He flew PBY flying boats in the New Guinea/Australia sector, then four-engined PB4Y-2 Privateer patrol bombers on a tour of operations with VP/VPB-109 (the "Reluctant Raiders").

He was reassigned afterwards to training activities stateside from August 1944 until the end of the war, then spent two years flying transport missions from Pearl Harbor to the West Coast.

Bored with the airline routine, he left in 1949 to join Douglas as a production test pilot to certify A-1 Skyraiders off the assembly line before their delivery to the Navy.

In 1955, he recounted his experiences test-flying the Skyraider and Skyrocket in a successful memoir, The Lonely Sky, written with Jacqueline Hazard, whom he married shortly after the book was published.

In September 1968, he was the pilot of a routine air-taxi flight from Los Angeles to Santa Catalina Island when his Grumman Goose amphibian went down in the Pacific Ocean.