Stranger to the Ground

I do not even squeeze my trigger. I watch for other airplanes, and after Three rivets his attention on one enemy airplane, I am the only eyes in the element that watch for danger. Three is totally absorbed in his attack, depending on me to clear him of enemy planes. If I wanted to kill him in combat, I would simply stop looking around.

In air combat more than at any other time, I am the thinking brain for a living machine. There is no time to keep my head in the cockpit or to watch gages or to look for switches. I move the control stick and the throttle and the rudder pedals unconsciously. I want to be there, and I am there. The ground does not even exist until the last minutes of a fight that was allowed to get too low. I fly and fight in a block of space. The ideal game of three-dimension chess, across which moves are made with reckless abandon.

In two-ship combat there is only one factor to consider: the enemy airplane. I seek only to stay on his tail, to track him with the pipper in the gunsight and pull the trigger that takes closeups of his tailpipe. If he should be on my tail, there are no holds barred. I do everything that I can to keep him from tracking me in his gunsight, and to begin to track him. I can do maneuvers in air combat that I could never repeat if I tried.

I saw an airplane tumble once, end over end. For one shocked moment the fighter was actually moving backwards and smoke was streaming from both ends of the airplane. Later on, on the ground, we deduced that the pilot had forced his aircraft into a wild variation of a snap roll, which is simply not done in heavy fighter airplanes. But the maneuver certainly got the enemy off his tail.

As more airplanes enter the fight, it becomes complicated. I must consider that this airplane is friend and that airplane is enemy, and that I must watch my rolls to the left because there are two airplanes in a fight there and I would fly right through the middle of them. Midair collisions are rare, but they are always a possibility when one applies too much abandon in many-ship air combat flights.

John Larkin was hit in the air by a Sabre that saw him too late to turn. “I didn’t know what had happened,” he told me. “But my airplane was tumbling and it didn’t take long to figure that I had been hit. I pulled the seat handle and squeezed the trigger and the next thing I remember, I was in the middle of a little cloud of airplane pieces, just separating from the seat.

“I was at a pretty good altitude, about thirty-five thousand, so I free-fell down to where I could begin to see color on the ground. Just when I reached for my ripcord, the automatic release pulled it for me and I had a good chute. I watched the tail of my airplane spin down by me and saw it crash in the hills. A couple of minutes later I was down myself and thinking about all the paperwork I was going to have to fill out.”

There had been a great amount of paperwork, and the thought of it makes me doubly careful when I fly air combat, even today. In a war, without the paperwork, I will be a little more free in my fighting.

When it spirals down to altitudes where dodging hills enters the tactic, a fight is broken off by mutual consent, as boxers hold their fists when an opponent is in the ropes. In the real war, of course, it goes on down to the ground, and I pick up all the pointers I can on methods to scrape an enemy into a hillside. It could all be important someday.

The wide luminous needle of the TACAN swings serenely as I pass over Spangdahlem at 2218, and one more leg of the flight is complete.

As if it recognized that Spangdahlem is a checkpoint and time for things to be happening, the thick dark cloud puts an end to its toying and abruptly lifts to swallow my airplane in blackness. For a second it is uncomfortable, and I sit tall in my seat to see over the top of the cloud. But the second quickly passes and I am on instruments.

For just a moment, though, I look up through the top of my canopy. Above, the last bright star fades and the sky above is as dark and faceless as it is about me. The stars are gone, and I am indeed on instruments.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Rhein Control, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Spangdahlem, over.” From my capricious radio I do not know whether or not to expect an answer. The “over,” which I rarely use, is a wistful sort of hope. I am doubtful.

“Jet Four Zero Five, Rhein Control, go ahead.”

Someday I will give up trying to predict the performance of a UHF radio. “Roger, Rhein, Zero Five was Spangdahlem at two niner, flight level three three zero assigned instrument flight rules, Wiesbaden at three seven, Phalsbourg next. Latest weather at Chaumont Air Base, please.” A long pause of faint flowing static. My thumb is beginning to be heavy on the microphone button.

“Roger your position, Zero Five. Latest Chaumont weather is one thousand overcast, visibility five miles in rain, winds from the west at one zero knots.”

“Thank you, Rhein. How about the Phalsbourg weather?” The static is suddenly louder and there is a light blue glow across the windscreen. St. Elmo’s fire. Harmless and pretty to watch, but it turns low-frequency radio navigation into a patchwork of guesses and estimates. The radiocompass needle is wobbling in an aimless arc. It is good to have a TACAN set.

“Zero Five, Phalsbourg weather is garbled on our machine. Strasbourg is calling eight hundred overcast, visibility one-half mile in heavy rain showers, winds variable two zero gusting three zero knots, isolated thunderstorms all quadrants.” Strasbourg is to the left of course, but I could catch the edge of their thunderstorms. Too bad that Phalsbourg is out. Always seems to happen when you need it most.

“What is the last weather you had from Phalsbourg, Rhein?” A garbled teletype weather report is really garbled. It is either a meaningless mass of consonants or a black jumble where one weather sequence has been typed on top of another.

“Latest we have, sir, is two hours old. They were calling five hundred overcast, visibility one-quarter mile in . . .” he pauses, and his thumb comes off the microphone button. It comes on again

“. . . hail—that might be a misprint—scattered thunderstorms all quadrants.” Quarter-mile visibility in hail. I have heard that nocturnal thunderstorms can be violent, but this is the first time that I have heard the direct report as I fly on instruments in the weather. But the sequence is two hours old, and the storms are isolated. It is rare for storms to hold their violence for a long time, and I can get a radar vector from a ground station around active storm cells.

“Thank you, Rhein.” The air is very smooth in the stratus, and it is not difficult to hold the new heading at 093 degrees. But I am beginning to think that perhaps my detour did not take me far enough around the severe weather.

I am well established in the routine of the crosscheck now, and occasionally look forward to the liquid blue fire on the windscreen. It is a brilliant cobalt, glowing with an inner light that is somehow startling to see at high altitude. And it is liquid as water is liquid; it twists across the glass in little rivulets of blue rain against the black of the night weather. The light of it, mingling with the red of the cockpit lights, turns the instrument panel into a surrealist’s impression of a panel, in heavy oil paint. In the steady red and flickering blue of the electrical fire on the glass, the only difference between my needles and the painter’s is that a few of mine are moving.

Turn back.

The air is smooth. The needles, except for the wobbling radiocompass needle and the rolling numbered drums of the distance-measuring equipment, move only the smallest fractions of inches as I make the gentle corrections to stay at 33,000 feet. The airplane is flying well and the UHF is back in action.

There are storms ahead, and this airplane is very small.

My crosscheck goes so smoothly that I do not have to hurry to include a look at the fuel flow and quantity gages, the pale green oxygen blinker blinking coolly at me as I breathe, the utility and flight control system pressure gages, the voltmeter, the loadmeter, the tailpipe temperature. They are all my friends, and they are all in the green.

I will not live through the storms.

What is this? Fear? The little half-noticed voices that flit through my thought like scurrying fireflies might warrant the name of fear, but only if I stretch the definition until it applies to the thoughts that scurry before I begin to walk across a busy highway. If I reacted to the half-thoughts, I would have quit flying before I made my first flight in the light propeller-driven trainer that first lifted me away from a runway.