A Gift of Wings

  “Understand you are declaring an emergency,” the tower replied. The tower was primarily concerned with meeting its responsibility, which was to ring the bell that sent crash crews scrambling for the red trucks. Responsibility met, the tower became only an interested observer, and very little help.

  Jack Willis, oddly, felt like a new person, enormously confident. The bounce on a left wheel in a strong right crosswind was a trick of coordination reserved for thousand-hour pilots, and Willis had just over four hundred hours in the air, sixty-eight in the F-84.

  Those who watched the next approach called it the work of an old-time professional pilot. With left wing down, with hard right rudder, with controls only moderately responsive at landing airspeed, Second Lieutenant Jack Willis bounced his twenty-thousand-pound airplane six times on its left main landing gear. On the sixth bounce, the right gear swung suddenly down and locked into place. The third green light came on.

  The crosswind landing that followed was simple by comparison, and his airplane touched smoothly down on its right wheel, then its left, and last of all, the nosewheel. Full left rudder in the landing roll and a touch of left brake as the airplane slowed and tried to weathervane into the wind, and the emergency was over. The crash crews in their bulky white suits of asbestos were unnecessary and out of their element in the normalcy that followed. “Nice job, Eagle Two,” mobile said simply. And the gray Persian cat, that had watched the landing with uncatlike, one might almost say, professional interest, was gone. The 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron was gradually pulling itself into fighting shape.

  The winter came. Low clouds moved in from the sea to become a permanent companion of the hilltops that surrounded the airbase. It rained much, and as the winter wore on, the rain became freezing rain and then snow. The runway was icy and drag chutes and very careful braking were necessary to keep the heavy airplanes on the concrete. The tall emerald grass turned pallid and lifeless. But a fighter squadron does not cancel its mission each winter, there is always flying and training to be done. There were incidents as the new pilots were faced with unusual aircraft problems and low ceilings, but they had been trained well on instruments and somehow the gray Persian cat sat carefully at the edge of the runway as each of the afflicted airplanes landed. The Persian became known to the pilots simply as “Cat.”

  One freezing afternoon, just as Wally Jacobs touched down uneventfully after a hydraulic system failure and a no-flap, no-speedbrake approach through a five-hundred-foot ceiling, Captain Hendrick, on duty as mobile control officer, ventured to capture the cat. It sat quietly, looking down the runway, absorbed in watching Jacobs’s airplane after it whistled past. Hendrick approached from behind and gently lifted the cat from the ground. At his first touch it became a ball of gray lightning. There was an instant slash of claw along Hendrick’s cheek, and the Persian streaked to the ground and away, disappearing at once in the tall dry grass.

  Five seconds later the brakes on Wally Jacobs’s airplane failed completely, and he swerved off the runway at seventy knots into the not-quite-frozen dirt. The nosewheel strut sheared immediately. The airplane disappeared in a great sheet of flying mud, slewed to collapse the right main landing gear and split the droptank, and slid around, backward, for another two hundred feet. Jacobs left the cockpit at once, forgetting even to close the throttle. In a second, as Hendrick watched, the airplane burst into brilliant flame. It burned fiercely, and with the airplane was destroyed a record for flying safety unmatched by any other fighter squadron in Europe.

  The findings of the investigation were that Lieutenant Jacobs was at fault for allowing the airplane to leave the runway and for neglecting to close the throttle, allowing the still-turning engine to ignite the fire. If he had not forgotten, like a grossly inexperienced pilot, to stopcock the throttle, the airplane would have been able to fly again.

  The board’s decision was not a popular one with the 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron, but the cause of the destruction of the airplane was laid to pilot error. Hendrick mentioned the cat, and an order, unwritten but official, was sent through the squadron: the Persian was never to be approached again. From that moment, Cat was rarely mentioned.

  But once in a while, as a young lieutenant brought an ailing airplane down through the weather, he would ask of mobile control, “Cat there?” And the mobile control officer would scan the runway edge for the sculptured gray Persian, and he would pick up his microphone and say, “He’s there.” And the airplane would land.

  Winter wore on. The young pilots became older, absorbed experience. And as the weeks went by, Cat was seen less and less frequently at the edge of the runway. Norm Thompson brought in an airplane with the windscreen and canopy completely iced over. Cat was not waiting by the runway, but Thompson’s GCA was a professional one, born of training and experience. He made a blind touchdown, jettisoned the canopy to be able to see, and rolled to an uneventful stop. Jack Willis, now with one hundred thirty hours flying experience in the F-84, came back with an airplane heavily damaged by ricochets picked up after a firing run at a new strafing range laid over a base of solid rock. He landed smoothly, although Cat was nowhere to be seen.

  The last time Cat appeared by the runway was in March. It was Jacobs again. He called that his oil pressure was falling, and that he was trying to make it back to the field. The ceiling was high, three thousand feet, when he broke into the clear after a radar vector and called the runway in sight.

  Major Robert Rider had raced his staff car to mobile control as the notice of emergency in progress reached him. This is it, he thought. I’m going to see Jacobs die. He closed the glass door behind him as the pilot asked, “Cat happen to be down there?”

  Rider reached for the binoculars and scanned the edge of the runway. The Persian sat quietly waiting. “Cat’s here,” the squadron commander told the mobile control officer seriously, and seriously the information was relayed to Jacobs.

  “Oil pressure zero,” the pilot said matter-of-factly. Then, “Engine’s frozen, the stick is locking. I’ll try to make it on the emergency hydraulic pump.” A moment later he said, suddenly, “No I won’t. I’m getting out.” He turned his airplane toward the heavy forest to the west and ejected. Two minutes later he was sprawling in the frozen mud of a plowed French field, his parachute settling like a tired white butterfly about him. It was over that quickly.

  The investigation board was to find later that the airplane struck the ground with both hydraulic systems completely locked. The emergency hydraulic pump failed before impact, they discovered, and the airplane hit with controls frozen and immovable. Jacobs was later to be commended for his judgment in not attempting to land the stricken airplane.

  But that was to be later. As Jacobs’s parachute drifted down behind a low hill, Rider leveled the binoculars at the gray Persian, who stood suddenly and stretched luxuriously, claws digging into the frozen earth. Cat, he noticed, was not a perfect sculpture. Along his left side, from ribs to shoulder, ran a wide white scar that the battle-gray fur could not cover as he stretched. The graceful head turned as Rider watched, and the amber eyes gazed squarely at the commander of the 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron.

  The cat blinked once, slowly, one might almost say amusedly, and walked to disappear for the last time in the tall grass.

  Tower 0400

  I closed the door behind me just as the twenty-four-hour clock by the light gun ticked through 0300. It was dark, of course, in the tower, but it was a much different sort of darkness than the black I had just stepped in from. That dark was a thing that anyone could use for any purpose; for cards or for crime, or for the war hinted and threatened in the headlines downstairs.

  The darkness in this aerie of glass and steel was a specialized dark. Everything it touched had the same air of professional purpose about it; the clock, the lightly hissing radio receivers in their bank along one low wall, the silent never-ending sweep of the pale green line of the radar scope. It was a professional darkness to shroud the
world of people who fly airplanes. There was no malice in this dark, it was not there to drag the airplanes down or to make it difficult for them to fly. It was just a matter-of-fact, businesslike, I-am-here-now darkness. The beacon rotating with its busy hum a few feet overhead was not turning to fight this dark, but to pinpoint a landing field on a map of black.

  The two tower operators who worked the graveyard shift were expecting me, and extended hands from behind the orange glow of their cigarettes. “What brings you up here at this hour?” one asked quietly. All the talk on this shift was quiet, as if to keep from waking the city that slept at our backs.

  “Always wondered what it was like,” I said.

  The other man laughed, again quietly. “Now you know,” he said. “This one minute is a pretty good example of what it’s like all through the shift.”

  The static hissed lightly on in the speakers, the light gun hung unswinging from the ceiling, and the pale line of the radar turned endlessly, tirelessly. The airport was waiting. At that moment, somewhere out in the starred night sky, an airliner bored steadily ahead, her long aluminum nose pointing at the field guarded by this tower. It wasn’t even an image yet on the farsighted eye of the radar, but the first officer was calling for weather at our field and leafing through his briefcase for let-down plates. His engines roared steadily on in the darkness outside, and the needles of the oil quantity gages had dropped down, confirming the length of the flight.

  But in the tower the air was quiet and still. The blue stars that were the taxiway lights stood frozen in their orderly constellation on the field, waiting to guide any pilot who thought of taxiing at this hour.

  Down on the lightplane ramp, a flashlight snapped on, making a little yellow eye on the concrete with its short beam. As I watched, the eye jumped up the trim fuselage of a Bonanza, found the door, and disappeared into the cockpit. It reappeared in a moment, and for a second I saw the shadowy form of the pilot who held the light as he stepped off the wingwalk.

  The tower operators continued their quiet talk together about the places they had been and the things they had seen. I watched the eye of the flashlight, fascinated. Where was that pilot going? Why did he leave so long before the sun? Is he a transient pilot going home or a home-town pilot leaving?

  The little pool of yellow light stayed for a moment on the aileron hinges, splashed down the leading edge of the right wing, disappeared beneath it into the wheel wells. It appeared suddenly on the cowling and waited patiently until the dzus fasteners were half-turned open and the cowl lifted. It jumped eagerly onto the engine, checking the sparkplug terminals, the oil level; it wandered for a moment where it pleased around the finned cylinders and the low-swing engine mount. The cowl came back down and fastened shut. The light brightened as it moved the length of the propeller, and was gone for a minute on the other side of the airplane. It appeared again on the fuselage and slipped into the cockpit.

  The flight line was as dark as it had been when I came, but out in its dark now was a man, and he was getting his airplane ready to fly. In the binoculars I found the faint glow of the dim cockpit lights as they came on, and in a minute the red-green of his navigation lights flashed, giving dimension to his machine. And suddenly the silence in the aerie was broken.

  “Tower, Bonanza four seven three five Bravo on the ad ramp, taxi for takeoff.” The voice stopped as suddenly and abruptly as it had begun.

  In our high glass cube the smooth professional voice of the tower operator answered, speaking into his microphone as if this were the thousandth call he had answered this morning, instead of the first.

  A single brilliant white light slammed into the darkness of the ramp below, and in its white the concrete showed its own true white and the yellow of its painted line. The bright light moved easily through the blue constellations of the field, homing on the end of the runway’s long strip of white lights. It stopped, and flicked out. Even in the binoculars the cockpit lights were too dim to see; the only evidence of the plane’s form was a short break in the orderly row of blue taxiway lights.

  In a minute our quiet air was broken again by the voice from the VHF speaker. “Tower, three five Bravo; think you can work me in for a takeoff?”

  “Wise guy,” the controller said, reaching for his microphone. “Might be able to squeeze you onto the schedule, three five Bravo. Cleared for takeoff, wind calm, no reported traffic.”

  “Roj, tower, three five Bravo’s rolling.”

  The black blot against the lights moved ahead as he talked, the only motion on a still field. In fifteen seconds the field lights shone as before, and a flashing green navigation light reached for the dark horizon.

  “Beautiful night,” the pilot said thoughtfully to the VHF. The field was still again.

  Those were the last words we heard from three five Bravo, and his lights faded into the night. I never will know what field he calls home, or where he was going that night, or who he is. But in that one last call, still captured on the impersonal tape recording of the tower, the pilot of that Bonanza suggested that perhaps pilots really are different from all other men.

  They share the same nontransferable experience of flying alone; if they are also moved by the same beauty of the sky, they have too much in common to ever be enemies. They have too much in common to ever be less than brothers.

  The field waited again, patiently, for the next airplane.

  What a fraternity that would be, a real brotherhood of all the men who lift airplanes into the sky!

  “This will be a Lufthansa flight coming in,” the controller said, pointing to the disc on the radar scope.

  Lufthansa was a blurred ellipse, a quarter of an inch wide, moving slowly in from the edge of the screen. He left a ghostly green luminous trail that made him look like a tiny comet pointed toward our tower at the center of the scope.

  As we looked out from the tower’s glass into the crystal night air, not a light moved in the sky. The comet closed on the center of the screen, the minute hand of the many-numbered clock swung around, and still the lights in the sky were stars.

  Then all at once Lufthansa was a flashing red anticollision light in the distance, and her first officer pressed the mike button on his control wheel. “Tower, Lufthansa Delta Charlie Charlie Hotel, fifteen miles east for landing.” The first officer spoke easily and precisely, and Lufthansa was pronounced “Looftahnza.”

  The thought swept me again. He could just as well have said, “Deutsche Lufthansa für Landung, fünfzehn Meilen zum Osten,” and he would have been as much, or even a little more a brother of the fraternity than I, standing in the high tower.

  What if every pilot knew, I thought, that we are already brothers? What if Vladimir Telyanin climbing the kicksteps of his MIG-21 knew it as well as Douglas Kenton in his Meteor and Erhart Menzel in his iron-crossed Starfighter and Ro Kum Nu tightening the shoulder harness in his YAK-23?

  Lufthansa swung easily down the ILS glidepath, his landing lights shining like bright eyes looking for the runway.

  What if the fraternity refused to fight among itself?

  Lufthansa taxied close to the terminal building, and in the tower we listened to her four engines whine down into the quiet.

  The radios hissed softly on, the sky was still again, the green line of the radar scope agreed that we were alone once more in the darkness. As the hands of the clock by the light gun touched 0400, I said my thanks and goodbyes to the controllers and stepped to the iron grating and stairway outside. I felt that difference of the blackness again, the same dark that touched the pages of the newspapers down at the end of the stairway.

  Above me, and above the field of sleeping airplanes, less one American lightplane, plus one German airliner, the long beam of the beacon swept around. Brothers. My leather soles rang on the metal stairs. At night, in the dark, you think funny things.

  What if they all knew? I thought.

  The snowflake and the dinosaur

  Have you ever wondered how a dinosa
ur felt, trapped in a Mesozoic tarpit? I’ll tell you how he felt. He felt exactly the way you would feel if you had force-landed in a winter hayfield in northern Kansas, fixed your engine, and tried to take off again through a carpet of wet snow. Helpless.

  They must have tried and tried, those poor stegosaurs and brontosaurs, turning up full power, thrashing like crazy, sending tar flying all directions till sundown caught them in darkness and at last they got so tired it was a blessing to give up and die. It’s the same way in snow, for an airplane—in a mere six inches of picturesque, level snow.

  With sundown coming on and a long walk from nowhere, the pilot’s alternative to dying is a cold night in a sleeping bag under shadow of new storms coming. Yet in spite of that, to me, the trap of snow wasn’t fair. I didn’t have time for it. Twenty tries at takeoff had won me only the understanding of the power of a snowflake, multiplied a thousand billion times. The heavy wet stuff turned to thick soup blurring underwheel, blasting violent hard fountains against the struts and wings of my borrowed Luscombe. Full power would drag us up to thirty-nine miles per hour at the fastest, and we needed forty-five minimum to take off. An atom-age dinosaur, we were caught in the wilderness.

  Between tries, while the engine cooled, I walked the field, frowning at the injustice of it all, stamping down a narrow white runway, wondering if I’d be camping in the cockpit till spring.

  Every new try at takeoff smashed the snow easily enough under the wheels, but at the same time built walls alongside, in ruts a foot deep. Jerking in and out of those tracks was like trying to take off with a balky rocket engine bolted to the plane. In the rut, we accelerated like a shot, but swerve two inches and bam! the nose pitched down, I was thrown forward in the seat, and we lost ten miles per hour in a split second. It was a kind of fixation. Bit by bit, I thought, I’ve got to wear down a runway till we can finally take off; or else it’s the rest of the winter here. But it was hopeless. If I had been a dinosaur, I would have laid me down to die.