Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [60]
That should have been a hint. I had intentionally planned my retirement announcement before promotions were announced, so that if I were not promoted to general, it would not seem as though my leaving was sour grapes. And if I was promoted, then it wouldn’t look as though I was an ingrate, just waiting for a pay raise before retiring at that level rather than as a colonel. But the more personal aspect of my announcement had to do with our children. Joan and I did not want to disrupt their lives in the middle of the school year, so while I had planned to announce my retirement now, I wouldn’t stop working until about six months later, much as we had done when I left NASA.
With no time to mull over the ramifications of the general’s request, I simply made a brief statement to the press, and obeyed orders—or, in this case, suggestions. Immediately following the press conference, I headed back to California and went back to work.
Upon my return to Edwards, General Bob White implied to me that I might want to consider relinquishing command of the school during my remaining time before retirement. He didn’t overtly state that he thought I could soon be removed from my command, but that was the message I understood. I asserted that it was to all our benefit for me to stay on and finish some of the projects on which Ted and I had been working.
“I understand, Buzz,” General White replied. “But we need to be prepared for all the possibilities.”
The possibilities took care of themselves the following day, when, only four days after the A-7 crash at Edwards, another disaster struck. A T-33 advanced jet trainer carrying two pilots crashed just seconds after the pilots bailed out. The pilots walked away with only surface cuts and bruises. Bob White met me at the hospital with a knowing look. We both recognized that the handwriting was on the wall.
Indeed, when the Air Force investigators finished looking into the accidents, they deduced that the A-7 jet pilot had bailed out because he couldn’t recover from a spin due to a mechanical problem that the plane’s maintenance staff missed. The T-33 had been doing spins and spin recovery when the problem occurred. In both cases there weren’t enough supervisory personnel observing the spin tests of the aircraft. That laid the blame for the destruction of two expensive planes, and nearly the loss of three pilots’ lives, squarely on my shoulders.
Not surprisingly, when the new list of brigadier generals came out, my name was not on it. The lists had ostensibly been prepared in December, before the two crashes. In truth, my chances for promotion ended when I asked for psychiatric help, but I still had hoped that my overall career might be considered. I had spent more than twenty years in service to my country. Even after returning from the hospital in San Antonio, I felt that my performance as commandant and my relationship with staff members had been extremely good.
In February 1972, four-star general George Brown came to visit Edwards. His visit wasn’t just a friendly stopover. The Air Force had sent down an edict stating that the school would no longer be known as the Aerospace Research Pilot School, since we would no longer be considered the primary training facility for potential U.S. astronauts. With the Apollo program winding down, the Air Force had decided to re-emphasize the traditional aspects of test pilot training, rather than astronaut instruction. Astronaut training was the one thing I knew about, and it provided a quasi-rationale for my being the commandant. Now that was gone, too.
General White called all of my young instructors to my office for a briefing so that General Brown from Washington, D.C., could explain the change to them. I stood along with the young officers listening to the general’s presentation, struggling to keep my jaw from dropping. The astronaut program had been in existence for ten years before I arrived at Edwards, but