The tail was shaking dramatically and I was afraid of it breaking off, but I didn't quit. I got myself to 25,000ft, and I practised turning, steeper, steeper, steeper and I got it where I could pull it round in 40 seconds. I went back to Wendover as quick as I could and took the airplane up. PT: I had dropped enough practice bombs to realise that the charges would blow around 1,500ft in the air, so I would have 40 to 42 seconds to turn 159 degrees. ST: How many seconds did you have to make that turn?
'Turn 159 degrees as fast as you can and you'll be able to put yourself the greatest distance from where the bomb exploded.' What is tangency in this case?' He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. I said, 'Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. But what should we do this time? He said, 'You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there.' He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb. So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it. PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened.
