Bombing IP
Well-Known Member
BIP
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Salty Old Flight Jacket on Test pilot
- Thread starter Bombing IP
- Start date
BIP
Silver Surfer
Well-Known Member
could be an aero 16160, by way of looking at the pocket, and snap impression. also the 16160s that i have seen tend to display wear consistent with the wear on the jac in the pic. just a forensic guess, mind ya.
Peter Graham
Well-Known Member
Does anyone else think the pockets look oddly high on that jacket ?
Silver Surfer
Well-Known Member
probably a small guy wearing a small a-2 with normal sized [one size fits all] pockets.
Silver Surfer
Well-Known Member
hahahahahaha
Bombing IP
Well-Known Member
Grant you nailed it . I got to google the guy because you found his name he had an interesting life .
BIP
BIP
Pete Girard
Member
He was about 6'2", weighed about 185#, I may have that jacket in a closet.
Pete Girard
Member
Nah, that was my father, passed away a few years ago. I also have his helmets, goggles and other stuff.
Steve27752
Well-Known Member
Welcome to VLJ. May I suggest going here and introducing yourself?
https://www.vintageleatherjackets.org/forums/member-bios.21/
Pete Girard
Member
Well, I am his eldest son, he was Peter Frank Girard, he married the Admiral's daughter and I am Peter Gehres Girard, 'Gehres' is my grandfather's (the Admiral's) name. Perhaps my father's career and interests are best summed up in the eulogy I gave at his funeral, it is edited to remove some more personal notes and follows below. I will need to send this in three parts because of the (not unreasonable) length limitations on this board. This is Part 1/3:
Tribute to Peter F. Girard, by Peter G. Girard, delivered 3 March, 2011
Blessed Sacrament Parish Church, San Diego, CA
On behalf of my Mother, my sister & brother, myself and our families, we are grateful for your prayers and your presence here today. I am Peter Girard, our father’s eldest child. My brother and sister will also have their own remarks.
Peter Frank Girard was a cowboy, an inventor, a flyer, an engineer, a hunter, a tinkerer, a backpacker, a WWII Army Air Corps veteran, a fly fisherman, a husband, a father and a grandfather. And he lived the life of several ordinary mortal men.
Pete Girard, known as ‘Recans’ to his parents and spouse, was born in Monterey, California, the son and first of two children to Pierre Etienne and Emelie Leppert Girard, on May 5, 1918, and raised at their Cachagua ranch on the Carmel River east of Monterey. He later moved a long rifle shot away to the Tularcitos ranch in the Carmel Valley when the family acquired that land tract.
Seemingly destined to be a rancher, he became fascinated with flying when, as a boy, he spotted who he later was told was Glenn Curtiss flying over the ranch land, on the way to San Francisco. Curtiss had earlier established a flying school in San Diego, a city that was to figure heavily later in my father’s career. When he was eleven years old, he discovered an article about gliding titled ‘On the Wings of the Wind’ that appeared in the June 1929 issue of National Geographic. Apparently something magic happened: from that time on he knew that he wanted to fly, that he wanted to teach himself to do so, and that the first time he did he longed to do it alone. I find it altogether wondrous to be able to trace a career passion to turning moments such as these.
First it was a one-room schoolhouse, then high school, and finally through his mother’s persistence, he attended what was to them the local college, UC Berkeley, where he studied engineering and played basketball. He graduated in 1940 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering specializing in Aeronautics (the designation of Aeronautical Engineer was not yet formalized), and he promptly went to work for the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Company at its St. Louis, Missouri facilities.
He fell in there with a group of like-minded engineers who would learn to fly their purchased gliders. It would create in him a longing to own his own glider and other aircraft, a goal he would pursue many times in his life.
As the U.S. became embroiled in WWII, at age 25 he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps and was inducted at San Francisco in May of 1943 as an aviation cadet. He proceeded through single engine, then multi-engine and heavy bomber training. Being a few years older, and several inches taller than many of the other cadets, he was not destined to fulfill his desire to be a fighter pilot, but instead to become the pilot and aircraft commander of a Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, a craft designed and largely built in San Diego, again a city to figure prominently in his future. A variety of circumstances led to his not being assigned to oversees duty, but rather to instructing and his own additional training for preparation to fly the B-29 in Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, when the war came to an end.
Having grown up in the depression and then serving in the war, he was part of that era of men and women who, whether here or abroad, in uniform, industry or at home, are what Tom Brokaw has called ‘The Greatest Generation’. They interrupted their lives to answer a call to duty. And in so doing their part they saved the world nations from a future of tyranny. In that ‘Greatest Generation’ are also some present and the parents of many here today, and we owe you and them our liberty. [here several notable attendees and parents were recognized]
Mustering out of the service as a Second Lieutenant in December of 1945 at San Bernardino, he joined Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego as an engineer in their metallurgical department, then as Chief of the Physical Test Section of the Engineering Laboratories. After a short while Ryan was looking for a new pilot to perform flight tests when he informed his managers that they were already employing one, he thus entered that unique fellowship of elite flyers known as experimental test pilots.
By 1951 he was living a Top Gun life, flying a variety of aircraft types for both career and pleasure, landing at airstrips large and small, buzzing the tower at Lindbergh Field to impress a girl, proposing to her in a glider over the beach at Torrey Pines, and finally marrying her, the Admiral’s daughter, in 1953 at the old Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel. Peter and Leslie Gehres Girard moved into an adobe-brick ranchhouse in La Mesa, eventually raising a family of three siblings: myself, my brother Les, and our sister Maria.
As children growing up under our father, my brother and sister and I would find ourselves playing in the wreckage of old, or sometimes not-so-old aircraft, or in a workshop filled with large tools and exotic creations, or on trips through the mountains by car or often on foot. In the course of our childhood, our father often took the occasion to fulfill some of his own youthful dreams. When my brother and I were Boy Scouts, my father used that time to participate as a troop leader primarily to be with us on the outdoor activities. Like the literary Mark Trail, we built a canoe, we built a kayak, and we built our own backpacks and used them on float trips down the Colorado River and to hike the Sierras.
We would augment those Scout adventures with hiking and fishing trips of our own. We took long tent-camping car excursions through the western U.S. and Canada, and did even more hiking in the Cuyamaca and Laguna hills, and especially in the Santa Lucia mountains of the Coast Range by the Girard Ranch in Steinbeck country . . . that beautiful combination of valleys, hills, cliffs, waterfalls, oak and scented laurel, pines and redwoods that make up the topography of the region along the Carmel and Big Sur rivers, near where coincidentally Les and Maria live today. During these trips he would recount tales of his own youth in the region, as we encountered deer, hawk, eagles, quail, steelhead and rainbow trout at the river’s edge or up along the ridge tops. He and I would backpack and fish (backpacking is just a means to and end, after all), in that country of his youth that even today bears such names he taught me that do not always appear on maps: D’nish, Puerto Suelo, Ventana, Pico Blanco, Hiding Canyon, Buckskin Flat, The BlueRock and The Sentinels.
Dad and I, in particular, made a number of trips over old trails of his recollection that had since become overgrown, and to springs of his memory that had long ago gone dry. On occasion I would sense that he wasn’t quite sure precisely where he was, his reply would be that an engineer is never really lost; he might get bewildered for 3 or 4 days, but never lost. I am convinced, in the case of my brother and me, that my father secretly had to prove to himself that he had raised real men, and to do so had to push us through the rigors of long treks, high temperatures, and little water, all conditions to which he himself seemed immune. It was times like those that I looked up at him and thought that he had been forged from solid steel. It was that rugged, tough, sinewy deer-hunter quality of his; it seemed he could and did willingly walk through hell to get to where he wanted to go. And of course he took us with him. If we survived, then good. If not, well, so much then for that.
Our sister Missy, enjoying that special father-daughter relationship, wasn’t subjected to quite the extremes that Les and I endured. That isn’t to say, however, that she escaped entirely. There is a series of family photos depicting all of us, dressed out in walking gear and rifles that includes our sister, pre-ERA, likewise equipped with a firearm of her own. And neither did Kathy and our children escape: Kathy joined us on a great number of those arduous trips, whose serene moments were so rewarding. As for the boys and Camille, they have their own tales of their grandfather that include long driving, deep black storms, washed-out trailheads, and ‘that darned bear!’
See Part 2/3
Blessed Sacrament Parish Church, San Diego, CA
On behalf of my Mother, my sister & brother, myself and our families, we are grateful for your prayers and your presence here today. I am Peter Girard, our father’s eldest child. My brother and sister will also have their own remarks.
Peter Frank Girard was a cowboy, an inventor, a flyer, an engineer, a hunter, a tinkerer, a backpacker, a WWII Army Air Corps veteran, a fly fisherman, a husband, a father and a grandfather. And he lived the life of several ordinary mortal men.
Pete Girard, known as ‘Recans’ to his parents and spouse, was born in Monterey, California, the son and first of two children to Pierre Etienne and Emelie Leppert Girard, on May 5, 1918, and raised at their Cachagua ranch on the Carmel River east of Monterey. He later moved a long rifle shot away to the Tularcitos ranch in the Carmel Valley when the family acquired that land tract.
Seemingly destined to be a rancher, he became fascinated with flying when, as a boy, he spotted who he later was told was Glenn Curtiss flying over the ranch land, on the way to San Francisco. Curtiss had earlier established a flying school in San Diego, a city that was to figure heavily later in my father’s career. When he was eleven years old, he discovered an article about gliding titled ‘On the Wings of the Wind’ that appeared in the June 1929 issue of National Geographic. Apparently something magic happened: from that time on he knew that he wanted to fly, that he wanted to teach himself to do so, and that the first time he did he longed to do it alone. I find it altogether wondrous to be able to trace a career passion to turning moments such as these.
First it was a one-room schoolhouse, then high school, and finally through his mother’s persistence, he attended what was to them the local college, UC Berkeley, where he studied engineering and played basketball. He graduated in 1940 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering specializing in Aeronautics (the designation of Aeronautical Engineer was not yet formalized), and he promptly went to work for the Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Company at its St. Louis, Missouri facilities.
He fell in there with a group of like-minded engineers who would learn to fly their purchased gliders. It would create in him a longing to own his own glider and other aircraft, a goal he would pursue many times in his life.
As the U.S. became embroiled in WWII, at age 25 he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps and was inducted at San Francisco in May of 1943 as an aviation cadet. He proceeded through single engine, then multi-engine and heavy bomber training. Being a few years older, and several inches taller than many of the other cadets, he was not destined to fulfill his desire to be a fighter pilot, but instead to become the pilot and aircraft commander of a Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, a craft designed and largely built in San Diego, again a city to figure prominently in his future. A variety of circumstances led to his not being assigned to oversees duty, but rather to instructing and his own additional training for preparation to fly the B-29 in Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, when the war came to an end.
Having grown up in the depression and then serving in the war, he was part of that era of men and women who, whether here or abroad, in uniform, industry or at home, are what Tom Brokaw has called ‘The Greatest Generation’. They interrupted their lives to answer a call to duty. And in so doing their part they saved the world nations from a future of tyranny. In that ‘Greatest Generation’ are also some present and the parents of many here today, and we owe you and them our liberty. [here several notable attendees and parents were recognized]
Mustering out of the service as a Second Lieutenant in December of 1945 at San Bernardino, he joined Ryan Aeronautical Company in San Diego as an engineer in their metallurgical department, then as Chief of the Physical Test Section of the Engineering Laboratories. After a short while Ryan was looking for a new pilot to perform flight tests when he informed his managers that they were already employing one, he thus entered that unique fellowship of elite flyers known as experimental test pilots.
By 1951 he was living a Top Gun life, flying a variety of aircraft types for both career and pleasure, landing at airstrips large and small, buzzing the tower at Lindbergh Field to impress a girl, proposing to her in a glider over the beach at Torrey Pines, and finally marrying her, the Admiral’s daughter, in 1953 at the old Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel. Peter and Leslie Gehres Girard moved into an adobe-brick ranchhouse in La Mesa, eventually raising a family of three siblings: myself, my brother Les, and our sister Maria.
As children growing up under our father, my brother and sister and I would find ourselves playing in the wreckage of old, or sometimes not-so-old aircraft, or in a workshop filled with large tools and exotic creations, or on trips through the mountains by car or often on foot. In the course of our childhood, our father often took the occasion to fulfill some of his own youthful dreams. When my brother and I were Boy Scouts, my father used that time to participate as a troop leader primarily to be with us on the outdoor activities. Like the literary Mark Trail, we built a canoe, we built a kayak, and we built our own backpacks and used them on float trips down the Colorado River and to hike the Sierras.
We would augment those Scout adventures with hiking and fishing trips of our own. We took long tent-camping car excursions through the western U.S. and Canada, and did even more hiking in the Cuyamaca and Laguna hills, and especially in the Santa Lucia mountains of the Coast Range by the Girard Ranch in Steinbeck country . . . that beautiful combination of valleys, hills, cliffs, waterfalls, oak and scented laurel, pines and redwoods that make up the topography of the region along the Carmel and Big Sur rivers, near where coincidentally Les and Maria live today. During these trips he would recount tales of his own youth in the region, as we encountered deer, hawk, eagles, quail, steelhead and rainbow trout at the river’s edge or up along the ridge tops. He and I would backpack and fish (backpacking is just a means to and end, after all), in that country of his youth that even today bears such names he taught me that do not always appear on maps: D’nish, Puerto Suelo, Ventana, Pico Blanco, Hiding Canyon, Buckskin Flat, The BlueRock and The Sentinels.
Dad and I, in particular, made a number of trips over old trails of his recollection that had since become overgrown, and to springs of his memory that had long ago gone dry. On occasion I would sense that he wasn’t quite sure precisely where he was, his reply would be that an engineer is never really lost; he might get bewildered for 3 or 4 days, but never lost. I am convinced, in the case of my brother and me, that my father secretly had to prove to himself that he had raised real men, and to do so had to push us through the rigors of long treks, high temperatures, and little water, all conditions to which he himself seemed immune. It was times like those that I looked up at him and thought that he had been forged from solid steel. It was that rugged, tough, sinewy deer-hunter quality of his; it seemed he could and did willingly walk through hell to get to where he wanted to go. And of course he took us with him. If we survived, then good. If not, well, so much then for that.
Our sister Missy, enjoying that special father-daughter relationship, wasn’t subjected to quite the extremes that Les and I endured. That isn’t to say, however, that she escaped entirely. There is a series of family photos depicting all of us, dressed out in walking gear and rifles that includes our sister, pre-ERA, likewise equipped with a firearm of her own. And neither did Kathy and our children escape: Kathy joined us on a great number of those arduous trips, whose serene moments were so rewarding. As for the boys and Camille, they have their own tales of their grandfather that include long driving, deep black storms, washed-out trailheads, and ‘that darned bear!’
See Part 2/3
Pete Girard
Member
Tribute to Peter F. Girard, by Peter G. Girard, delivered 3 March, 2011, Part 2/3
He was often away during that period of our youth, conducting flight tests on new manned or unmanned aircraft at the Yuma Proving Grounds, or giving briefings at the Pentagon or at the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. On weekends my brother and I would accompany him to various airfields where aeronautical engineers do what aeronautical engineers do: design and build their own airplanes. I wound up going with him to strips in Ramona, Riverside and Lake Elsinore, or to fields in the Mojave desert during fly-ins to see new experimental and ultralight designs and meet up with the likes of Ray Cote, Bob Fronius, Bill Immenschuh, Jim Smith, Ladislao Pazmany, Claude Ryan and other notable aviation figures. To this day, I can distinctly recall that curious blended scent of compressed air, oil, zinc chromate and aluminum that instantly alerts anyone who has experienced it that you are in an aircraft hanger.
It was during the period when he was Ryan’s Chief Test Pilot that several events occurred that we think of as the pinnacle of his career. The first occurred in 1953. Ryan engineers had earlier begun to wonder if a jet engine of sufficient thrust, which was in the foreseeable future, might be turned on end and used to lift an aircraft straight up. As it turns out, so did the Navy, and then the Air Force and the fledgling National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, today’s NASA. Under a military proof-of-concept contract, Ryan did just that. An Allison J33 jet engine was mounted vertically into a standing frame and tethered only by a set of fuel and instrument umbilicals at the Ryan facilities on Lindbergh Field. They gave it a name: the ‘beast-in-the-backyard’. After a series of unmanned tests, they fixed a kind of ‘saddle’ onto a carved-out B-47 fuel tank at the top, and then looked around for some fearless cowboy to climb up onto the stirrups and ride this thing. I suspect my father literally leapt onto it. On November 11, 1953, he became the first man in the world to hover freely in pure jet-vertical flight.
The next occurred over the course of the flight tests from 1955 through 1957 of the Ryan X-13 Vertijet. Built under a contract with the USAF, signed on July 28, 1954 (the very day his future daughter-in-law was born), two prototypes were constructed, tail numbers 19 and 20. These aircraft were small and lightweight, little more than an aluminum skin wrapped around the newly-produced Rolls-Royce Avon engine, one of the ‘river’ series which had the unheard-of thrust of ten thousand pounds. The flight tests were conducted to prove the conventional (that is, horizontal) flight airworthiness of the craft itself, then vertical-mode only control, then some high-altitude horizontal-to-vertical and back transitions, and finally to complete the full-cycle transition from vertical takeoff to horizontal flight and back to a vertical landing. That first full cycle take-off-to-landing flight occurred on April 11, 1957 at the North Base (the secret one) of Edwards Air Force Base, making Pete Girard the first man to do so in a pure jet-powered aircraft. That plane is now located at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The other craft that performed the conventional flight and transition tests is located here at our own San Diego Air & Space Museum, on loan from the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air & Space Museum. Our father described the control sensation of flying the Vertijet as one of an aerial ballet, being able to perform delicate yet graceful yaws and pirouettes while vertically only feet off the ground, and as ‘one hot little plane’ when flying fast conventionally over the field and then demonstrating its terrific rate of climb (the plane weighed only 7,000 pounds but had 10,000 pounds of thrust)! Air Force films of these tests were later spliced together and put to the Blue Danube Waltz; viewing them one gets a sense of what he meant.
The final events in the series occurred starting at 10:00 in the morning on July 29, 1957, when a demonstration of the X-13 was conducted in Washington, D.C. to coincide with the 50th (Golden) anniversary of the formation of the Aeronautical Division of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, what would eventually become the U.S. Air Force. His call-sign that day was ‘Paralyze-1’, he never did find out why that name was chosen. The X-13 flew from Andrews Air Force Base, crossed the Potomac River, and in front of 3000 military officers and journalists, landed on its up-tilted trailer at the steps of the Pentagon. The X-13 was a small plane with only 9 minutes of off-hook flight time, just enough to make the flight with between 30 and 45 seconds of reserve. In vertical mode the ejection seat was inoperative, and there was no other way to set down other than to hook on to the special landing trailer. After lift-off at Andrews, and once he reached the Potomac he was committed to the flight, there was no turning back. Until shortly before then the X-13 had been a classified program, imagine the surprised looks of the street, bridge and boat traffic as the X-13 passed only a few hundred feet overhead. Several things did not go quite as planned during that event, notably a blinding water-curtain spray from the jet blast on the lagoon, but he managed to hook on with about 15 seconds of fuel remaining, the audience no wiser. It had been the first and only fixed-wing jet aircraft landing at the Pentagon. The next day the X-13 recreated the flight Orville Wright had performed exactly 48 years earlier on the final acceptance flight of the U.S. Army’s first airplane from Alexandria and back. Twenty-some years after the event, I was able to be with him to revisit that spot there at the Pentagon steps. He was not a demonstrably emotional man, and he had told me several times over the years he had not expected to live to see his children grow, yet he was there with me now. I think he was choked up.
It was during the Edwards flight tests that the X-13, with our father in the pilot seat, was featured on the cover of LIFE magazine and in the accompanying photo essay in the May 20, 1957 issue. In preparation for these tests, in 1953 Dad had attended the 10th class of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, also known as Pax River. Normally reserved for military pilots, my father was brought in under the military contract, one of the few civilian pilots ever having done so, and graduated second in the class of 36 adding yet additional aircraft and helicopter types to his flight log.
On the X-13, he was not only the Chief Test Pilot, but a participating member of the engineering and design team. In the course of those flight tests, Pete Girard became part of that ‘mad-monk’ squadron of flyers at Edwards that was to include so many other notable test pilots. I am convinced to this day, had he been perhaps 5 years younger and maybe 3 inches shorter, he might have been an astronaut. As it was, the work he accomplished as part of the Vertijet team resulted in important aeronautical developments in the areas of jet-reaction control, vectored thrust and V/STOL aerodynamics, capabilities that can be seen today not only on such aircraft as the AV-8 Hawker Harrier, the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning, but also spacecraft capsules and the space shuttle.
See Part 3/3
He was often away during that period of our youth, conducting flight tests on new manned or unmanned aircraft at the Yuma Proving Grounds, or giving briefings at the Pentagon or at the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. On weekends my brother and I would accompany him to various airfields where aeronautical engineers do what aeronautical engineers do: design and build their own airplanes. I wound up going with him to strips in Ramona, Riverside and Lake Elsinore, or to fields in the Mojave desert during fly-ins to see new experimental and ultralight designs and meet up with the likes of Ray Cote, Bob Fronius, Bill Immenschuh, Jim Smith, Ladislao Pazmany, Claude Ryan and other notable aviation figures. To this day, I can distinctly recall that curious blended scent of compressed air, oil, zinc chromate and aluminum that instantly alerts anyone who has experienced it that you are in an aircraft hanger.
It was during the period when he was Ryan’s Chief Test Pilot that several events occurred that we think of as the pinnacle of his career. The first occurred in 1953. Ryan engineers had earlier begun to wonder if a jet engine of sufficient thrust, which was in the foreseeable future, might be turned on end and used to lift an aircraft straight up. As it turns out, so did the Navy, and then the Air Force and the fledgling National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, today’s NASA. Under a military proof-of-concept contract, Ryan did just that. An Allison J33 jet engine was mounted vertically into a standing frame and tethered only by a set of fuel and instrument umbilicals at the Ryan facilities on Lindbergh Field. They gave it a name: the ‘beast-in-the-backyard’. After a series of unmanned tests, they fixed a kind of ‘saddle’ onto a carved-out B-47 fuel tank at the top, and then looked around for some fearless cowboy to climb up onto the stirrups and ride this thing. I suspect my father literally leapt onto it. On November 11, 1953, he became the first man in the world to hover freely in pure jet-vertical flight.
The next occurred over the course of the flight tests from 1955 through 1957 of the Ryan X-13 Vertijet. Built under a contract with the USAF, signed on July 28, 1954 (the very day his future daughter-in-law was born), two prototypes were constructed, tail numbers 19 and 20. These aircraft were small and lightweight, little more than an aluminum skin wrapped around the newly-produced Rolls-Royce Avon engine, one of the ‘river’ series which had the unheard-of thrust of ten thousand pounds. The flight tests were conducted to prove the conventional (that is, horizontal) flight airworthiness of the craft itself, then vertical-mode only control, then some high-altitude horizontal-to-vertical and back transitions, and finally to complete the full-cycle transition from vertical takeoff to horizontal flight and back to a vertical landing. That first full cycle take-off-to-landing flight occurred on April 11, 1957 at the North Base (the secret one) of Edwards Air Force Base, making Pete Girard the first man to do so in a pure jet-powered aircraft. That plane is now located at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The other craft that performed the conventional flight and transition tests is located here at our own San Diego Air & Space Museum, on loan from the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air & Space Museum. Our father described the control sensation of flying the Vertijet as one of an aerial ballet, being able to perform delicate yet graceful yaws and pirouettes while vertically only feet off the ground, and as ‘one hot little plane’ when flying fast conventionally over the field and then demonstrating its terrific rate of climb (the plane weighed only 7,000 pounds but had 10,000 pounds of thrust)! Air Force films of these tests were later spliced together and put to the Blue Danube Waltz; viewing them one gets a sense of what he meant.
The final events in the series occurred starting at 10:00 in the morning on July 29, 1957, when a demonstration of the X-13 was conducted in Washington, D.C. to coincide with the 50th (Golden) anniversary of the formation of the Aeronautical Division of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, what would eventually become the U.S. Air Force. His call-sign that day was ‘Paralyze-1’, he never did find out why that name was chosen. The X-13 flew from Andrews Air Force Base, crossed the Potomac River, and in front of 3000 military officers and journalists, landed on its up-tilted trailer at the steps of the Pentagon. The X-13 was a small plane with only 9 minutes of off-hook flight time, just enough to make the flight with between 30 and 45 seconds of reserve. In vertical mode the ejection seat was inoperative, and there was no other way to set down other than to hook on to the special landing trailer. After lift-off at Andrews, and once he reached the Potomac he was committed to the flight, there was no turning back. Until shortly before then the X-13 had been a classified program, imagine the surprised looks of the street, bridge and boat traffic as the X-13 passed only a few hundred feet overhead. Several things did not go quite as planned during that event, notably a blinding water-curtain spray from the jet blast on the lagoon, but he managed to hook on with about 15 seconds of fuel remaining, the audience no wiser. It had been the first and only fixed-wing jet aircraft landing at the Pentagon. The next day the X-13 recreated the flight Orville Wright had performed exactly 48 years earlier on the final acceptance flight of the U.S. Army’s first airplane from Alexandria and back. Twenty-some years after the event, I was able to be with him to revisit that spot there at the Pentagon steps. He was not a demonstrably emotional man, and he had told me several times over the years he had not expected to live to see his children grow, yet he was there with me now. I think he was choked up.
It was during the Edwards flight tests that the X-13, with our father in the pilot seat, was featured on the cover of LIFE magazine and in the accompanying photo essay in the May 20, 1957 issue. In preparation for these tests, in 1953 Dad had attended the 10th class of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, also known as Pax River. Normally reserved for military pilots, my father was brought in under the military contract, one of the few civilian pilots ever having done so, and graduated second in the class of 36 adding yet additional aircraft and helicopter types to his flight log.
On the X-13, he was not only the Chief Test Pilot, but a participating member of the engineering and design team. In the course of those flight tests, Pete Girard became part of that ‘mad-monk’ squadron of flyers at Edwards that was to include so many other notable test pilots. I am convinced to this day, had he been perhaps 5 years younger and maybe 3 inches shorter, he might have been an astronaut. As it was, the work he accomplished as part of the Vertijet team resulted in important aeronautical developments in the areas of jet-reaction control, vectored thrust and V/STOL aerodynamics, capabilities that can be seen today not only on such aircraft as the AV-8 Hawker Harrier, the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning, but also spacecraft capsules and the space shuttle.
See Part 3/3
Pete Girard
Member
Tribute to Peter F. Girard, by Peter G. Girard, delivered 3 March, 2011, Part 3/3
When the film ‘The Right Stuff’ appeared, I asked him about the type of go-for-broke attitude the film seemed to portray. He hadn’t seen the film, but he did have a very firm opinion about the type of character displayed by good test pilots. Very systematic, very precise, very repeatable. You never did anything that wasn’t scripted, and you didn’t do anything that the controllers weren’t expecting. That’s what got you killed, and more importantly, that’s what got others killed. The work was risky enough, and if something went wrong, everyone else had to know what had led up to it. Good test flying was more like the reliance on procedures portrayed in the film ‘Apollo 13’. There were a great number of significant aircraft control issues to be overcome in such a light aircraft with such a massive engine; problems such as inertia coupling and undamped divergent oscillation, tendencies that are often compensated in today’s aircraft by reliance on modern computer control systems. A summary document by the X-13 Flight Test Director notes: “It must be appreciated that Peter Girard was entering upon an area of flight research hitherto unexplored and fraught with potential for catastrophe.”
He was not to walk away from his test-pilot career unscathed, however. On more than one occasion he had less than a three point landing, most notably in another STOL aircraft, the ungainly-looking VZ-3Y. Another proof-of-concept bird, it was in 1959, during the 13th test flight, on Friday the 13th, that this aircraft suffered a power shaft failure that resulted in a hard landing at Moffett Field with our father at the controls. One of the outsized propeller blades separated during the failure, passed through the fuselage and struck his left foot, putting him in a leg-and-foot cast for an extended time. It was not long after that he wised up and retired from test flying in order to concentrate on advanced systems design, having outlived the normal lifespan for experimental test pilots. It became something of a family axiom that when I was born, he was flying; when Les was born, he was flying, but that after Missy was born, he quit flying.
That combination of his work and interests, my exposure to his manner of thinking, and our shared adventures in the workshop and outdoors instilled in me an ever-consuming curiosity to know how things worked. I believe that this curiosity is the soul of an engineer, and that is a gift he gave to me.
My father’s name appears on more than thirty patents, usually singly, most sponsored through his work at Ryan Aeronautical, a few in a separate venture with T. Claude Ryan called Ryson, and one from his own workshop. His last patent was obtained just several years before his death, and he consulted in many areas of aircraft design after his retirement. These patents are for innovations in V/STOL design, aircraft control devices, remotely piloted air vehicles and aerial delivery systems, wing designs and an epicyclic internal combustion engine. I assisted him in testing a few of his inventions. A series I recall was a means of cutting out some cylinders in an automotive V8 in order to improve fuel economy, an idea which appeared later in the Cadillac V8-6-4. For this test, he had borrowed a V-8 sedan from Claude Ryan, we not owning a V-8 car at the time. For this, the hood had to be removed and several hardware components and instruments affixed to the top of the engine, and then tested on some country backroads. After performing the last of those tests, removing the hardware and reaffixing the hood, my father slammed it down only to have an 8 inch long threaded rod spear right up through the dead center of the hood sheet metal, he having forgotten to remove it. Mrs. Ryan got her car back, but with a new ventilation feature.
In the course of his life Dad received a number of awards and participated in a number of societies. Because of his performance in cadet flight training for the Air Corps, a one-of-a-kind academic excellence award was created and presented to him. At least seven of his papers were published in a variety of technical bulletins, and in 1963 he was awarded the I.B. Laskowitz Gold Medal by the New York Academy of Sciences for a test pilot’s report on VTOL flight characteristics. He was among the select group of people invited to the Dryden Space Center at Edwards to observe the landing of the second Space Shuttle flight, the Columbia.
He was an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, a member of the American Helicopter Society, the Soaring Society of America, and the Associated Glider Club of Southern California, and was a Registered Professional Engineer in the State of California. It gave me great pride when I received my own Professional Engineer certificate to note that the only differences besides the 31 year date interval were the middle name and the certificate number.
He had served as Chief Engineering Test Pilot for 12 years, and later at Ryan held the positions of Chief of Aerodynamics, Chief of Preliminary Design, and Chief of Advanced Products for Aircraft Engineering. Something he enjoyed during this time was to attend the Paris Air Show, arguably the premier annual display of aeronautical technology even to this day. He was often requested as a guest speaker, and frequently mentioned in aeronautical technology articles. His experiences are recounted in the 1963 book “Jet Pioneers”, in a chapter titled ‘Hanging on Hot Air’. He is also noted in the book “Ryan, the Aviator”, and he figures prominently in a segment produced by the History Channel entitled “Secret Superpower Aircraft: Quest for Vertical Take-Off”.
Throughout his life my father was a religious man. He attended Mass regularly. One of his most treasured experiences he would recount was that he had received Communion atop Mt. Whitney during a service there on one of the treks with my brother Les. During his failing years, my wife Kathy and I would pick him up from his home and take him to evening Mass, for which he had dressed hours earlier and walking to and from the car became increasingly laborious. He received the Last Rites several days before his final passing, at 10:20 on a warm, bright, sunny Saturday morning, February 12, a perfect day for flying.
Over the course of our time together, I came to know that my father genuinely loved our mother and his children, and took special joy in each and every one of his grandchildren. My father is survived by his wife, Leslie Gehres Girard, and his children, myself, Peter Gehres Girard and my wife Kathy, my brother Leslie John Girard and his spouse Lori, and our sister, Maria Adrienne Girard-Smith and her husband Stephen. He is also survived by his sister, Adrienne Zekos, who resides in Salinas, California, and he has five grandchildren: Peter Edward Girard, Michael Gehres Girard, Camille Marie Girard, Leslie Franklin Girard, and Nicholas John Girard.
He was not to walk away from his test-pilot career unscathed, however. On more than one occasion he had less than a three point landing, most notably in another STOL aircraft, the ungainly-looking VZ-3Y. Another proof-of-concept bird, it was in 1959, during the 13th test flight, on Friday the 13th, that this aircraft suffered a power shaft failure that resulted in a hard landing at Moffett Field with our father at the controls. One of the outsized propeller blades separated during the failure, passed through the fuselage and struck his left foot, putting him in a leg-and-foot cast for an extended time. It was not long after that he wised up and retired from test flying in order to concentrate on advanced systems design, having outlived the normal lifespan for experimental test pilots. It became something of a family axiom that when I was born, he was flying; when Les was born, he was flying, but that after Missy was born, he quit flying.
That combination of his work and interests, my exposure to his manner of thinking, and our shared adventures in the workshop and outdoors instilled in me an ever-consuming curiosity to know how things worked. I believe that this curiosity is the soul of an engineer, and that is a gift he gave to me.
My father’s name appears on more than thirty patents, usually singly, most sponsored through his work at Ryan Aeronautical, a few in a separate venture with T. Claude Ryan called Ryson, and one from his own workshop. His last patent was obtained just several years before his death, and he consulted in many areas of aircraft design after his retirement. These patents are for innovations in V/STOL design, aircraft control devices, remotely piloted air vehicles and aerial delivery systems, wing designs and an epicyclic internal combustion engine. I assisted him in testing a few of his inventions. A series I recall was a means of cutting out some cylinders in an automotive V8 in order to improve fuel economy, an idea which appeared later in the Cadillac V8-6-4. For this test, he had borrowed a V-8 sedan from Claude Ryan, we not owning a V-8 car at the time. For this, the hood had to be removed and several hardware components and instruments affixed to the top of the engine, and then tested on some country backroads. After performing the last of those tests, removing the hardware and reaffixing the hood, my father slammed it down only to have an 8 inch long threaded rod spear right up through the dead center of the hood sheet metal, he having forgotten to remove it. Mrs. Ryan got her car back, but with a new ventilation feature.
In the course of his life Dad received a number of awards and participated in a number of societies. Because of his performance in cadet flight training for the Air Corps, a one-of-a-kind academic excellence award was created and presented to him. At least seven of his papers were published in a variety of technical bulletins, and in 1963 he was awarded the I.B. Laskowitz Gold Medal by the New York Academy of Sciences for a test pilot’s report on VTOL flight characteristics. He was among the select group of people invited to the Dryden Space Center at Edwards to observe the landing of the second Space Shuttle flight, the Columbia.
He was an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, a member of the American Helicopter Society, the Soaring Society of America, and the Associated Glider Club of Southern California, and was a Registered Professional Engineer in the State of California. It gave me great pride when I received my own Professional Engineer certificate to note that the only differences besides the 31 year date interval were the middle name and the certificate number.
He had served as Chief Engineering Test Pilot for 12 years, and later at Ryan held the positions of Chief of Aerodynamics, Chief of Preliminary Design, and Chief of Advanced Products for Aircraft Engineering. Something he enjoyed during this time was to attend the Paris Air Show, arguably the premier annual display of aeronautical technology even to this day. He was often requested as a guest speaker, and frequently mentioned in aeronautical technology articles. His experiences are recounted in the 1963 book “Jet Pioneers”, in a chapter titled ‘Hanging on Hot Air’. He is also noted in the book “Ryan, the Aviator”, and he figures prominently in a segment produced by the History Channel entitled “Secret Superpower Aircraft: Quest for Vertical Take-Off”.
Throughout his life my father was a religious man. He attended Mass regularly. One of his most treasured experiences he would recount was that he had received Communion atop Mt. Whitney during a service there on one of the treks with my brother Les. During his failing years, my wife Kathy and I would pick him up from his home and take him to evening Mass, for which he had dressed hours earlier and walking to and from the car became increasingly laborious. He received the Last Rites several days before his final passing, at 10:20 on a warm, bright, sunny Saturday morning, February 12, a perfect day for flying.
Over the course of our time together, I came to know that my father genuinely loved our mother and his children, and took special joy in each and every one of his grandchildren. My father is survived by his wife, Leslie Gehres Girard, and his children, myself, Peter Gehres Girard and my wife Kathy, my brother Leslie John Girard and his spouse Lori, and our sister, Maria Adrienne Girard-Smith and her husband Stephen. He is also survived by his sister, Adrienne Zekos, who resides in Salinas, California, and he has five grandchildren: Peter Edward Girard, Michael Gehres Girard, Camille Marie Girard, Leslie Franklin Girard, and Nicholas John Girard.
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Flightengineer
Well-Known Member
Thank you so much for placing it here.
