Stranger to the Ground

I move up for a moment into the position that I will hold during our passes across the base. When I feel that it is correct, the black gaping hole of Lead’s tailpipe is a shimmering inky disc six feet forward of my windscreen and a foot above the level of my canopy. My vertical stabilizer is solid in his jetwash, and I ease the weight of my boots from the rudder pedals to avoid the uncomfortable vibration in them. If it were possible to move my boots completely off the pedals, I would, but the slanting tunnels that lead down to them offer no resting-place, and I must live with the vibration that means that the stabilizer is blackening in burnt JP-4. I can hear it, a dull heavy constant rumble of twisted forced air beating against the rudder. The airplane does not fly easily in this, and it is not enjoyable to fly with the tail, like a great dorsal fin, forced into the stream of heat from Baker Blue Lead’s turbine. But that is the position that I must fly to make Baker Blue flight a close and perfect diamond, and the people who will watch are not interested in my problems. I move the throttle back an inch and ahead again, touch the control stick forward, sliding away and down into a looser, easier formation.

Two and Three are using the time that Falcon formation spends in its wide turn to check their own positions. The air is rough, and their airplanes shudder and jolt as they move in to overlap their wings behind Lead’s. To fly a tight formation, they must close on the leader until their wings are fitted in the violent wake of Lead’s wing. Although that air is not so rough as the heat that blasts my rudder, it is more difficult to fly, for it is an unbalanced force, and a changing one. At 350 knots the air is as solid as sheet steel, and I can see the ailerons near their wingtips move quickly up and down as they fight to hold smoothly in formation. During normal formation flying, their wings would be just outside the river of air washing back from their leader’s wing, and they could fly that position for a long time with the normal working and coaxing and correcting. But this is a show, and for a show we work.

Two and Three are apparently satisfied that they will be able to hold a good position for the passes across the base, for they slide out into normal formation almost simultaneously. Still they watch nothing but Baker Blue Lead, and still they bounce and jar in the rough air. Every few seconds the flight slams across an invisible whirlwind twisting up from a plowed field, and the impact of it is a solid thing that blurs my vision for an instant and makes me grateful for my shoulder harness.

This is summer on an air base: not blazing sun and crowded pool and melting ice cream, but the jarring slam of rough air when I want to tuck my airplane into close formation.

The wide circle is completed, and Falcon formation begins to descend to its 500-foot flyby altitude.

“Close it up, Falcon,” comes the voice of the man who is Able Red Leader. We close it up, and I lift my airplane to push the rudder again into Lead’s tumbling jetwash. I glance at my altimeter when the formation is level and three miles from the crowd by the runway. One quick glance: 400 feet above the ground. The leading vee of diamonds is at 500 feet and we are stacked 100 feet beneath it. As a slot man, altitude is none of my business, but I am curious.

Now, in these last three miles to the base, we are being watched by the American people. They are interested in knowing just how well the part-time Air Force can fly its airplanes.

The diamonds of Falcon formation are hard and glittering in the sun, and even from the center of Baker Blue flight the formation looks close and good. I think again the old axiom of bouncing in the same air with the leader, and I am not alone with the thought. Two and Three have placed their wings unnervingly close to Lead’s smooth fuselage, and we take the ridges of the air as a close formation of bobsleds would take the ridges of hardpacked snow. Slam. Four helmets jerk, four sets of stiff wings flex the slightest bit. My rudder is full in Lead’s jetwash and the pedals are chattering heavily. This rumble of hard jetwash must be loud even to the people standing by the bleachers on the flight line. Hold it smooth. Hold it steady. Hold it close.

But the people on the concrete do not even begin to hear the rumble that makes my rudder pedals dance. They see from the north a little cloud of grey smoke on the horizon. It stretches to become a quiver of grey arrows in flight, shot at once from a single bow. There is no sound.

The arrows grow, and the people on the ground talk to each other in the quiet air as they watch. The arrowheads slice the air at 400 knots, but from the ground they seem to be suspended in cold clear honey.

Then, as the silent flight reaches the end of the runway a quarter-mile from the bleachers and even the visiting general is smiling to himself behind his issue sunglasses, the honey becomes only air and the 400 knots is the ground-shaking blast of 24 sudden detonations of high explosive. The people wince happily in the burst of sound and watch the diamonds whip together through the sky in unyielding immovable grace. In that moment the people on the ground are led to believe that Air Guard airplanes are not left to rust unused in the sun, and this is what we are trying to tell them.

In one fading dopplered roar we flick past the stands and are to the people a line of dwindling dots, pulling two dozen streamers of tenuous grey as we go. Our sound is gone as quickly as it came, and the ground is quiet again.

But still, after we pass the crowd, we fly formation. Baker Blue flight and Falcon formation are just as present about me as they have been all morning. The brief roar that swept the people is to me unchanged and constant. The only change in Falcon formation after it crosses the field is that the diamonds loosen a few feet out and back, and the bobsleds take the ridges a tenth-second apart rather than in the same instant.

During the turn to the second pass across the base, I slide with Baker Blue Lead to form a new pattern in which our diamond is the corner of a giant block of airplanes. Regardless of the position that we fly, the rough sky beats at our airplanes and the jetwash thunders over my vertical stabilizer. I think of the landing that is ahead, hoping that a light breeze has begun across the runway, to clear the jet-wash out of the way by the time my airplane slides down final approach to land.

Maybe they don’t want to be pilots.

Where did that come from? Of course they want to be pilots. Yet they watch from the ground instead of flying wing in Baker Blue flight. The only reason that they are not flying today instead of watching is that they do not know what they are missing. What better work is there than flying airplanes? If flying was the full-time employment of an Air Force pilot, I would have become a career officer when the chance was offered me.

We force our airplanes close again, fly the second pass, re-form into a final design and bring it through the rocky air above the field. Then, from a huge circle out of sight of the runway, flight after flight separates from the formation, diamonds changing to echelon right, and the echelons fly a long straight approach across the hard uneven air into the landing pattern.

It is work, it is uncomfortable. The needle that measures G has been knocked to the number 4. But in the moments that the people watch this part of their standby Air Force, and were glad for it, the flight was worthwhile. Able Red Leader has completed another little part of his job.

That was months ago. These days, in Europe, our formation is not for show but for the business of fighting. A four-ship flight is loose and comfortable when it is not being watched, and the pilots merely concentrate on their position, rather than devote their every thought and smallest action to show flying. At altitude we wait for the left-right yaw of the lead airplane, and spread out even more, into tactical formation. Three and Four climb together a thousand feet above Lead and Two; each wingman sliding to a loose angled trailing position from which he can watch the sky around as well as the airplane that he protects. In tactical formation and the practice of air combat, responsibility is sharply defi

ned: wingman clears leader, high element clears low element, leaders look for targets.

Flying at the contrail altitudes, this is easy. Any con other than our own four are bogies. During a war, when they are identified, they become either bogies to be watched or bandits to be judged and occasionally, attacked. “Occasionally” because our airplane was not designed to engage enemy fighters at altitude and destroy them. That is the job of the F-104’s and the Canadian Mark Sixes and the French Mystères. Our Thunderstreak is an air-to-ground attack airplane built to carry bombs and rockets and napalm against the enemy as he moves on the earth. We attack enemy airplanes only when they are easy targets: the transports and the low-speed bombers and the propeller-driven, fighters. It is not fair and not sporting to attack only a weaker enemy, but we are not a match for the latest enemy airplanes built specifically to engage other fighters.

But we practice air combat against the day when we are engaged over our target by enemy fighters. If hours of practice suffice only to allow us a successful escape from a more powerful fighter, they will have been worthwhile. And the practice is interesting.

There they are. Two ’84F’s at ten o’clock low, in a long circling climb into the contrail level, coming up like goldfish to food on the surface. At 30,000 feet the bogie lead element begins to pull a con. The high element is nowhere in sight.

I am Dynamite Four, and I watch them from my high perch. It is slow motion. Turns at altitude are wide and gentle, for too much bank and G will stall the airplane in the thin air and I will lose my most precious commodity: airspeed. Airspeed is golden in combat. There are books filled with rules, but one of the most important is Keep Your Mach Up. With speed I can outmaneuver the enemy. I can dive upon him from above, track him for a moment in my gunsight, fire, pull up and away, prepare another attack. Without airspeed I cannot even climb, and drift at altitude like a helpless duck in a pond.

I call the bogies to Three, my element leader, and look around for the others. After the first enemy airplanes are seen, it is the leader’s responsibility to watch them and plan an attack. I look out for other airplanes and keep my leader clear. When I am a wingman, it is not my job to shoot down enemy airplanes. It is my job to protect the man who is doing the shooting. I turn with Three, shifting back and forth across his tail, watching, watching.

And there they are. From above the con level, from five o’clock high, come a pair of swept dots. Turning in on our tail. I press the microphone button. “Dynamite Three, bogies at five high.”

Three continues his turn to cover Dynamite Lead during his attack on the bogie lead element in their climb. The decoys. “Watch ’em,” he calls.

I watch, twisted in my seat with the top of my helmet touching the canopy as I look. The two are counting on surprise, and are only this moment, with plenty of airspeed, beginning to pull cons. I wait for them, watching them close on us, begin to track us. They are F-84’s. We can outfly them. They don’t have a chance.

“Dynamite Three, break right!” For once the wingman orders the leader, and Three twists into a steep bank and pulls all the backpressure that he can without stalling the airflow over his wings. I follow, seeking to stay on the inside of his turn, and watching the attackers. They are going too fast to follow our turn, and they begin to overshoot and slide to the outside of it. They are not unwise, though, for immediately they pull back up, converting their airspeed into altitude for another pass. But they have lost the surprise that they had counted on, and with full throttle we are gaining airspeed. The fight is on.

A fight in the air proceeds like the scurrying of minnows about a falling crumb of bread. It starts at high altitudes, crossing and recrossing the sky with bands of grey contrail, and slowly moves lower and lower. Every turn means a little more altitude lost. Lower altitudes mean that airplanes can turn more tightly, gain speed more quickly, pull more G before they stall. Around and around the fight goes, through the tactics and the language of air combat: scissors, defensive splits, yo-yos and “Break right, Three!”