Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Mary Feik
The pilots who flew in World War II are a dying breed. There was a time not long ago that many pilots had fathers who flew in WWII. Now it's getting hard to find fathers who flew in Korea. My friend Clark flies as an instructor at the Naval Academy Flying Club. The other day he called me to say he was going to have coffee with Mary Feik and I could join him. I knew who Mary Feik was. I took my video camera and my autograph book and headed out to Lee Airport in Annapolis, Md. The 84 year old famous engineer, mechanic, pilot shook my hand and smiled and let me turn on my camera. Even though I was a perfect stranger. Her gray hair was beautifully done in a Mary Martin-Peter Pan style. She looked like a million bucks. I had a list of things to ask her but it went out the window. I heard myself ask her what is was like working for the Army Air Corp. when you were a cute 19 yr. old and the only girl around. Were you chatted up by a lot of men. She said no she wasn't. She said she was part of an engineering team and it was strictly work. But she was not "one of the guys". On flight trips when there was a layover, she would have a bag with her that enabled her to dress in a dress with stockings. "They went out with a lady". I asked her something about Wright Patterson, and she began a narrative that would last off and on for three hours. I wish I had every word on the tape, but I don't. The story begins with an eighteen year old girl not being accepted into the engineering department at the University of Buffalo. She applies for a job with the pre Pearl Harbor Army Air Corps. As a maintenance instructor. She is hired and notified by telegram. This would lead to her testing and flying aircraft like the: P-51, P-38, T-33, B-17, B-25, B-29. She designed the flight simulators used for WWII fighters.. She flew 6000 hours in B-29's as a test engineer. She was honored by NASA as one of the 47 most significant women in aerospace. She restored airplanes for the Smithsonian for 10 years. Including work on the Enola Gay. She received the Charles Taylor Master Mechanics Award. She knew Crossfield, Yeager, Hoover. And so much more. She told me about testing a B-25 one day with a failed right main landing gear. They battled with it, it went up and over in a big cartwheel. Her co-pilot had not a scratch, but they had to cut Mary out of it. On her 50th wedding anniversary she was riding on the Concord to London. She was called up to the flight deck and asked to observe the flight engineer for the entire flight. Three hours and thirteen minutes. She told her friend Scott Crossfield (the first guy to mach 2), "See Scott, I did it too".
Now I've got this video of Mary. My wife and I are going to try to edit it and post it up on YouTube. So all my friends can see Mary Feik, the living legendary female aviator.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Clark D. Cloukey. I was there at Ledo's in Edgewater when Lloyd filmed Mary Feik and the others. By far the most interesting and enjoyable part of the morning was listening to Mary's account of how she got started in aviation during the war as an engineer for the Army Air Corps at Wright-Patterson Field and all the famous flyers and technical people she worked with. This is where she met her future husband Bob, who later became chief scientist for the Air Force. In those days most Army men could not accept the fact that an eighteen-year old woman was running a section of the flight test division, but she had had an extremely unusal aptitude for troubleshooting and fixing mechanical problems from her days of rebuilding automobile engines for her dad back in Pennsylvania. The commanding officer of the base saw to it that Mary got all the assistance she needed and also saw to it that she received Army Air Corps training in the Stearman, BT-13, AT-6, P-51 Mustang, P-47 Thunderbolt, P-38 Lightning, P-61 Black Widow, A-20, A-26, B-25 Mitchell, and B-29. She was able to squeeze more performance out of the R-2800 engine and developed training sims for the P-51C which greatly improved emergency training procedures for pilots in the early days before full-motion simulators were available. She wrote the training manual for the P-61 Black Widow. She was a flight engineer on the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, the most high performance military aircraft at the time. Later on, she flew the first jets out of Muroc with Scott Crossfield, Tony Levier, and Chuck Yeager. I first met her years ago when she operated her two aircraft out of Lee Airport in Edgewater and she was my section leader when I was appointed to Aerospace Education Officer at Maryland Wing Headquarters, Civil Air Patrol. For a few years now she has been meeting with her friends at Ledo's near the airport on Tuesdays and when I returned to Lee Airport as an instructor I started meeting with them and sharing old flying stories with Mary, Ray and Lea Stinchcomb, Dick Johnson, Harry Smith and others. I urged Lloyd to come over and use his camcorder, and he graciously agreed. On inauguration day the weather was too bad for flying with my students and the conditions were just right for filming since the crowd was light at Ledo's that morning. I sure look foreward to seeing the finished result when Lloyd and Vicki finish editing; I am sure it will be an interesting and revealing historical document. Per adura ad astra, Clark.
Post a Comment