Word: harman
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...Harman got a music fellowship after graduating in 1940, and stayed on at Princeton. Somewhat to his own surprise, he soon found himself in a civilian pilot training course. "Other guys," he explains, "were taking the course who didn't seem particularly inclined that way either, so I tried it." His teacher, a former truck driver, liked to fly the Waco trainers upside down, and the "first thing I noticed was that my cigarettes in my jacket pocket were falling out and slipping past my face...
After Pearl Harbor, Harman joined the Air Forces, and during training volunteered to fly a then largely untried craft, the helicopter. One trouble with the helicopter was that if, at low speed, the engine failed, the pilot couldn't glide down as a plane pilot could: no one had ever lived through a forced helicopter landing. So most of Harman's early training (at the big Sikorsky plant in Bridgeport, Conn.) was spent studying theoretical techniques for forced landings...
...Harman and another pilot were flying over the plant area when, at the low level of 200 feet, the engine stopped dead. Obedient to the untested theory they had been taught, and against all their natural instincts, the two tilted the copter downward and dived it at full speed straight for the ground. It worked: 20 feet from the ground the rotor blades, spun by the dive, acquired enough lift to break the fall. The craft smashed up, but Harman and his friend walked away, "just as the fire engines and ambulances came roaring...
Later, in Burma, where he served as a squadron commander in Colonel Philip Cochran's famed Air Commando Group, Harman chalked up another first. in helicopter history. He made the world's first military helicopter rescue, bringing out three British soldiers and an American flyer who had crashed in the jungle...
...guess there are some links between flying and music," says Harman, "sensory things, like the sense of spanning time and space. High in an airplane you feel that you are going very slowly; a scherzo sounds fast, but you know the actual passage of time is really slower...