Harry Armstrong, born in 1899, entered into the U.S. military when horses were still being ridden into battle. During World War I Armstrong learned how to drive a six-mule ambulance and decided to become a doctor. After receiving his medical degree from the University of Louisville, he opened a private practice in Minneapolis. He might have become a country doctor, but he was preoccupied by airplanes and dirigibles. Appointed first lieutenant in the Medical Corps Reserve, Armstrong entered the School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Field, in San Antonio, Texas, in 1924. In 1925 he decided to specialize in a field of medicine few had ever heard of, and soon he would become a flight surgeon. He had never flown in an airplane before.
It was a master sergeant named Erwin H. Nickles who inspired Armstrong to make his first parachute jump. In a lecture that took place in a parachute hangar, Nickles presented the idea that one day entire troops of infantrymen just might jump out of airplanes into combat situations as a group. After the class was over, Armstrong got in a long conversation with Nickles. “He told me that he was puzzled by the fact that people who he supervised in practice jumps almost invariably failed to follow his instruction which was to count ten after leaving the airplane before pulling the rip cord,” Armstrong explained. He said that Nickles feared jumpers would “black out or get into a panic and pull the rip cord too quickly.” When Nickles “hinted that he would be very happy if some doctor would make a jump to see if they could solve his problem,” Armstrong’s mind was made up. “I decided I would make a practice jump and delay my opening as long as possible.”
A few weeks later Armstrong was standing in the cockpit of a biplane, wearing a flying suit and a gabardine helmet and getting ready to jump. “I had a feeling of panic,” Armstrong explained, but he hurled himself out of the aircraft anyway. As he fell through the air he kept his eyes closed and paid attention to what his body felt like as he descended. The feeling of panic disappeared, he later recalled. He did not lose consciousness or black out. Armstrong allowed himself to free-fall for approximately twelve hundred feet before he finally pulled the ripcord. His parachute opened and he floated the last one thousand feet to earth, where he landed in a grassy Texas field. Harry Armstrong had set a U.S. Army record. He was the first flight surgeon to make a free fall from an aircraft.
Armstrong finished school and returned to Minnesota, but with an insatiable love of flying. On March 21, 1930, he closed his practice in Minneapolis and joined the army for good. His life as one of the most important figures in the history of American aviation and aerospace medicine had begun.
When Armstrong arrived with his family at Wright Field, in 1934, the world was enamored with airplanes, which were not yet associated with war but with peacetime progress and the spirit of adventure. Jimmy Doolittle set a transcontinental record flying from California to New Jersey in eleven hours, sixteen minutes. Wiley Post and Harold Gatty circled the globe in eight days. At Wright Field, the primary task of the flight surgeon was determining who was physically fit to fly in the airplanes of the day. Armstrong was a man with a vision and he was also a soldier. He envisioned a future where wars would be fought in the air. The Army Air Corps’ most advanced fighter aircraft was a biplane with a speed of around 200 miles per hour and a flight ceiling of 18,000 feet. Armstrong’s work centered around resolving problems related to oxygen deprivation and exposure to cold.
One day Armstrong spotted a trapdoor in the floor of his office inside Building 16 at Wright Field. He opened the door, saw a staircase, and climbed down. He found himself in a basement filled with old machinery and drafting tables. An unusual-looking chamber, like something out of a novel by Jules Verne, caught his eye. It was shaped like a globe, made of iron, and had windows like submarine portholes. This was the army’s first and only low-pressure chamber, built decades earlier for its World War I flight surgeon school. The school, located in Mineola, Long Island, had closed down after the war and the chamber had wound up here, at Wright Field.
Armstrong got an idea. Next door to his office, Army Air Forces engineers were designing airplanes that could fly faster, higher, and farther than ever before. Armstrong wanted to begin research and development on the medical effects that flying these new airplanes would have on pilots. He wrote a letter to the engineering division at Wright Field requesting permission. The letter was forwarded to Washington. In no time, Armstrong was appointed director of the Physiological Research Unit (later called the Aero Medical Research Laboratory and other variations on the name) at Wright Field.