On the night of 20 September 1956, a 20-year-old aircraft mechanic at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona took an F-86F Sabre down the runway for a high-speed taxi test, felt the nose go light at 105 knots, decided he no longer had room to stop, and pulled it into the air.

He had about two hours of flying in his life, all of it in a Piper Cub with an instructor behind him. He had never flown a jet. He stayed airborne for an hour and two minutes and landed it on the centreline.

Que s'est-il réellement passé ?

Johnson was on the evening shift with the other mechanics, working an F-86F that had come out of major maintenance and needed functional checks before a pilot flew it in the morning. He started the engine, called the tower for taxi clearance, went to the run-up area and asked permission for a high-speed taxi run. Permission was granted. All of that was normal.

What happened next he explained years later to Air & Space Magazine, and it is not the story of a man taking a jet for a joyride.

He called the tower and asked what he should do.

What explains the outcome is what he already knew. He had spent hundreds of hours inside this type with a spanner, and he had read the pilot’s handbook properly.

He climbed to about 10,000 feet and circled the base for roughly an hour while Captain Robert McCormick, an F-86 pilot, talked him through the aircraft over the radio. Second Lieutenant George Madison, an F-86 check pilot Johnson knew and trusted, took off and flew alongside him. Captain Linden Kelly, a senior maintenance officer and pilot, got airborne in a third Sabre.

They gave him speeds, told him when to lower gear and flaps, and lined him up. He touched down on the centreline, faster than a normal landing, and rather than risk standing on the brakes he let the aircraft run into the barrier at the far end. He had no parachute.

Then they prosecuted him

Johnson was taken to the base hospital for a blood test and spent the night in a guarded room. His general court-martial convened on 26 March 1957 on three charges: stealing an F-86F valued at $217,427, causing $195.64 of damage to it, and flying without proper clearance.

The court found he had not intended to steal the aircraft. He pleaded guilty to wrongful appropriation and was convicted of the damage. On the third charge he was acquitted, on a technicality with real charm to it: the regulation requiring clearance to fly applied only to Air Force pilots, and Johnson was not one.

He got six months at hard labour, reduction to Airman Basic and forfeiture of $65 a month. He served five and was released for good behaviour, stayed at Williams for another two years, transferred to Okinawa, and left active duty in late 1961. Later, in civilian life, he earned a pilot’s licence and flew crop dusters.

He was not the only one

The comment thread under the original post is full of people saying this is really the story of the English Electric Lightning, and getting cross about it. They are thinking of a different man, and both stories are true.

In 1966 Wing Commander Walter “Taffy” Holden, an engineering officer, accidentally flew a Lightning F1 at RAF Lyneham while running the engine to chase an electrical fault. Vibration walked the throttle past the gate into reheat, and he was airborne in an aircraft with no canopy, no ejection seat straps done up, and no flying suit. He landed it on his third attempt.

The third case is the odd one out, because it was deliberate. On 4 July 1986, Lance Corporal Howard Foote, 21, took an A-4M Skyhawk from MCAS El Toro and flew it for about half an hour over the Pacific. He had done fifty hours in a simulator. He had recently learned that a physical condition disqualified him from becoming a Marine pilot.

A commenter under the original post says Foote was court-martialled. He was not, and the correction is worth making. Court-martial proceedings were dropped. The base commander, Brigadier General D.E.P. Miller, concluded that four months in the brig at Camp Pendleton plus an other than honourable discharge would serve. Foote wrote an apology calling his own actions foolhardy and downright dangerous.

The thing all three have in common

Johnson could not be a pilot because of his eyes. Foote could not be a pilot because of a physical condition. Both of them ended up flying a fighter anyway, badly advised and alone, and both were punished for it.

It is the same disqualification that runs through Keith Ferris, told he could not join the flight cadet programme because he was allergic to eggs, who spent forty years in the back of Air Force aircraft with a sketchbook and then patented the camouflage they wear. It is the same one that put Charles DeBellevue in the back seat of an F-4, where he became the highest-scoring American ace of the Vietnam War without touching the controls.

Aviation has always had a medical gate at the front of it, and it has always been a blunt instrument. Some of the people it turns away find a way in through a side door. Two of them did it with a spanner and a stolen hour.

About those photographs

One more thing, since the comments are unanimous about it. The post that brought this round illustrated an F-86 story with what several readers identified as a MiG-15, and a second image that looks like a T-33.

The confusion is at least historically apt, since telling an F-86 from a MiG-15 in a hurry was a genuine operational problem over Korea, and both types have a nose intake and swept wings. But the aircraft in this story is a Sabre, serial 52-5039, and it is the one at the top of this page.

Sources: Air & Space Magazine, “Mind If I Borrow It?”, Smithsonian; UPI archive, 7 November 1986; Afterburner reporting on Taffy Holden; theaviationcircle on Instagram