Stranger to the Ground

  The biggest difference in the final approach is in the eye of the observer, and observers are many. When the square red fire trucks grind to the runway with their red beacons flashing, the line crews and returning pilots climb to stand on the swept silver wings of parked airplanes and watch to see what will happen. (Look at that, Johnny, turning final with no nosewheel. Heard about an eighty-four that cart-wheeled on the runway trying this same trick. Good luck, whoever you are, don’t forget to hold the nose off as long as you can.) It is interesting to them, and mildly annoying to me, for it is like being pushed on stage without having anything to perform. No flames, no eerie silence of a frozen engine, a practically nonexistent threat of spectacular destruction, no particular skill on display.

  I simply land, and the twin plumes of blue rubber-smoke pout back from the main wheels as they touch the hard concrete. I slow through 100 knots on the landing roll, touching right rudder to put the narrow strip of foam between the wheels. Then, slowly and gently, the unwheeled nose of the airplane comes down.

  At that moment before the metal of the nose touches the runway and I tilt unnaturally forward in my cockpit and the only sight in the windscreen is the fast-blurred strip of white foam, I am suddenly afraid. This is where my control ends and chance takes over. A gust of wind against the high rudder and I will surely cartwheel in a flying swirling cloud of brilliant orange flame and twisted metal; the airplane will tumble and I will be caught beneath it; the hot engine will explode when the cold foam sprays up the intake. The ground is hard and it is moving very fast and it is very close.

  Throttle off, and the nose settles into the foam.

  White. Instant white and the world outside is cut away and metal screams against concrete loudly and painfully and I grit my teeth and squint my eyes behind the visor and know in a surprised shock that my airplane is being hurt and she doesn’t deserve to be hurt and she is good and faithful and she is taking the force of a 90-knot slab of concrete and I can do nothing to ease her pain and I am not cart-wheeling and the scream will never end and I must have slid a thousand feet and I am still slammed hard forward into the shoulder harness and the world is white because the canopy is sprayed with foam and get that canopy open now, while I’m still sliding.

  The foam-covered sheet of plexiglass lifts as I pull the unlock lever, as smoothly as if nothing was the least unusual and there is the world again, blue sky and white runway sliding to a stop and grass at the side of the concrete and visor up and oxygen mask unsnapped and it is very quiet. The air is fresh and smooth and green and I am alive. Battery off and fuel off. As quiet as I have ever heard. My airplane is hurt and I love her very much. She didn’t somersault or cartwheel or flip on her back to burn and I owe my life to her.

  The advancing roar of firetruck engines and soon we’ll be surrounded by the square monsters and by talking people and Say, why couldn’t you get the nosewheel down and That landing was a pretty good one boy and You should have seen the foam spray when your nose hit. But before the people come, I sit quietly in the cockpit for a second that seems a long time and tell my airplane that I love her and that I will not forget that she did not trap me beneath her or explode on the runway and that she took the pain while I walk away without a scratch and that a secret that I will keep between us is that I love her more than I would tell to anyone who asks.

  I will someday tell that secret to another pilot, when he and I happen to be walking back from a night formation flight and the breeze is cool and the stars are as bright as they can get when you walk on the ground. I will say in the quiet, “Our airplane is a pretty good airplane.” He will be quiet a second longer than he should be quiet and he will say, “It is.” He will know what I have said. He will know that I love our airplane not because she is like a living thing, but because she truly is a living thing and so very many people think that she is just a block of aluminum and glass and bolts and wire. But I know and my friend will know and that is all that must be said.

  Though it had its moment of fear and though it opened the door of understanding a little wider, the nosegear failure is an incident, not an emergency. I have had a few incidents in the hours that I have spent in the little cockpit, but so far I have never experienced a real emergency or been forced to make the decision to pull the yellow ejection seat handles, squeeze the red trigger, and say a quick farewell to a dying airplane. Yet that sort of thing is what the newspapers would have me believe happens every day in the Air Force.

  At first, I was ready for it. When the engine sounded rough during those first hours alone, I thought of the ejection seat. When a tailpipe overheat light came on for the first time in my career, I thought of the ejection seat. When I was nearly out of fuel and lost in the weather, I thought of it. But the part of my mind that is concerned with caution can cry wolf only so many times before I see through its little game and realize that I could easily fly through my entire career without being called upon to blast away from an airplane into a cold sky. But still it is good to know that a 37-millimeter cannon shell is waiting just aft of the seat, waiting for the moment that I squeeze the trigger.

  If I ever collide with another airplane in the air, the seat is waiting to throw me clear. If I lose all hydraulic pressure to the flight controls, it is waiting. If I am spinning and have not begun to recover as the ground nears, the seat is waiting. It is an advantage that conventional aircraft and transport pilots do not have, and I feel a little sorry for them at their dangerous job.

  Even without passengers to think about, if they are hit in the air by another airplane, transport pilots do not have a chance to crawl back to the trap door on the floor of the flight deck and bail out. They can only sit in their seats and fight the useless controls of a wing that is not there and spin down until their airplane stops against the ground.

  But not the single-engine pilot. Climbing or diving or inverted or spinning or coming to pieces, his airplane is rarely the place that he dies. There is a narrow margin near the ground where even the ejection seat is a game of chance, and I am in that margin for five seconds after the end of the runway has passed beneath me. After that five seconds I have accelerated to a speed that allows a climb to a safe ejection altitude; before that five seconds I can put my airplane back down on the runway and engage the nylon webbing and steel cable of the overrun barrier. When I engage that barrier, even at 150 knots, I drag a steel cable and the cable drags a long length of anchor chain and no airplane in the world can run on forever with tons of massive chain trailing behind it. The five seconds are the critical ones. Even before I retract the flaps after takeoff, I can eject if the engine explodes. And no engine explodes without warning.

  Flying is safe, and flying a single-engine fighter plane is the safest of all flying. I would much rather fly from one place to another than drive it in that incredibly dangerous thing called an automobile. When I fly I depend upon my own skill, not subject to the variables of other drivers or blown tires at high speed or railroad crossing signs that are out of order at the wrong moments. After I learn my airplane, it is, with its emergency procedures and the waiting ejection seat, many times more safe than driving a car.

  Four minutes to Wiesbaden. Smooth crosscheck. Smooth air. I relax and drift with the smoothness across the river of time.

  When I was a boy I lived in a town that would last from now to now as I fly at 500 knots. I rode a bicycle, went to school, worked at odd jobs, spent a few hours at the airport watching the airplanes come and go. Fly one myself? Never. Too hard for me. Too complicated.

  But the day came that I had behind me the typical history of a typical aviation cadet. I did not make straight A’s in my first college year and I thought that campus life was not the best road to education. For a reason that I still do not know I walked into a recruiting office and told the man behind the desk that I wanted to be an Air Force pilot. I did not know just what it was to be an Air Force pilot, but it had something to do with excitement and adventure, and I would have begun Life
.

  To my surprise, I passed the tests. I matched the little airplanes in the drawings to the ones in the photographs. I identified which terrain was actually shown in Map Two. I wrote that Gear K will rotate counterclockwise if Lever A is pushed forward. The doctors poked at me, discovered that I was breathing constantly, and all of a sudden I was offered the chance to become a United States Air Force Aviation Cadet. I took the chance.

  I raised my right hand and discovered that my name was New Aviation Cadet Bach, Richard D.; A-D One Nine Five Six Three Three One Two. Sir.

  For three months I got nothing but a life on the ground. I learned about marching and running and how to fire the 45-caliber pistol. Every once in a while I saw an airplane fly over my training base.

  The other cadets came from a strangely similar background. Most of them had never been in an airplane, most of them had tried some form of higher education and did not succeed at it. They decided on Excitement and Adventure. They sweated in the Texas sun with me and they memorized the General Orders and Washington’s Address and the Aviation Cadet Honor Code. They were young enough to take the life without writing exposés or telling the squadron commander that they had had enough of this heavy-handed treatment from the upper class. In time we became the upper class and put a stripe or two on our shoulderboards and learned about being heavy-handed with the lower class. If they can’t take a little chewing out or a few minutes of silly games, they’ll never make good pilots.

  LOOK HERE MISTER DO YOU THINK THIS JOKE’S A PROGRAM? ARE YOU SMILING, MISTER? ARE YOU SHOWING EMOTION? MAINTAIN EYE-TO-EYE CONTACT WITH ME, MISTER! DON’T YOU HAVE ANY CONTROL OVER YOURSELF? GOD HELP THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IF YOU EVER BECOME AN AIR FORCE PILOT!

  And then, suddenly, Preflight Training was over and we were on our way to become the lower class at a base where we began to learn about airplanes, and where we first breathed the aluminum-rubber-paint-oil-parachute air of an airplane cockpit and where we began to get a tiny secret idea, shared in secret by every other cadet in the class, that an airplane is actually a living thing, that loves to fly.

  I took the academics and I loved the flying and I bore the military inspections and the parades for six months. Then I left Primary Flight School to become part of the lower class in Basic Flight School, where I was introduced to the world of turbine and speed and spent my first day in Basic Single-Engine Flight School.

  Everything is new fresh exciting imminent tangible. A sign: Cadet Club; rows of tarpapered barracks; close-cut brown grass; weedless sidewalks; hot sun; bright sun; blue sky, ceilingless and free above my polished hatbill and stripeless shoulderboards. A strange face above white-banded boards and a set of white gloves. “Fall in, gentlemen.”

  A flight of four sun-burnished silver jet training planes whistle over the base. Jets. “Let’s expedite, gentlemen, fall in.”

  In we fall. “Welcome back to the Air Force, gentlemen, this is Basic.” A pause. Distant crackle of full throttle and takeoff. “You tigers will get your stripes here. It’s not a lot of fun or a no-sweat program. If you can’t hack it, you’re out. So you were Cadet Group Commander in Primary; you let up, you slack the books, you’re out. Stay sharp and you’ll make it. LaiUFF, HAICE! Ho-ward, HAR!”

  The B-4 bag is heavy in the right hand. Dust on shined shoes. Hot air doesn’t cool as I move through it. Black rubber heels on dusty asphalt. Away, a lone jet trainer heads for the runway. Solo. I am a long way from Primary Flight School. A long way from the chug of a T-28’s butter-paddle propeller. And a long way still from the silver wings above the left breast pocket. Where are the hills? Where is the green? The cool air? In Primary Flight School. This is Texas. This is Basic.

  “. . . program will require hard work . . .” says the wing commander.

  “. . . and you’d best stay sharp in my squadron . . .” says the squadron commander.

  “This is your barracks,” says the whitegloves. “There are T-33 pilot’s handbooks in every room. Learn the emergency procedures. All of them. You will be asked. Another whitegloves will be around later to answer questions.”

  Questions.

  “Inspections every Saturday?”

  “Are the classes tough?”

  “What is the airplane like?”

  “When do we fly?”

  A cold night in a white-collar bed. Cold twinkle of familiar stars through the window. Talk in the dark barracks.

  “Just think, boy, jets at last!”

  “So it’s tough. They’ll have to throw me out. I’ll never quit because it’s hard.”

  “. . . airspeed down final with the gun bay doors open is one twenty plus fuel plus ten, right?”

  “Let’s see, Johnny, is that ‘climb to twenty-five thousand and rock wings’? Twenty-five thousand feet! Man, we’re flying JETS!”

  “Never thought I’d make it to Basic. We’ve come a long way from Preflight . . .”

  Behind the quiet talk is the roar of night-flying turbines as the upper class learns, and the flash of landing lights bright for an instant on the wall opposite my open window.

  Tenuous sleep. Upperclass voices by the window as they return in the night. “I never saw that before! He only had ninety-five percent and his tailpipe was bright red . . . really red!”

  “. . . so then Mobile told me to climb in Sector One to thirty thousand feet. I couldn’t even find the field, let alone Sector One . . .”

  My glowing Air Force watch says 0300. Strange dreams. The beautiful blonde looks up at me. She asks a question. “What’s your airspeed turning base leg with three hundred and fifty gallons of fuel on board?” A crowded and fantastically complex instrument panel, with a huge altimeter pointing to 30,000. Helmets with visors, red-topped ejection seats, instruments, instruments.

  Sleep soaks away into the pillow and the night is still and dark. What do I do with a zero loadmeter reading? Battery off . . . no . . . battery on . . . nono . . . “activate electrical device” . . . Outside, the green beam and the split white beam of the beacon on the control tower go round and round and round.

  But once again the days pass and I learn. I am concerned with ground schools and lectures; with first flights in the T-33; and after ten hours aloft with an instructor in the back seat, with flying it alone. Then with instruments and precise control of an airplane in any weather. With formation. With navigation.

  It would all be a great deal of fun if I knew for certain that I would successfully finish Basic Training and wear at last the silver wings. But when instrument flying is new, it is difficult, and my class that numbered 112 in Preflight is now cut to 63. None have been killed in airplane crashes, none have bailed out or ejected from an airplane. For one reason or another, for academic or military or flying deficiencies, or sometimes just because he has had enough of the tightly-controlled routine, a cadet will pack his B-4 bag one evening and disappear into the giant that is the Air Force.

  I had expected some not to finish the program, but I had expected them to fail in a violent sheet of flame or in a bright spinning cloud of fragments of a midair collision.

  There are near-misses. I am flying as Lead in a four-ship flight of T-33’s. With 375 knots and a clear sky overhead, I press the control stick back to begin a loop. Our airplanes are just passing the vertical, noses high in the blue sky, when a sudden flash of blurred silver streaks across our path, and is gone. I finish the loop, wingmen faithfully watching only my airplane and working hard to stay in their positions, and twist in my seat to see the airplane that nearly took all four of us out of the sky. But it is gone as surely and as completely as if it had never been. There had not been time for reaction or fear or where did he come from. There had simply been a silver flash ahead of me in the sky. I think about it for a moment and begin another loop.

  A few weeks later it happened to a lowerclass cadet, practicing acrobatics alone at 20,000 feet. “I was on top of a Cuban Eight, just starting down, when I felt a little thud. When I rolled out, I saw that my right tiptan
k was gone and that the end of the wing was pretty well shredded. I thought I’d better come back home.”

  He didn’t even see the flash of the airplane that hit him. After he had landed and told what had happened, the base settled down to wait for the other airplane. In a little more than an hour, one airplane of all the airplanes on mobile control’s list of takeoffs failed to have an hour written in the column marked “Return.” Search airplanes went up arrowing through the dust like swift efficient robots seeking a fallen member of the clan. The darkness fell, and the robots found nothing.

  The base was quiet and held its breath. Cadet dining halls were still, during the evening meal. Not everyone is home tonight. Pass the salt please, Johnny. The clink of stamped steel forks on mass-fired pottery. I hear it was an upperclassman in the other squadron. Muted clinks, voices low. Across the room, a smile. He should be calling in any minute now. Anybody want some more milk? You can’t kill an upperclassman.

  The next day, around the square olive-drab briefing tables in the flight shack, we got the official word. You can kill an upperclassman. Let’s look around, gentlemen; remember that there are sixty airplanes from this base alone in the sky during the day. You’re not bomber pilots here, keep that head on a swivel and never stop looking around.

  And we briefed and flew our next mission.

  Then, suddenly, we had made it. A long early morning, a crisp formation of the lower class in review as we stand at parade rest, a sixteen-ship flyby, a speech by a general and by the base commander.

  They return my salute, shake my hand, present me a cold set of small wings that flash a tiny beam of silver. I made it all the way through. Alive. Then there are orders to advanced flying training and the glory-soaked number that goes F-84F. I am a pilot. A rated Air Force pilot. A fighter pilot.

  The German night is full around me, and in my soft earphones is solid hard static from the blue fire that sluices across the windscreen and across the low-frequency antenna in the belly of my airplane. The slim needle of the radiocompass is becoming more and more excited, jerking to the right, always to the right of course; trembling for a second there, swinging back toward Spangdahlem behind me, jerking again toward my right wingtip. I am glad again for the TACAN.