Stranger to the Ground

At first, I was ready for it. When the engine sounded rough during those first hours alone, I thought of the ejection seat. When a tailpipe overheat light came on for the first time in my career, I thought of the ejection seat. When I was nearly out of fuel and lost in the weather, I thought of it. But the part of my mind that is concerned with caution can cry wolf only so many times before I see through its little game and realize that I could easily fly through my entire career without being called upon to blast away from an airplane into a cold sky. But still it is good to know that a 37-millimeter cannon shell is waiting just aft of the seat, waiting for the moment that I squeeze the trigger.

If I ever collide with another airplane in the air, the seat is waiting to throw me clear. If I lose all hydraulic pressure to the flight controls, it is waiting. If I am spinning and have not begun to recover as the ground nears, the seat is waiting. It is an advantage that conventional aircraft and transport pilots do not have, and I feel a little sorry for them at their dangerous job.

Even without passengers to think about, if they are hit in the air by another airplane, transport pilots do not have a chance to crawl back to the trap door on the floor of the flight deck and bail out. They can only sit in their seats and fight the useless controls of a wing that is not there and spin down until their airplane stops against the ground.

But not the single-engine pilot. Climbing or diving or inverted or spinning or coming to pieces, his airplane is rarely the place that he dies. There is a narrow margin near the ground where even the ejection seat is a game of chance, and I am in that margin for five seconds after the end of the runway has passed beneath me. After that five seconds I have accelerated to a speed that allows a climb to a safe ejection altitude; before that five seconds I can put my airplane back down on the runway and engage the nylon webbing and steel cable of the overrun barrier. When I engage that barrier, even at 150 knots, I drag a steel cable and the cable drags a long length of anchor chain and no airplane in the world can run on forever with tons of massive chain trailing behind it. The five seconds are the critical ones. Even before I retract the flaps after takeoff, I can eject if the engine explodes. And no engine explodes without warning.

Flying is safe, and flying a single-engine fighter plane is the safest of all flying. I would much rather fly from one place to another than drive it in that incredibly dangerous thing called an automobile. When I fly I depend upon my own skill, not subject to the variables of other drivers or blown tires at high speed or railroad crossing signs that are out of order at the wrong moments. After I learn my airplane, it is, with its emergency procedures and the waiting ejection seat, many times more safe than driving a car.

Four minutes to Wiesbaden. Smooth crosscheck. Smooth air. I relax and drift with the smoothness across the river of time.

When I was a boy I lived in a town that would last from now to now as I fly at 500 knots. I rode a bicycle, went to school, worked at odd jobs, spent a few hours at the airport watching the airplanes come and go. Fly one myself? Never. Too hard for me. Too complicated.

But the day came that I had behind me the typical history of a typical aviation cadet. I did not make straight A’s in my first college year and I thought that campus life was not the best road to education. For a reason that I still do not know I walked into a recruiting office and told the man behind the desk that I wanted to be an Air Force pilot. I did not know just what it was to be an Air Force pilot, but it had something to do with excitement and adventure, and I would have begun Life

.

To my surprise, I passed the tests. I matched the little airplanes in the drawings to the ones in the photographs. I identified which terrain was actually shown in Map Two. I wrote that Gear K will rotate counterclockwise if Lever A is pushed forward. The doctors poked at me, discovered that I was breathing constantly, and all of a sudden I was offered the chance to become a United States Air Force Aviation Cadet. I took the chance.

I raised my right hand and discovered that my name was New Aviation Cadet Bach, Richard D.; A-D One Nine Five Six Three Three One Two. Sir.

For three months I got nothing but a life on the ground. I learned about marching and running and how to fire the 45-caliber pistol. Every once in a while I saw an airplane fly over my training base.

The other cadets came from a strangely similar background. Most of them had never been in an airplane, most of them had tried some form of higher education and did not succeed at it. They decided on Excitement and Adventure. They sweated in the Texas sun with me and they memorized the General Orders and Washington’s Address and the Aviation Cadet Honor Code. They were young enough to take the life without writing exposés or telling the squadron commander that they had had enough of this heavy-handed treatment from the upper class. In time we became the upper class and put a stripe or two on our shoulderboards and learned about being heavy-handed with the lower class. If they can’t take a little chewing out or a few minutes of silly games, they’ll never make good pilots.

LOOK HERE MISTER DO YOU THINK THIS JOKE’S A PROGRAM? ARE YOU SMILING, MISTER? ARE YOU SHOWING EMOTION? MAINTAIN EYE-TO-EYE CONTACT WITH ME, MISTER! DON’T YOU HAVE ANY CONTROL OVER YOURSELF? GOD HELP THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IF YOU EVER BECOME AN AIR FORCE PILOT!

And then, suddenly, Preflight Training was over and we were on our way to become the lower class at a base where we began to learn about airplanes, and where we first breathed the aluminum-rubber-paint-oil-parachute air of an airplane cockpit and where we began to get a tiny secret idea, shared in secret by every other cadet in the class, that an airplane is actually a living thing, that loves to fly.

I took the academics and I loved the flying and I bore the military inspections and the parades for six months. Then I left Primary Flight School to become part of the lower class in Basic Flight School, where I was introduced to the world of turbine and speed and spent my first day in Basic Single-Engine Flight School.

Everything is new fresh exciting imminent tangible. A sign: Cadet Club; rows of tarpapered barracks; close-cut brown grass; weedless sidewalks; hot sun; bright sun; blue sky, ceilingless and free above my polished hatbill and stripeless shoulderboards. A strange face above white-banded boards and a set of white gloves. “Fall in, gentlemen.”

A flight of four sun-burnished silver jet training planes whistle over the base. Jets. “Let’s expedite, gentlemen, fall in.”

In we fall. “Welcome back to the Air Force, gentlemen, this is Basic.” A pause. Distant crackle of full throttle and takeoff. “You tigers will get your stripes here. It’s not a lot of fun or a no-sweat program. If you can’t hack it, you’re out. So you were Cadet Group Commander in Primary; you let up, you slack the books, you’re out. Stay sharp and you’ll make it. LaiUFF, HAICE! Ho-ward, HAR!”

The B-4 bag is heavy in the right hand. Dust on shined shoes. Hot air doesn’t cool as I move through it. Black rubber heels on dusty asphalt. Away, a lone jet trainer heads for the runway. Solo. I am a long way from Primary Flight School. A long way from the chug of a T-28’s butter-paddle propeller. And a long way still from the silver wings above the left breast pocket. Where are the hills? Where is the green? The cool air? In Primary Flight School. This is Texas. This is Basic.

“. . . program will require hard work . . .” says the wing commander.

“. . . and you’d best stay sharp in my squadron . . .” says the squadron commander.

“This is your barracks,” says the whitegloves. “There are T-33 pilot’s handbooks in every room. Learn the emergency procedures. All of them. You will be asked. Another whitegloves will be around later to answer questions.”

Questions.

“Inspections every Saturday?”

“Are the classes tough?”

“What is the airplane like?”

“When do we fly?”

A cold night in a white-collar bed. Cold twinkle of familiar stars through the window. Talk in the dark barracks.

“Just think, boy, jets at last!”