Slowed Motion : Sammy Mason, a Top Test Pilot for Years, Now Writes and Studies

The hands are legendary for their deft and steady touch on a joy stick, renowned for coaxing aerial ballet out of thousands of pounds of hurtling machinery.

Now those hands tremble and dance with a life of their own, tapping an unbidden patter on their owner’s knee.

“I’m not nervous,” Sammy Mason of Santa Paula tells a visitor matter-of-factly, trapping the renegade hands under his armpits. “I’ve got Parkinson’s.”

The 69-year-old Santa Paula resident, once the toast of the national air show circuit and a pioneer in test piloting, has adjusted his life to a quieter pace because of the degenerative disease.

He walks his Irish setter, Rusty, along the river bank that borders the Santa Paula Airport and spends hours composing his thoughts to the soft clicks of a computer keyboard. But he brings the same attitude to flying a desk as testing a jet fighter. The limits are still there to be explored, only now they are his own and not an airplane’s.

Mason flew for more than a half-century and won acclaim in three arenas of aviation.

In the late 1940s, he was the premier performer of the air show circuit, commanding the highest salary of any aerobatic performer in the country. In 1976, he was named Flight Instructor of the Year by the National Assn. of Flight Instructors. Last month, the Society of Experimental Test Pilots awarded him an honorary fellowship, a distinction reserved for a handful of legendary fliers such as Charles Lindbergh and Jimmy Doolittle, to acknowledge pioneering feats accomplished during 22 years of test piloting.

If the transition from cockpit to armchair has been painful for Mason, he doesn’t let on, his sons say.

In the two years since he stopped flying, Mason has spent most of his waking hours at the Santa Paula Airport in his office above the hangar, where his sons keep a helicopter and two light planes. There he writes books and poems, pores over the Bible and works on aeronautical inventions in an atmosphere faintly spiked by the fumes of aviation gas.

“There’s just so many things going on right now, so much I have to get done,” he tells a caller seeking to appropriate a chunk of his time.

Mason has published “Stalls, Spins and Safety,” a book that has been acclaimed by aviation publications, has patented two of his inventions, and is writing his autobiography.

Not that quiet and contemplation are new to him. He has long defied the swaggering, bar-hopping, hard-living stereotype of the red-hot pilot. Friends and family say they’ve always been as likely to find Mason with a book in his hand as a joy stick, and they recall543713645Sunday-school classes as clearly as they remember his low rolls over the Santa Paula citrus groves.

Mason was Steve McQueen’s flight instructor, but he is quicker to mention that he got the reputedly hard-bitten actor into church than out of tailspins.

He seems to be singularly untouched by the acclaim that has followed him through his aviation careers. A visitor hungry for tales of blood-and-guts daring on the air-show circuit is more likely to glean engineering insights on the relationship between the angle of attack and pro-spin yaw. His orderly office is almost bare of aviation memorabilia. A wealth of old photos is tucked away in a metal filing cabinet.

Despite the wear of time, Mason looks more the role of dashing aviator than he plays it. His six-foot frame is lean, his craggy face softened by an avalanche of eyebrows. His voice is deep and strong.

Mason has been obsessed with aviation as long as he can remember.

At 14, he dropped out of school to be closer to airplanes. He mowed weeds and painted hangars at the old Telegraph and Atlantic Airport in East Los Angeles in exchange for flight time. Then he moved up to the position of grease monkey for a local instructor, earning 15 minutes of air time for a week of work. He soloed in four hours and went on to teach himself all the aerobatics he’s ever learned.

By the time Mason was 18, he was stretching his wings in air shows, but it seems his early interest in aerobatics was not only for the thrill, but, in part, out of a healthy sense of self-preservation.

“Sammy had six engine failures in his first 20 hours of flight,” recalled Tony LeVier, former chief test pilot for Lockheed, who first met Mason over 50 years ago at the Telegraph and Atlantic Airport. “I think that helped give him his lifelong interest in safety--he always wanted to be able to handle the aircraft, no matter what it was doing.”

Over the next few years, Mason worked through a potpourri of aviation jobs ranging from flight instructor to charter pilot and flew air shows on the side. While working out of an airfield in Glendale, he met Wanda Lee, who became his wife and mother of their eight children.

Word of Mason’s expertise in aerobatics spread, and, in 1941, famed international aerobatic champion Tex Rankin asked Mason to be an instructor at his flight school in Tulare. Soon after Mason accepted, Rankin signed a contract with the military to train pilots for World War II.

Redemption Aloft

Rankin put Mason in charge of a squadron of washout students, dubbed Squadron X, in an effort to staunch a flood of rejects from the aviation program.

Mason only recalls two students who weren’t successfully recycled from Squadron X--one who kept getting lost and another who froze with fear during a steep dive and whom Mason had to pry off the controls to right the plane.

After the war, Mason started flying the air-show circuit in earnest. He soon put together five fliers, two wing walkers and a parachute team and called them the Hollywood Hawks.

“The old-timers in the business still talk about the Hollywood Hawks,” said Mike Dewey, a movie and commercial stunt pilot for 23 years. Dewey was a child when he saw the Hollywood Hawks and said Mason was his hero then and is an inspiration still. “I knew, even as a kid, I was watching something incredible.”

Mason especially astonished the crowds in an old souped-up Steerman biplane to which he’d strapped rockets to produce an ear-splitting, mind-boggling, nearly vertical takeoff.

Although others recall stunts like these with chills, Mason downplays the danger.

“I gave most things a considerable amount of thought before I did them,” he said. “You can do things that seem dangerous to the average layman, but, if you approach it right, it’s safe.”

While Mason zig-zagged across the country, flying an assortment of airplanes or towing his glider from coast to coast, Wanda and the kids lived in Big Bear, in a cabin near the lake.

Never on Sundays

“We lived about a mile from the airport, and Dad would taxi his airplanes down the dirt road and park them behind the log cabin,” said Mike Mason of Santa Paula, Sam’s son and a Lockheed pilot. “It just seemed the normal thing to do.”

Mason’s children also recall thinking it normal to see their dad fly between pine trees and perform impromptu air shows.

At the height of his air-show fame, Mason started going to church to set an example for his children, but ended up embracing Christianity himself.

His new conviction was so strong that, when a minister at a church in Spearfish, S.D., one Sunday mentioned that most of the congregation had skipped church to get ready to see an air show, Mason stopped performing on Sundays.

Without the Sunday revenue, Mason couldn’t keep up with all the fuel and maintenance expenses. At a particularly low point, all he had to send home were trading stamps, said daughter Lynn Dowling of Santa Paula.

Mason gave up the air-show circuit in 1949 and took a job building chinchilla pens. Later that year, he picked up some work crop-dusting and ferrying airplanes. In 1950, Lockheed hired him as a jet aircraft test pilot.

With his aerobatic background, Mason was a natural for spin-testing, which LeVier calls “probably the most feared maneuver of an airplane,” pointing out that early aviators called them “death spirals.”

Mason cooly describes a spin in terms such as “a stall that results in autorotation,” but he does concede that spin testing is “one of the trickier aspects of testing.”

“If you could do everything on paper and computers, it would be wonderful, but there’s always an unknown,” Mason said. “You really don’t know what the airplane will do until you do it.”

Mason tested many of Lockheed’s early jet fighters and quickly established himself as an authority on spin/stall testing, LeVier said. He won a place in the record books, however, when he became the first pilot to fly a helicopter upside down.

He’d been demonstrating a particularly maneuverable helicopter for Lockheed in 1967. “I got more frisky with it as we went along,” he said. “I told them, I think we can do a full complement of aerobatics in it.”

Awesome Display

Lockheed officials wanted assurance that they wouldn’t lose the helicopter and they also wanted the program ready for the Helicopter Society of America show in a few days, Mason said. Mason came up with an aerobatic series for a helicopter that including a dazzling array of loops and rolls that had only been performed in airplanes before--after seven hours of practice.

“They were awed by the guy’s flying,” LeVier said.

Mason spent 22 years at Lockheed, spinning and stalling and diving newly designed aircraft ranging from helicopters to heavy transport planes. By the time he retired, he had logged about 32,000 hours--over 3 1/2 years of flight--and he’d had some close calls.

His son Tim said the family rarely sensed any anxiety Mason might have felt.

“As a kid I realized the danger of his business mostly because he was losing a lot of friends and associates,” he said. “For a while there, it seemed like every few months, he’d lose a friend.”

After retiring from Lockheed in 1973, Mason gave private lessons out of Santa Paula Airport. Aerobatics were always part of the course, often accompanied by some lessons in faith.

Airport regulars point to many pilots who changed their life style after meeting Mason, including Steve McQueen. McQueen spent the last three years of his life in Santa Paula, most of it at the airport. He spent much of his time with Mason’s family and regularly attended the Ventura Missionary Church with them.

Spiritual Leader

Tim Mason said he’s lost track of the number of people his father has, in his subtle way, influenced spiritually.

“I think it is because people respect him so much for his confidence and expertise in aviation,” he said. “If they have problems in their life, they look to him for help.”

The depth of Mason’s faith has often been tested as he pumped adrenaline on risky flights and watched friends drill aircraft into the ground. The limits were plumbed, however, when his son Tony, at age 17, died in a midair collision at the Santa Paula airport. Part of the dedication of Mason’s book reads: to “Tony, who departed on eternal wings.”

“Another pilot clipped his tail off,” said LeVier. “The remarkable thing was that, when they looked at the airplane, they found the boy had followed all the emergency procedures. He’d had the presence of mind to shut off the engines, the electrical system, magnetos.”

“Of course he would have,” he said. “He was Sammy’s son. Sammy taught him.”