Maverick Test Pilot Noted for a Stunt Boeing Tried to Hush Up : Aviation: Tex Johnston took the first passenger jet out for a spin, literally, at a Seattle air show. Company bigwigs were left breathless, and irate.

When Alvin (Tex) Johnston was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame, he was honored for a career that included test flights of sweptwing bombers and the nation’s first jet.

But one feat that made the Boeing test pilot a legend wasn’t even mentioned during the July ceremony in Dayton, Ohio.

It happened in 1955. About 300,000 people had gathered around Seattle’s Lake Washington for the Gold Cup hydroplane races, part of Seafair, an annual water event that also features spectacular air shows.

Once the Navy’s Blue Angels aerobatic flying team left the sky, it was Johnston’s turn to show off the Dash 80, the prototype of the Boeing 707, the nation’s first passenger jet.

At the sound of the engines, the crowd looked up to see the 160,000-pound 128-foot-long plane zoom close overhead at more than 400 m.p.h.

Then it shot straight up in a chandelle, a maneuver usually reserved for aerobatic pilots, descended, and made a 360-degree barrel roll.

“I was pretty sure they didn’t believe what they’d seen, so I made a turn, came back in the other direction, and repeated the maneuver,” Johnston said.

The crowd was thrilled; Boeing officials were not.

One version of the story has it that the 707 passed upside down over the platform where Boeing Chairman William Allen and other company executives were standing. Nearby were members of the International Air Transport Assn., a powerful air cartel that was holding its annual meeting in Seattle that week.

Allen, who died in 1985, did not talk publicly about the incident until years later. The $16-million Dash 80 was the biggest project at the time for a company that was the foundation of the local economy.

“It has taken nearly 22 years for me to reach the point where I can discuss the event with a modicum of humor,” he told a conference in Seattle in 1977.

“Keep in mind we had gambled over $20 million and a big chunk of the company’s future on that airplane. Many of our potential customers, as well as stockholders and directors, were on the lake watching, and it was the only such aircraft in the world.”

At the time, Allen directed his publicity department to keep the stunt out of the news, something Boeing was powerful enough to do in those days. Neither of Seattle’s daily newspapers reported the incident the next day, nor did any television station, Johnston recalled.

Before the maneuver, Johnston said, he told his co-pilot he was going to do the roll so it wouldn’t come as a surprise.

The next day, Johnston was called in to Allen’s office.

Before Allen could scold him, Johnston cut in.

“I said, ‘I wouldn’t jeopardize the equipment. It’s a 1-G maneuver. I’ve perfected it all my life. These people will never forget it. They’ll think it’s the strongest airplane in the world.’

“And he said, ‘You know that and now we know that, but just don’t do it anymore.’ ”

Johnston, 79, lives in Everett, about 20 miles north of Seattle, with Dolores, his wife of 58 years. Their mobile home is just a mile or so from Payne Field, a county airport.

He grew up in Emporia, Kan., where at age 11 he took his first airplane ride in a World War I Jenny that landed in a cow pasture near his home. By 19, he had a limited commercial pilot’s license and was working for a barnstorming operation in Coffeyville, Kan.

During World War II, he was an instructor for the Civilian Pilot Training program and then a pilot for the Army Air Corps Ferry Command, flying new military aircraft out of factories.

In 1944, he became a test pilot at Bell Aircraft’s Muroc Flight Test Base in California, which is now Edwards Air Force Base. He worked on the development of the XP-59A, the country’s first jet aircraft. Later, he took over testing of the supersonic X-1, the jet that Chuck Yeager eventually used to break the sound barrier.

He was the first pilot to fly the X-1 on all four rockets, in preparation for Yeager’s historic flight.

Johnston would have liked to have been the one to break the sound barrier. Although it’s been reported that he was bitter about the decision to put Yeager in the seat, he shrugged it off during the interview.

“It was an Air Force airplane and the Air Force wanted it that way,” Johnston said. “I thought about it, but it didn’t make any difference. It was just another flight.”

He went to Boeing in 1949 and was project pilot for the XB-47, the first sweptwing bomber, and later the XB-52 bomber, which became the backbone of the Strategic Air Command.