight in full and meticulous detail, punctuating his paragraphs with alternate pulls at the lemonade straw and the cigarette.

From then, and for many days to come, Lithgow was dogged by all kinds of ill-fortune: the timing-gear troubles, and the infernal waywardness of the re-heat system then on its first tropical trials. Finally, when all these were overcome, the ideal conditions which had mocked a helpless Lithgow day by day were switched off overnight by some sardonic deity of the desert. The Ghibli wind whipped up sandstorm after sandstorm, neatly bridging the gap until an American aeroplane was ready to wrest its new record from the Swift.

Amid all this were held interminable meetings to decide whether to claim the practice runs as a record, or whether to trust to luck to improve the score. It was essentially, as pontoon players will recognise, a decision whether to stick or twist—and eventually it was decided to stick. It was a wise decision in that it brought world record honours to Lithgow and the Swift, but none the less a hard decision to reach at the time, and one shot through with much use of nervous energy. In all this I never saw Lithgow lose his temper once, yet he was the man under the greatest strain.

I hope that, from the foregoing, the reader will gather that when Lithgow goes so far as to describe something as having been troublesome, or difficult, you can safely assume that you or I would have chosen different words.

I am sure you will be fascinated by the story of Lithgow’s rescue after he had been forced into the sea at night—an occurrence which was unknown for a long time to the colleagues of his squadron or to those aboard his aircraft carrier. The chances of that rescue, as must be obvious to anyone who has knowledge of the sea or of navigation, were about the same as being dealt thirteen trumps in a hand at whist. They were quite clearly evaluated by Lithgow as he struggled in the sea, and from the evaluation must have come knowledge that no man likes to possess. Yet, reading of that incident, there comes, quite clearly through the unembroidered narrative, that calmness and poise which in lesser but more protracted circumstances we were to admire years later at Tripoli. A man who can wait, almost cheerfully, and up to his neck in the ocean, for a million to one against pick-up can, I fancy, muster a fair amount of monastic calm about any set of circumstances with which the future is likely to beset him.

There is one final aspect of this book which I feel should be mentioned—that is the limitation imposed by security. Lithgow has for some years now been engaged day by day on development flying for the Swift and the 525 fighters. Here I, too, am forced into a reticence of words, but you can take it that all the development work has not been straightforward. Many of the flights which Lithgow has made, especially in the earlier days of swept wings and supersonics, were deliberate acts of courage which must remain buried away in files which will be marked Secret for some years to come.

There is much more I would like to say about Lithgow as a person and as a pilot, but I have to face the fact that I shall meet him again after he has read this foreword and, when provoked, he is a master of the quietly cutting phrase. In any case the man’s character is not entirely covered over by his own obstinate refusal to give himself much credit for any of the many great things he has done for British aviation.

1

There were about thirty of us when we gathered on the platform at Waterloo Station, all signed up as midshipmen with the Fleet Air Arm and on our way for a short period of naval training aboard H.M.S. Frobisher before our air training as pilots and observers. Something always happens to me in March, and this was March 13th, 1939.

H.M.S. Frobisher was at that time moored in Fareham Creek, though later we moved alongside in Portsmouth Dockyard. I had no idea then that I should ever look back on those days as happy ones, with a feeling almost of nostalgia. The routine was not one which appealed to me very strongly at the time. It began with semaphore drill on the forecastle at 5.30 a.m., and by breakfast time we usually felt we had already put in a good day’s work. Lectures in all branches of nautical lore followed, with practical seamanship and sailing as welcome interludes. There were at least two breaks during the day for P.T. and other forms of violent physical exercise, to shift for which we were permitted the princely allowance of three minutes.

Proceedings on board were enlivened by the presence, apart from our own Number 5 Air Course, of sixty or so regular cadets who were entering the Navy in a more orthodox manner. Our exalted rank of midshipmen, or even sub-lieutenants in some