Stranger to the Ground

  In flight, after an hour of low-level. Fuel suddenly streams from the leader’s airplane, flying back like a great white banner of distress. Broken fuel lines? An indicator of turbine blades spinning from the redhot wheel and an engine coming to pieces? Imminent fire and a burst of scarlet in the sky? No. Quite normal, this streamer of fuel. As the drop tanks feed the last of their fuel, and as the internal tanks join to feed their own fuel, there is for a moment too much JP-4 in the main fuel tank, and it overflows, as designed, harmlessly overboard. The airplane chuckles with an old joke.

  Takeoff. Heavy laden at low airspeed, close to the ground, bailout a marginal thing before the flaps are up, and a brilliant yellow light flares on the instrument panel. Suddenly. I see it from the corner of my eye, and I am stunned. For a half-second. And the yellow light, all by itself, goes out. Not the yellow overheat-warning light I saw at that critical moment when fire could be disaster, but the mechanical advantage shift light, telling me, when I have recovered my composure, that the stabilator hydraulic system is going about its task as its destiny demands, changing the response of the flight controls as the landing gear locks up. And the airplane chuckles.

  But once in a very long while the turbine buckets do break free and slice redhot through the fuel lines, the fire warning light really does come on with flame at its sensors, the cockpit does fill with smoke. Once in a while. And an airplane screams.

  Tonight I cruise. The steady play of whines and thuds and rumbles and squeals, and through it all the luminous needles at 95 percent rpm and 540 degrees tailpipe temperature, and 265 knots indicated airspeed. Cruise is the long radium hands of the altimeter drifting slowly back and forth across the 33,000-foot mark and other shorter needles captured by arcs of green paint on their glass dials. There are 24 round dials on the panel in front of me in the red light. The fact is empty and unimpressive, although I feel, vaguely, as if it should be startling. Perhaps if I counted the switches and handles and selectors . . .

  At one time I would have been impressed by the 24 dials, but tonight they are few and I know them well. There is a circular computer on the clipboard strapped to my leg that tells me the indicated airspeed of 265 knots is actually moving my airplane over the land between Abbeville and Laon at a speed of 465 knots, 535 miles per hour. Which is not really fast, but for an old Guard airplane it is not really slow, either.

  Cruise. Hours neatly shortened and diced into sections of time spent flying between city and city, radiobeacon and radiobeacon, between one swing of the radiocompass needle and the next. I carry my world with me as I fly, and outside is the familiar, indifferent Other World of fifty-five below zero and stars and black cloud and a long fall to the hills.

  From the light static in the earphones comes a quick and hurried voice: “Evreux Tower radio check Guard channel; one-two-three-four-five-four-three-two-one Evreux Tower out.”

  There is someone else in the world at this moment. There is a tower operator six miles below me, dwindling at 465 knots, who is this second setting his microphone back in its cradle, glancing at his runway held in a net of dim white lights and surrounded by blue taxiway lights that lead to a parking ramp. From his tower he can look down on to tall rhythmic triangles that are the vertical stabilizers of his base’s transport airplanes parked. At this moment he is beginning a lonely stretch of duty; his radio check was as much to break the silence as it was to check to emergency transmitter. But now he is assured that the radio works and he settles down to wait the night through. He is not aware that I have passed over his head. To know, he would have to step out to the catwalk around his tower and listen carefully and look up through the last hole in the clouds, toward the stars. He would hear, if his night was a quiet one, the tiny dim thunder of the engine that carries me and my airplane through the sky. If he carried his binoculars, and if he watched at precisely the right moment, he would see the flashing dots of red and green and amber that are my navigation lights, and the white of my fuselage light. And he would walk back into his tower in the first drops of rain and wait for to coming of the dawn.

  I remember that I wondered, once, what flying a fighter airplane would feel like. And now I know. It feels just the same as it feels to drive an automobile along the roads of France. Just the same. Take a small passenger sedan to 33,000 feet. Close the walls around the driver’s seat, cut away the roof and cap the space with plexiglass. Steer with a control stick and raider pedals instead of with a wheel. Put 24 gages on the instrument panel. Wear a sage-green set of many-pocketed coveralls and a tight-laced zippered G-suit and a white crash helmet with a dark plexiglass visor and a soft green rubber oxygen mask and a pair of high-topped black jump boots with white shroud-line laces and a pistol in a leather shoulder holster and a heavy green flight jacket with a place for four pencils on the left sleeve and sew your squadron emblem and your name on the jacket and paint your name on the helmet and slip into a parachute and connect the survival kit and the oxygen and the microphone and the automatic parachute lanyard and strap yourself with shoulder harness and safety belt into a seat wife yellow handles and a trigger and fly along above the hills to cover eight miles a minute and look down at the growing wall of cloud at your right and watch the needles and pointers that tell you where you are, how high you are and how fast you are moving. Flying a fighter airplane is just the same as driving an automobile along the roads of France.

  My airplane and I have been in the air now for 31 minutes since we left the runway at Wethersfield Air Base. We have been together for 415 flying hours since we first met in the Air National Guard. Fighter pilots are not in the cockpits of their airplanes a tenth as long as transport pilots are on the flight decks of theirs. Flights in single-engine airplanes rarely last longer than two hours, and new airplanes replace old models every three or four years, even in the Guard. But the ’84 and I have flown together for a reasonably long time, as fighter pilots and their airplanes go. We have gotten to know each other. My airplane comes alive under my gloved touch, and in return for her life she gives me the response and performance that is her love.

  I want to fly high, above the cloud, and she willingly draws her own streamer of tunneled and twisting grey behind us. From the ground the tunnel of grey is a contrail of brilliant white, and the world can see, in the slash across the blue, that we are flying very high.

  I want to fly low. In a roar, flash, a sweptwing blur we streak across the wooded valleys. We rustle the treetops in the pressure of our passing and the world is a sheetblur in the windscreen with one point fixed: straight ahead, the horizon.

  We enjoy our life together.

  Every once in a while as an idle hour catches me thinking of the life I lead, I ask why the passion for speed and for low-level flying. For, as an old instructor told me, you can do anything you want in an airplane without the slightest danger, until you try to do it near the ground. It is the contact with the ground, with that depressingly solid other world, that kills pilots. So why do we fly low and fast occasionally just for the fun of it? Why the barrel rolls off the deck after a pass on the army tanks in the war games? Why the magnetism of the bridge, the silent patient dare that every bridge makes to every pilot, challenging him to fly beneath it and come away alive?

  I enjoy the color and the taste of life a very great deal. Although death is an interesting sort of thing on the path ahead, I am content to let it find me where it will rather than hasting to meet it or deliberately searching it out. So I ask myself, why the rolls, the lower-than-necessary passes at high speed? Because it is fun, the answer says, throwing up a screen that it hopes will be accepted as self-sufficient. Because it is fun. There. No pilot will deny that. But like a child experimenting with words, I ask, why is it fun? Because you like to show off. Aha. The answer begins to be seen, slipping into a doorway a half-second too late to escape my attention. And why do I like to show off? The answer is caught in a crossfire of brilliant spotlights. Because I am free. Because my spirit is not shackled by a 180-pound bod
y. Because I have powers, when I am with my airplane, that only the gods have. Because I do not have to read about 500 knots or see it in a motion picture from a drone airplane or imagine what it would feel like. In my freedom I can live 500 knots—the blur of the trees the brief flash of the tank beneath me the feel of the stick in my right hand and the throttle in my left the smell of green rubber and cold oxygen the filtered voice from the forward air controller, “Nice show, Checkmate!” Because I can tell the men on the ground that truth that I discovered a long time ago: Man is not confined to walk the earth and be subject to its codes. Man is a free creature, with dominion over his surroundings, over the proud earth that was master for so long. And this freedom is so intense that it brings a smile that will not cede its place to mature, dignified impassiveness. For, as the answer said in part, freedom is fun.

  She is responsive, my airplane. She does not care that she drinks fuel at low level as a fall drinks water. She does not care that the insects of the forest are snapped into sudden flecks of eternity on her windscreen. She flies at the tops of the trees because that is where I want to fly, because she is a sensitive and responsive airplane. Because I have moved a gloved hand to give her life. Because I paint her a name on the forward fuselage. Because I call her “she.” Because I love her.

  My love for this airplane is not born of beauty, for a Thunderstreak is not a beautiful airplane. My love is born of a respect for quality of performance. My airplane, in the life that I bring to her, expects that I fly her properly and well. She will forgive me the moments that make it necessary to force her where she would not smoothly go, if there are reasons for the moments. But if I continually force her to fly as she was not meant to fly, overspeed and overtemperature, with sudden bursts of throttle, with hard instant changes of flight controls, she will one day, coldly and dispassionately, kill me.

  I respect her, and she in turn respects me. Yet I have never said, “We landed” or “We tore the target to pieces”; it is always “I landed,” “I knocked out that tank.” Without my airplane I am nothing, yet I claim the credit. What I say, though, is not egocentric at all.

  I step into the cockpit of my airplane. With shoulder harness and wide safety belt I strap myself to my airplane (I strap on my wings and my speed and my power) I snap the oxygen hose to my mask (I can breathe at altitudes where the air is very thin) I fit the radio cable to the black wire that comes from the back of my fitted helmet (I can hear frequencies that are unheard by others; I can speak to scores of isolated people with special duties) I flick the gun switch to guns (I can cut a six-ton truck in half with a squeeze of my finger I can flip a 30-ton tank on its back with the faint pressure of my thumb on the rocket button) I rest one hand on the throttle, one on the contoured, button-studded grip of the control stick (I can fly).

  The swept aluminum wings are my wings, the hard black wheels are my wheels that I feel beneath me, the fuel in the tanks is my fuel which I drink and through which I live. I am no longer man, I am man/airplane; my airplane is no longer merely Republic F-84F Thunderstreak, but airplane/man. The two are one, the one is the “I” that stops the tank holding the infantry in its foxholes, that strikes the enemy man/airplane out of the blind sky. The I that carries the wing commander’s documents from England to France.

  Sometimes I stand on the ground or lie back on a soft couch and wonder how it is possible for me to become wide awake and a part of an airplane, to climb into that fantastically complex cockpit and go through all the procedures and do all the alert thinking that is necessary to fly in formation with other airplanes or around a gunnery pattern for score or to put a cluster of rockets on a target. This thought has stuck with me for long minutes, while I zip the legs of my G-suit, while I slide into my mae west, while I strap myself into the little cockpit. It is a dull lethargy that says, “How can I do everything right?” and wants only to withdraw into itself and forget about the responsibility of flying a high-performance airplane through a precise pattern. But one of the strange features of the game is that as soon as my finger presses the starter switch to start, the lethargy vanishes. In that moment I am ready for whatever the mission will require. I am alert and thinking about what has to be done and knowing just how it must be done and taking the flight one step at a time and taking each step surely and correctly and firmly. The feeling of trying to accomplish the impossible disappears with the touch of the switch to my glove and does not reappear until I am again off guard and un-alert and resting before the next flight. I wonder if this is common, this draining of aggressiveness before a flight. I have never asked another pilot about it, I have never heard another pilot speak of it. But as long as the touch of the switch is an instant cure, I am not concerned.

  Switch pressed, in the airplane, I asked how I ever found the thought that flying single-engine airplanes is a complicated job. I cannot answer. It just seemed as if that should be, before I start the engine, and long ago, before I understood the 24 dials and the switches and the handles and the selectors. After I sit in one little space for 415 hours I come to know it rather well, and what I don’t know about it at the end of that time is not of great importance. Where did the thought of complication begin?

  At the air shows, friends who do not fly climb the yellow ladder to my airplane and say, “How complicated it all is!” Do they really mean what they are saying? A good question. I think back, before the day I knew an aileron from a stabilator. Did I once consider airplanes complicated? I think back. A shocking answer. Terribly complicated. Even after I had begun to fly, each new airplane, each larger airplane, looked more complicated than the one I flew before. But a simple thing like knowing the purpose of everything in a cockpit dissolves the word “complicated” and makes it sound foreign when someone uses it to describe my airplane.

  This dim red panel in front of me now, what is complex about it? Or the consoles at the left and right? Or the buttons on the stick grip? Child’s play.

  It was a shattering disillusion, the day I landed from my first flight in the F-84. The Thunderstreak was considered then the best airplane in the Air Force for air-to-ground warfare. It could deliver more high explosive on target than any other tactical fighter airplane flying. I was hurt and disillusioned, because I had just gone through fifteen months of marching and studying and flying and Hit One, Mister, to prepare for an airplane that my wife could walk out to and fly any day of the week. I could settle her in the cockpit, put the harness over her shoulders and buckle the seat belt about her and tell her that the throttle is for fast and slow, the stick is for up and down and left and right, and there’s the handle that brings the wheels up and down. Oh, and by the way, sweetheart, a hundred and sixty knots down final approach.

  There goes the feeling that some magic day I would wake to find myself a superman. My wife, who had spent the last fifteen months taking letters in shorthand, could step into that little cockpit and take it through the speed of sound; could drop, if she wanted, an atomic bomb.

  Divorced from my airplane I am an ordinary man, and a useless one—a trainer without a horse, a sculptor without marble, a priest without a god. Without an airplane I am a lonely consumer of hamburgers, the fellow in line at a cash register, shopping cart laden with oranges and cereal and quarts of milk. A brown-haired fellow who is struggling against pitiless odds to master the guitar.

  But as “The Speckled Roan” falls to the persistence of an inner man striving with chords of E and A minor and B7, so I become more than ordinary when the inner man strives with the material that he loves, which, for me, has a wingspan of 37 feet 6 inches, a height of 13 feet 7 inches. The trainer, the sculptor, the priest and I. We all share a preference for string beans, and distaste for creamed corn. But in each one of us, as in each of all humanity, lives the inner man, who lives only for the spirit of his work.

  I am not a superman, but flying is still an interesting way to make a living, and I bury the thought of changing into a steel butterfly and stay the same mortal I have always
been.

  There is no doubt that the pilots portrayed in the motion pictures are supermen. It is the camera that makes them. On a screen, in a camera’s eye, one sees from without the airplane, looking into the cockpit from over the gunports in the nose. There, the roar of the guns fills the echoing theater and the sparkling orange flames from the guns are three feet long and the pilot is fearless and intense with handsome narrowed eyes. He flies with visor up, so one can see his eyes in the sunlight.

  It is this view that makes to superman, the daring air-man, the hero, the fearless defender of the nation. From the other side, from alone inside the cockpit, it is a different picture. No one is watching, no one is listening, and a pilot flies in the sun with his visor down.

  I do not see gunports or orange flames. I squeeze the red trigger on the stick grip and hold the white dot of the gunsight on the target and I hear a distant sort of pop-pop-pop and smell gunpowder in my oxygen mask. I certainly do not feel like a very daring airman, for this is my job and I do it in the best way that I can, in the way that hundreds of other tactical fighter pilots are doing it every day. My airplane is not a roaring silver flash across the screen, it is still and unmoving about me while the ground does the blurring and the engine-roar is a vibrating constant behind my seat.

  I am not doing anything out of the ordinary. Everyone in a theater audience understands that this gage shows how much utility hydraulic pressure the engine-driven pumps are producing; they know perfectly well that this knob selects the number of the rocket that will fire when I press the button on top of the stick grip; that the second button on the grip is a radar roger button and that it is disconnected because it is never used; that the button that drops the external fuel tanks has a tall guard around it because too many pilots were pressing it by mistake. The audience knows all this. Yet it is still interesting to watch the airplanes in the motion pictures.