Stranger to the Ground

Calva is suggesting another frequency, but by the time I can understand all of his message I will be too far away for it to matter. Trying to send a position report with a radio in this condition is like trying to shout a message across a deep and windy chasm; difficult and frustrating. I give my report once again to comply with the rules, click back to manual and forget the matter. Too bad. It would have been good to hear the latest weather report along my route, but simply getting my request understood would have been a major problem, to say nothing of receiving a reply. The weather is of only academic interest anyway, for there would have to be a pilot report of a squall line with severe turbulence and heavy icing to 40,000 feet before I would consider turning back.

I look back over my left shoulder as I turn to the heading that will take me to Spangdahlem.

I am pulling a contrail.

In a sweeping turn behind me, following like a narrow wake of a high-speed racing boat, is a twisting tunnel of glowing grey mist in the starlight that is the path that I have followed. Clearly and precisely in texts on atmospheric physics, contrails are explained by the men who spend their time with radio balloons and diagrams of the upper air.

Contrails are like fireflies. If I desire, I can find pages of explanation about them in books and in specialized magazines. But when I see one close at hand, it is alive and mystic and greyly luminous. Watching the con as I turn, I can see the rise and fall of it where I made small changes to keep my airplane at flight level 330. It looks like a very gentle roller-coaster, one for people who do not like excitement. That is where I have been. No air aside from the rolling tunnel of mist can say that it has felt my passage. If I desire, I can turn now and fly through exactly the same air that I flew before. And I am alone. As far as I can see, and that is a long distance about me, there is no other contrail in the sky. I am the only person in all the world to fly above the clouds in the hundreds of cubic miles that make the world of high altitude between Abbeville and Spangdahlem this evening. It is a solitary feeling.

But there is work to be done. Back to the coffee grinder. Squeak squeak to frequency 428. Volume up. Static. And no second thoughts, no mistaking this one. An S and a P and an A. A city with its thousands of people, with the cares and the joys that they share, people, with me. I am alone and six miles above their earth, and their city is not even a light grey glow in the black cloud. Their city is an S and a P and an A in the soft earphones. Their city is the needlepoint at the top of the dial.

The frequency selector knob of the TACAN set clicks under my right glove to channel 100, and after a moment of indecision, the modern, smoothworking mileage drum spins to show 110 miles to the Spangdahlem beacon. Except for the failure of the UHF radio, my flight has gone very smoothly. There is a faint flicker in the rising hills of cloud far ahead to my right, as if someone is having difficulty striking an arc with a gigantic welding rod. But distances at night are deceiving, and the flash of light could be over any one of four countries.

As a pilot, I have traveled and seen millions of square miles of land and cloud above land. As a recalled Guard pilot in Europe I have rolled my wheels on hundreds of miles of asphalt and concrete runways in seven countries. I can say that I have seen more of the continent than many people, yet Europe is a much different place for me than it is for them. It is a patterned country, broad and wide in the sunlight, wrinkled in the south by the Pyrenees and in the east by the Alps. It is a country over which someone has spilled a great sack of airports, and I seek these out.

France is not the France of travel posters. France is Etain Air Base and Chateauroux Air Base and Chaumont and Marville. It is the patchwork of Paris about its beloved river, a patchwork that flows like crystallized lava around the tictactoe runways of Orly Field and Le Bourget. France is the repetition of walking over the concrete to Base Operations and being aware, as I walk, of tiny villages outside the perimeter fence and hills everywhere.

Europe is a pitifully small place. From 37,000 feet above the Pyrenees I can see the cold Atlantic at Bordeaux and the shores of the French Riviera on the Mediterranean. I can see Barcelona, and in the haze, Madrid. In thirty minutes I can fly over England, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, and Germany. My squadron flies nonstop to North Africa in two and a half hours; it patrols the border between West and East in Germany; can fly to Copenhagen for the weekend. So this was a school for mankind. A small schoolyard.

But I rarely get first-hand, visual evidence of the postage stamp that is Europe, for much more often than not the land is covered by tremendous decks of cloud, seas of white and grey that stretch without a rift from horizon to horizon. It is the weather in Europe, as in the United States, that reminds me now and then that, although I can span continents in a single leap, I am not always so godlike as I feel. Some clouds in summer tower past my airplane to 50,000 feet, and some boil up and build faster than my airplane can climb. Much of the time I am correct in saying that mine is an over

-the-weather airplane, but clouds are watch-keepers over arrogant men, they remind me, just often enough, of my actual size.

The swirling masses of white cumulus will some days harbor only the mildest of turbulence along my path. Another day I may penetrate the same type of cloud and come out of it grateful to the man who designed the crash helmet. Tight as safety belt and shoulder harness can be, it is still in the province of a few clouds to snap my helmet sharply against the canopy and flex the steelspar wings that I once swore could never be forced an inch.

I was once constantly wary of the hardest-looking clouds, but I have learned that, despite the snap of helmet on canopy, their turbulence is rarely strong enough to really damage a fighter airplane. Every once in a while I read of a multiengine airplane that lost its windshield or radome in the hail, or has taken a bolt or two of lightning, for these instances are duly reported and photographed in detail for the pilots’ magazines. There are a few airplanes that have taken off into bad weather, into thunderstorms, and have been found days later or weeks later scattered across a lonely stretch of earth. The reasons are unknown. The storm might have been unusually powerful; the pilot could have lost control; he could have been caught in a web of vertigo and dived from storm into ground. So, although my airplane has a six-layer bulletproof windscreen designed for worse than hail and an airframe stressed to withstand twice the force that would tear the wings from larger airplanes, I respect thunderstorms. I avoid them when I can; I grit my teeth and hold on to the control stick when I can’t. So far, I have been knocked about by a few small thunderstorms, but I have not seen them all.

There are procedures, of course. Tighten the safety belt and shoulder harness, pitot heat and defrosters on, cockpit lights to full bright, airspeed down to 275 knots, and try to hold the airplane level. In the vertical air currents of a thunderstorm, altimeters and vertical speed indicators and even airspeed indicators are practically useless. They lag and they lead and they flutter helplessly. Though the ’84F tends to yaw and roll a bit in turbulence, I must try to fly by the little airplane on a two-inch gyrostabilized horizon set ahead of me on the instrument panel: the attitude indicator. I fly to hold my attitude straight and level through the storm. So I am prepared. I always have been.

In the darkness of the French night, my airplane flies easily along the continuous stream of miles between Laon and Spangdahelm, through air as smooth as polished obsidian. I tilt my white helmet back against the red ejection seat headrest and look up from the thick dark layer of cloud to the deeper, bright layer of stars overhead, that have so long guided men across the earth. The constant, eternal stars. The reassuring stars. The useless stars. In an airplane like mine, built to work at its best through a pilot’s eyes and a pilot’s direction, the stars have become only interesting spots of light to look out upon when all is going well. The important stars are the ones that draw the luminous needles of the radiocompass and the TACAN. Stars are nice, but I navigate by the S and the P and the A.

Tactical fighter pilots have traditionally been on marginal terms with the thought of weather flying, and only by superhuman efforts has the Air Force brought them to accept the thought that nowadays even fighter airplanes must fly in weather. The official emphasis takes the form of motion pictures and ground schools and instrument schools and required minimum hours of instrument and hooded flight every six months. Each successive fighter airplane becomes more capable of operating in all-weather conditions, and today interceptor pilots in their big delta-wings can fly a complete interception and attack on an enemy airplane without ever seeing it except as a smoky dot of light on their attack radar screen.

Even the fighter-bomber, long at the mercy of the low cloud, is today capable of flying a low-level attack through the weather, using sophisticated radar systems in order to avoid the hard mountains and identify the target. Beyond the official emphasis and the pressure of regulations, tactical fighter pilots of the newest airplanes must learn all there is to know about weather flying simply to keep up with their airplane, to be able to use it as it was meant to be used. But weather is still an enemy. The cloud robs me of the horizon and I cannot see outside the cockpit. I am forced to depend completely on seven expressionless faces in glass that are my flight instruments. There is, in weather, no absolute up or down. There is only a row of instruments that say, this is up, this is down, this is the horizon. When so much of my flying is done in the clear world of air-to-ground gunnery, it is not easy to stake my life on the word of a two-inch circle of glass and radium paint, yet that is the only way to stay alive after my airplane sinks into cloud. The feel and the senses that hold the pipper steady on the tank are easily confused when the world outside is a faceless flow of grey.

After a turn, or after the harmless movement of tilting my head to look at the radio set as I change frequencies, those senses can become shocked and panic-stricken, can shout you’re diving to the left! although the gyro horizon is a calm and steady guide on the instrument panel. Caught in the contradiction, I have a choice: follow one voice or follow the other. Follow the sense that marks me expert in strafe and rocket and high-angle dive-bomb, or follow the little bit of tin and glass which someone has told me is the thing to trust.

I follow the tin, and a war is on. Vertigo has become so strong that I have had to lean my helmet almost to my shoulder in accord with its version of up and down. But still I fly the instruments. Keep the little tin airplane level in its glass you’re banking hard to the right keep the altimeter and vertical speed needles steady look out, you’re starting to dive . . . keep the turn needle straight up and the ball in the center of its curved glass tube you’re rolling! you’re upside down and you’re rolling! Keep crosschecking the instruments. One to the next to the next to the next.

The only common factor between combat flying and instrument flying is one of discipline. I do not break away from my leader to seek a target on my own; I do not break away from the constant clockwise crosscheck of the seven instruments on the black panel in front of me. The discipline of combat is usually the easier. There I am not alone, I can look out and see my leader and I can look up and back to see the second element of my flight, waiting to go in and fire on the enemy.

When the enemy is an unresisting grey fog, I must rely on the instruments and pretend that this is just another practice flight under the canvas instrument hood over the rear cockpit of a T-33 jet trainer, that I can lift the hood any time that I would like, and see a hundred miles of clear air in all directions. I am just not concerned with lifting the hood. Weather, despite the textbook familiarity that ground schools give and that experience reinforces, is still my greatest enemy. It is difficult to predict exactly, and worse, it is completely uncaring of the men and the machines that fly into it. It is completely uncaring.

“Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, France Control with an advisory.” Like a telephone ringing. My radio. There is not the slightest flaw in its operation. How can that be when only a minute ago . . . but it is working now and that is all that matters. Microphone button down. Professional voice.

“Roger, France; Four Zero Five, go.”

“Four Zero Five, Flight Service advised mutiengine aircraft reports severe turbulence, hail and heavy icing in vicinity of Phalsbourg. Also T-33 reported moderate turbulence at flight level three zero zero, light clear icing.”

Button down. What about that. Sounds as if there might be a thunderstorm or two in the stratus ahead. That was in the textbook, too. But still it is rare to have very large thunderstorms in France. “Roger, France, thank you for the advisory. What is the current weather at Chaumont?”

“Stand by one.”

I stand by, waiting while another man in a white shirt and loose tie riffles through his teletyped weather reports looking for the one out of hundreds that is coded LFQU. With one hand he sorts and moves the weather from the Continent over; he shuffles through rain and haze and fog and high cloud and winds and ice and blowing dust. He is at this moment

touching the sheet of yellow paper that tells him, if he wants to read it, that Wheelus Air Base, Libya, has clear skies with visibilities to 20 miles and a 10-knot wind from the southwest. If he wants to know, a line on the paper tells him that Nouasseur, Morocco, is calling high broken cirrus, visibility 15 miles, wind west southwest at 15 knots. He thumbs through weather from Hamburg (measured 1,200-foot overcast, visibility three miles in rain showers, wind from the northwest at ten knots) from Wiesbaden Air Base (900-foot overcast, visibility two miles, wind from the south at seven knots), from Chaumont Air Base.

“Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Chaumont is calling a measured one thousand one hundred foot overcast, visibility four miles in rain, winds from the southwest at one zero gusting one seven.” The weather at Chaumont is neither good nor bad.