Stranger to the Ground

The inventors took over and tried to design the human error out of their airplanes. Some airspeed indicators have flags that cover the dial during a landing approach unless the wheels are down, on the theory that if the pilot cannot read his airspeed he will be shocked into action, which here involves lowering the gear. In the deadliest, most sophisticated interceptor in the air today, that carries atomic missiles and can kill an enemy bomber under solid weather conditions at altitudes to 70,000 feet, there is a landing gear warning horn that sounds like a high-speed playback of a wide-range piccolo duet. The inventors deduced that if this wild noise would not remind a plot to lower his landing gear, they were not going to bother with lights or covering the airspeed indicator or any other tricks; he would be beyond them all. When I see one of the big grey delta-wing interceptors in the landing pattern, I am forced to smile at the reedy tootling that I know the pilot is hearing from his gear warning horn.

Suddenly, in my dark cockpit, the thin luminous needle of the radiocompass swings wildly from its grip on the Spangdahlem radiobeacon and snaps me from my idle thoughts to the business of flying.

The needle should not move. When it begins to swing over Spangdahlem, it will first make very small leftright quivers on its card to warn me. The leftrights will become wider and wider and the needle will finally turn to point at the bottom of the dial, as it did passing Laon.

But the distance-measuring drum shows that I am still 40 miles from my first German checkpoint. The radiocompass has just warned me that it is a radiocompass like all the others. It was designed to point the way to centers of low-frequency radio activity, and there is no more powerful center of low-frequency radio activity than a fully-grown thunderstorm. For years I have heard the rule of thumb and applied it: stratus clouds mean stable air and smooth flying. In an aside to itself, the rule adds (except when there are thunderstorms hidden in the stratus).

Now, like a boxer pulling on his gloves before a fight, I reach to my left and push the switch marked pilot heat. On the right console is a switch with a placard windscreen defrost and my right glove flicks it to the on position, lighted in red by hidden bulbs. I check that the safety belt is as tight as I can pull it, and I cinch the shoulder harness straps a quarter of an inch tighter. I have no intention of deliberately flying into a thunderstorm tonight, but the padlocked canvas sack in the gun bay ahead of my boots reminds me that my mission is not a trifling one, and worth a calculated risk against the weather.

The radiocompass needle swings again, wildly. I look for the flicker of lightning, but the cloud is still and dark. I have met a little rough weather in my hours as a pilot, why should the contorted warning feel so different and so ominous and so final? I note my heading indicator needle steady on my course of 084 degrees, and, from habit, check it against the standby magnetic compass. The gyro-held needle is within a degree of the incorruptible mag compass. In a few minutes the cloud will reach up to swallow my airplane, and I shall be on instruments, and alone.

It is a strange feeling to fly alone. So much of my flying is done in two- and four-ship formations that it takes time for the loneliness to wear from solo flight, and the minutes between Wethersfield and Chaumont Air Base are not that long a time. It is unnatural to be able to look in any direction that I wish, throughout an entire flight. The only comfortable position, the only natural position, is when I am looking 45 degrees to the left or 45 degrees to the right, and to see there the smooth streamlined mass of the lead airplane, to see the lead pilot in his white helmet and dark visor looking left and right and up and behind, clearing the flight from other airplanes in the sky and occasionally looking back for a long moment at my own airplane. I watch my leader more closely than any first violin watches his conductor, I climb when he climbs, turn when he turns, and watch for his hand signals.

Formation flying is a quiet way to travel. Filling the air with radio chatter is not a professional way of accomplishing a mission, and in close formation, there is a hand signal to cover any command or request from the leader and the answer from his wingman.

It would be easier, of course, for the leader to press his microphone button and say, “Gator flight: speed brakes . . . now,” than to lift his right glove from the stick, fly with his left for a second while he makes the thumb-and-fingers speed brake signal, put his right glove back on the stick while Gator Three passes the signal to Four, put his left glove on the throttle with thumb over sawtooth speed brake switch above the microphone button, then nod his helmet suddenly and sharply forward as he moves the switch under his thumb to extend. It is more complicated, but it is more professional, and to be professional is the goal of every man who wears the silver wings over his left breast pocket.

It is professional to keep radio silence, to know all there is to k

now about an airplane, to hold a rock-solid position in any formation, to be calm in emergencies. Everything that is desirable about flying airplanes is “professional.” I joke with the other pilots about the extremes to which the word is carried, but it cannot really be overused, and I honor it in my heart.

I work so hard to earn the title of a professional pilot that I come down from each close-formation flight wringing wet with sweat; even my gloves are wet after a flight, and dry into stiff wrinkled boards of leather before the next day’s mission. I have not yet met the pilot who can fly a good formation flight without stepping from his cockpit as though it was a swimming pool. Yet all that is required for a smooth, easy flight is to fly a loose formation. That, however, is not professional, and so far I am convinced that the man who lands from a formation flight in a dry flight suit is not a good wingman. I have not met that pilot and I probably never will, for if there is one point in which all single-engine pilots place their professionalism in open view, it is in formation flying.

At the end of every mission, there is a three-mile initial approach to the landing pattern, in close echelon formation. In the 35 seconds that it takes to cover those three miles, from the moment that the flight leader presses his microphone button and says, “Gator Lead turning initial runway one niner, three out with four,” every pilot on the flight line and scores of other people on the base will be watching the formation. The flight will be framed for a moment in the window of the commander’s office, it will be in plain sight from the Base Exchange parking lot, visitors will watch it, veteran pilots will watch it. It is on display for three miles. For 35 seconds it is the showpiece of the entire base.

I tell myself that I do not care if every general in the United States Air Force in Europe is watching my airplane, or if just a quail is looking up at me through the tall grass. The only thing that matters is the flight, the formation. Here is where I tuck it in. Every correction that I make will be traced in the grey smoke of my exhaust and will be one point off the ideal of four straight grey arrows with unmoving sweptsilver arrowheads. The smallest change means an immediate correction to keep the arrow straight.

I am an inch too far from the leader; I think the stick to the left and recover the inch. I bounce in the rough afternoon air; I move it in on the leader so that I bounce in the same air that he does. Those 35 seconds require more concentrated attention than all the rest of the flight. During a preflight briefing, the leader can say, “. . . and on initial, let’s just hold a nice formation; don’t press it in so close that you feel uncomfortable . . .” but every pilot in the flight smiles to himself at the words and knows that when that half-minute comes, he will be just as uncomfortable as the other wingmen in the closest, smoothest formation that he can fly.

The tension in those seconds builds until I think that I cannot hold my airplane so close for one more second. But the second passes and so does another, with the green glass of my leader’s right navigation light inches from my canopy.

At last he breaks away in a burst of polished aluminum into the landing pattern, and I begin the count to three. I follow him through the pattern and I wait. My wheels throw back their long plumes of blue smoke on the hard runway and I wait. We taxi back to the flight line in formation and we shut down our engines and we fill out the forms and we wait. We walk back to the flight shack together, parachute buckles tinkling like little steel bells, waiting. Occasionally it comes. “Looked pretty good on initial today, Gator,” someone will say to the lead pilot.

“Thanks,” he will say.

I wonder in an unguarded moment if it is worth it. Is it worth the work and the sweat and sometimes the danger of extremely close formation flying just to look good in the approach? I measure risk against return, and have an answer before the question is finished and phrased. It is worth it. There are four-ship flights making approaches to this runway all day long, seven days a week. To fly one approach so well that it stands out in the eye of a man who watches hundreds of them is to fly an outstanding piece of formation. A professional formation. It is worth it.

If day formation is work, then night formation is sheer travail. But there is no more beautiful mission to be found in any Air Force.

Lead’s airplane melts away to join the black sky and I fly my number Three position on his steady green navigation light and the faint red glow that fills his cockpit and reflects dimly from his canopy. Without moon or starlight, I can see nothing whatsoever beyond his lights, and take the thought on slimmest faith that there is 10 tons of fighter plane a few feet from my cockpit. But I usually have the starlight.

I drift along on Lead’s wing with my engine practicing its balky V-8 imitation behind me and I watch the steady green light and the dim red glow and the faint faint silhouette of his airplane under the stars. At night the air is smooth. It is possible, at altitude and when Lead is not turning, to relax a little and compare the distant lights of a city to the nearer lights that are the stars around me. They are remarkably alike.

Distance and night filter out the smallest lights of the city, and altitude and thin clear air bring the smallest of stars into tiny untwinkling life. Without an undercast of cloud, it is very difficult to tell where sky ends and ground begins, and more than one pilot has died because the night was perfectly clear. There is no horizon aside from the ever-faithful one two inches long behind its disc of glass on the panel with its 23 comrades.

At night, from 35,000 feet, there is no fault in the world. There are no muddy rivers, no blackened forests, nothing except silver-grey perfection held in a light warm shower of starlight. I know that the white star painted on Lead’s fuselage is dulled with streaks of oil rubbed by dusty rags, but if I look very closely I can see a flawless five-pointed star in the light of the unpointed stars through which we move.

The Thunderstreak looks very much as it must have looked in the mind of the man who designed it before he got down to the mundane task of putting lines and numbers on paper. A minor work of art, unblemished by stenciled black letters that in day read fire ingress door and cradle pad and danger—ejection seat. It looks like one of the smooth little company models in grey plastic, without blemish or seam.

Lead dips his wing sharply to the right, blurring the green navigation light in a signal for Two to cross over and take the position that I now fly on Lead’s right wing. With Four floating slowly up and down in the darkness off my own right wing, I inch back my throttle and slide gently out to leave an ’84-size space for Two. His navigation lights change from bright flash to dim steady before he begins his crossover, for it is easier for me to fly on a steady light than a flashing one. Although this procedure came out of the death of pilots flying night formation on flashing lights, and is a required step before Two slides into position, I appreciate the thoughtfulness behind the action and the wisdom behind the rule.

Two moves slowly back eight feet, begins to move across behind the lead airplane. Half way to his new position, his airplane stops. Occasionally in a crossover an airplane will catch in the leader’s jetwash and require a little nudge on stick and rudder to break again into smooth air, but Two is deliberately pausing. He is looking straight ahead into the tailpipe of Lead’s engine.

It glows.

From a dark apple-red at the tip of it to a light luminous pink brighter than cockpit lights at their brightest, the tailpipe is alive and vibrant with light and heat. Tucked deep in the engine is the cherry-red turbine wheel, and Two is watching it spin.

Like the spokes of a quick-turning wagon wheel it spins, and every few seconds it strobes as he watches and appears to spin backwards. Two is saying to himself, again, “So that is how it works.” He is not thinking of flying his airplane or of crossing over or of the seven miles of cold black air between his airplane and the hills. He is watching a beautiful machine at work, and he pauses in Lead’s jet-wash. I can see the red of the glow reflected in his windscreen, and on his white helmet.