Blond, curly-headed James R. Collins was sitting around the restaurant at Roosevelt Field Hotel with other unemployed pilots, smoking, sipping coffee, jesting casually about his profession. Since 1929 when he quit as chief test pilot for Curtiss, he had been a free-lance specialist on power dives.
"It's a damn fool's job," remarked "Jimmy" Collins, "but it's easy money."
It paid him $1,500 per job, but jobs were scarce and, at 31, he had a wife and two children to support. They had been on his father-in-law's farm in Oklahoma for months because he lacked...
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