Alvin M. Johnston

By the summer of 1955 the Dash 80 had been flying for a year.

Tex Johnston had been flying it for most of that time.

He knew that airplane the way a good mechanic knows an engine he's rebuilt with his own hands.

From the inside out with the kind of knowledge you only get from repetition and attention.

Good publicity, a controlled professional showing for 50,000 people and, not incidentally, the airline executives and company board members who were on hand.

William Allen was on the shore, the man who had bet the company on this airplane.

Nobody thought to be specific with Tex Johnston about what controlled and professional meant.

That turned out to matter.

The morning of August 8, 1955, Tex Johnston walked into Bill Allen's office at Boeing headquarters in Seattle.

Allen was the president of the company.

He hadn't slept.

Those four engines pressing that swept wing machine through the summer air.

Beautiful.

And then Tex Johnston put it into a barrel roll.

Not a steep bank, not a wing over, a full coordinated barrel roll.

A smooth sweeping arc that took the Dash 80, put it inverted over Lake Washington, and brought it back upright in front of every airline executive Boeing had managed to get on that barge.

I’m Taildragger, and this is The Hangar on Radio Hangar.

Today, we are going back to a summer afternoon in 1955 when a man named Tex Johnston did something so audacious, so technically precise, and so utterly unrepeatable that people still talk about it 70 years later.

He barrel-rolled a jetliner—not a fighter, not a stunt plane—a 130-foot wingspan prototype commercial jet over Lake Washington in front of 50,000 spectators, with Boeing’s president watching from his yacht below.

Pull up a chair.

That was the kind of number that, if the airplane failed or the airlines said no, could bring a company to its knees.

The Dash 80 first flew on July 15th, 1954.

Tex Johnston in the left seat, a test pilot named Dix Loesch in the right.

The flight went cleanly, which for a swept-wing jet transport of that scale and novelty was not something you could take for granted.

Alvin Melvin Johnston.

Everybody called him Tex on account of the cowboy boots and the cowboy hat he wore, even though he was actually from Kansas, not Texas.

Didn't matter.

He was Tex, he was Boeing's chief of flight test, and he was, by every account of the men who flew with him, one of the finest stick-and-rutter pilots who ever drew breath.