Stranger to the Ground

The airplane that I fly has no key or secret combination for starting; I merely ask the crew chief to plug in an auxiliary power unit and I climb into the cockpit and I start the engine. When the power unit is disconnected and I taxi to the runway, there is no one in the world who can stop me if I am determined to fly, and once I am aloft I am the total master of the path of my airplane. If I desire, I can fly at a 20-foot altitude up the Champs Elysées; there is no way that anyone can stop me. The rules, the regulations, the warnings of dire punishment if I am caught buzzing towns means nothing if I am determined to buzz towns. The only control that others can force upon me is after I have landed, after I am separated from my airplane.

But I have learned that it more interesting to play the game when I follow the rules; to make an unauthorized flight would be to defy the rules and run a risk entirely out of proportion to the result of one more flight. Such a flight, though possible, is dangerous.

At the other extreme is the world of wartime combat. There is a bridge over the river. The enemy depends upon the bridge to carry supplies to his army that is killing my army. The enemy has fortified his bridge with antiaircraft guns and antiaircraft missiles and steel cables and barrage balloons and fighter cover. But the bridge, because of its importance, must be destroyed. The result of destroying the bridge is worth the risk of destroying it. The mission is chalked on a green blackboard and the flight is briefed and the bombs and rockets are hung on our airplanes and I start the engine and I take off and I fully intend to destroy the bridge.

In my mind the mission is not a dangerous one; it is one that simply must be done. If I lose the game of staying alive over this bridge, that is just too bad; the bridge is more important than the game.

How slowly it is, though, that we learn of the nature of dying. We form our preconceptions, we make our little fancies of what it is to pass beyond the material, we imagine what it feels like to face death. Every once in a while we actually do face it.

It is a dark night, and I am flying right wing on my flight leader. I wish for a moon, but there is none. Beneath us by some six miles lie cities beginning to sink under a gauzy coverlet of mist. Ahead the mist turns to low fog, and the bright stars dim a fraction in a sheet of high haze. I fly intently on the wing of my leader, who is a pattern of three white lights and one of green. The lights are too bright in the dark night, and surround themselves with brilliant flares of halo that make them painful to watch. I press the microphone button on the throttle. “Go dim on your nav lights, will you, Red Leader?”

“Sure thing.”

In a moment the lights are dim, mere smudges of glowing filament that seek more to blend his airplane with the stars than to set it apart from them. His airplane is one of the several whose dim is just too dim to fly by. I would rather close my eyes against the glare than fly on a shifting dim constellation moving among the brighter constellations of stars. “Set ’em back to bright, please. Sorry.”

“Roj.”

It is not really enjoyable to fly like this, for I must always relate that little constellation to the outline of an airplane that I know is there, and fly my own airplane in relation to the mental outline. One light shines on the steel length of a drop tank, and the presence of the drop tank makes it easier to visualize the airplane that I assume is near me in the darkness. If there is one type of flying more difficult than dark-night formation, it is dark-night formation in weather, and the haze thickens at our altitude. I would much rather be on the ground. I would much rather be sitting in a comfortable chair with a pleasant evening sifting by me. But the fact remains that I am sitting in a yellow-handled ejection seat and that before I can feel the comfort of any evening again I must first successfully complete this flight through the night and through whatever weather and difficulties lie ahead. I am not worried, for I have flown many flights in many airplanes, and have not yet damaged an airplane or my desire to fly them.

France Control calls, asking that we change to frequency 355.8. France Control has just introduced me to the face of death, I slide my airplane away from leader’s just a little, and divert my attention to turning four separate knobs that will let me listen, on a new frequency, to what they have to say. It takes a moment in the red light to turn the knobs. I look up to see the bright lights of Lead beginning to dim in the haze. I will lose him. Forward on the throttle, catch up with him before he disappears in the mist. Hurry.

Very suddenly in the deceptive mist I am closing too quickly on his wing and his lights are very very bright. Look out, you’ll run right into him! He is so helpless as he flies on instruments. He couldn’t dodge now if he knew that I would hit him. I slam the throttle back to idle, jerk the nose of my airplane up, and roll so that I am upside down, watching the lights of his airplane through the top of my canopy.

Then, very quickly, he is gone. I see my flashlight where it has fallen to the plexiglass over my head, silhouetted by the diffused yellow glow in the low cloud that is a city preparing to sleep on the ground. What an unusual place for a flashlight. I begin the roll to recover to level flight, but I move the stick too quickly, at what has become far too low an airspeed. I am stunned. My airplane is spinning. It snaps around once and the glow is all about me. I look for references, for ground or stars; but there is only the faceless glow. The stick shakes convulsively in my hand and the airplane snaps around again. I do not know whether the airplane is in an erect spin or an inverted spin, I know only that one must never spin a swept-wing aircraft. Not even in broad light and clear day. Instruments. Attitude indicator shows that the spin has stopped, by itself or by my monstrous efforts on the stick and rudder. It shows that the airplane is wings-level inverted; the two little bars of the artificial horizon that always point to the ground are pointing now to the canopy overhead.

I must bail out. I must not stay in an uncontrolled airplane below 10,000 feet. The altimeter is an unwinding blur. I must raise the right armrest, squeeze the trigger, before it is too late.

There is a city beneath me. I promised myself that I would never leave an airplane over a city.

Give it one more chance to recover on instruments, I haven’t given the airplane a chance to fly itself out.

The ground must be very close.

There is a strange low roaring in my ears.

Fly the attitude indicator.

Twist the wings level.

Speed brakes out.

I must be very close to the ground, and the ground is not the friend of airplanes that dive into it.

Pull out.

Roaring in my ears. Glow in the cloud around me.

St. Elmo’s fire on the windscreen, blue and dancing. The last time I saw St. Elmo’s fire was over Albuquerque, last year with Bo Beaven.

Pull out.

Well, I am waiting, death. The ground is very close, for the glow is bright and the roaring is loud. It will come quickly. Will I hear it or will everything just go black? I hold the stick back as hard as I dare—harder would stall the airplane, spin it again.

So this is what dying is like. You find yourself in a situation that has suddenly gone out of control, and you die. And there will be a pile of wreckage and someone will wonder why the pilot didn’t eject from his airplane. One must never stay with an uncontrolled airplane below 10,000 feet.

Why do you wait, death? I know I am certain I am convinced that I will hit the ground in a few thousandths of a second. I am tense for the impact. I am not really ready to the, but now that is just too bad. I am shocked and surprised and interested

in meeting death. The waiting for the crash is unbearable.