Stranger to the Ground

And then I am suddenly alive again.

The airplane is climbing.

I am alive.

The altimeter sweeps through 6,000 feet in a swift rush of a climb. Speed brakes in. Full forward with the throttle. I am climbing. Wings level, airspeed a safe 350 knots, the glow is fading below. The accelerometer shows that I pulled seven and a half G’s in my recovery from the dive. I didn’t feel one of them, even though my G-suit was not plugged into its source of pressured air.

“Red lead, this is Two here; had a little difficulty, climbing back through 10,000 feet. . .”

“TEN THOUSAND FEET?”

“Roger, I’ll be up with you in a minute, we can rejoin over Toul TACAN.”

Odd. And I was so sure that I would be dead.

The flashes in the dark clouds north of Phalsbourg are more frequent and flicker now from behind my airplane as well as in front of it. They are good indicators of thunderstorm cells, and they do not exactly fit my definition of “scattered.” Directly ahead, on course, are three quick bright flashes in a row. Correct 30 degrees left. Alone. Time for twisted thoughts in the back of the mind. “You have to be crazy or just plain stupid to fly into a thunderstorm in an eighty-four F.” The words are my words, agreed and illustrated by other pilots who had circumstance force them to fly this airplane through an active storm cell.

The airplane, they say, goes almost completely out of control, and despite the soothing words of the flight handbook, the pilot is relying only on his airplane’s inertia to hurl it through and into smooth air beyond the storm.

But still I have no intention of penetrating one of the flickering monsters ahead. And I see that my words were wrong. I face the storms on my course now through a chain of logic that any pilot would have followed. The report called them “scattered,” not numerous or continuous. I flew on. There are at least four separate radar-equipped facilities below me capable of calling vectors through the worst cells. I fly on. A single-engine pilot does not predicate his action on what-shall-I-do-if-the-radio-goes-out. The risk of the mission is worth the result of delivering the heavy canvas sack in the gun bay.

Now, neither crazy nor stupid, I am at the last link of the chain: I dodge the storms by the swerving radiocompass needle and the flashes of lightning that I see from the cockpit. The TACAN is not in the least disturbed by my uneasy state of mind. The only thing that matters in the world of its transistorized brain is that we are 061 miles from Phalsbourg, slightly to the left of course. The radiocompass has gone wild, pointing left and right and ahead and behind. Its panic is disconcerting among the level-headed coolness of the other instruments, and my right glove moves its function switch to off. Gratefully accepting the sedative, the needle slows, and stops.

Flash to the left, alter course 10 degrees right. Flash behind the right wing, forget about it. Flash-FLASH directly brilliantly ahead and the instrument panel goes featureless and white. There is no dodging this one. Scattered.

The storm, in quick sudden hard cold fury, grips my airplane in its jaws and shakes it as a furious terrier shakes a rat. Right glove is tight on the stick. Instrument panel, shock-mounted, slams into blur. The tin horizon whips from an instant 30-degree left bank to an instant 60-degree right bank. That is not possible. A storm is only air.

Left glove, throttle full forward. My airplane, in slow motion, yaws dully to the left. Right rudder, hard. Like a crash landing on a deep-rutted rock trail. Yaw to the right. My airplane has been drugged, she will not respond. Vicious left rudder.

The power, where is the power? Left glove back, forward again, as far as it will go, as hard as it will go. A shimmering blurred line where the tachometer needle should be. Less than 90 percent rpm at full throttle.

I hear the airplane shaking. I cannot hear the engine. Stick and rudders are useless moving pieces of metal. I cannot control my airplane. But throttle, I need the throttle. What is wrong?

Ice. The intake guide vanes are icing, and the engine is not getting air. I see intake clogged in grey ice. Flash and FLASH the bolt is a brilliant snake of incandescent noon-white sun in the dark. I cannot see. Everything has gone red and I cannot even see the blurred panel. I feel the stick I feel the throttle I cannot see. I have suddenly a ship in the sky, and the storm is breaking it So quickly. This cannot last. Thunderstorms cannot hurt fighters. I am on my way to Chaumont. Important mission.

Slowly, through the bone-jarring shake of the storm, I can see again. The windscreen is caked wife grey ice and bright blue fire. I have never seen the fire so brightly blue. My wings are white. I am heavy with ice and I am falling and the worst part of a thunderstorm is at the lowest altitudes. I cannot take much more of this pounding. White wings, covered in shroud. Right glove grips the stick, for that is what has kept my airplane in the sky for six years. But tonight the airplane is very slow and does not respond, as if she were suddenly very tired and did not care to live. As if her engine had been shut down.

The storm is a wild horse of the desert that has suddenly discovered a monster on its back. It is in a frenzy to rid itself of me, and it strikes with shocks so fast they cannot be seen. I learn a new fact. The ejection seat is not always an escape. Bailout into the storm will be just as fatal as the meeting of earth and airplane, for in the churning air my parachute would be a tangled nylon rag. My airplane and I have been together for a long time, we will stay together now. The decision bolts the ejection seat to the cockpit floor, the Thunderstreak and I smash down through the jagged sky as a single dying soul. My arm is heavy on the stick, and tired. It will be good to rest. There is a roaring in my ears, and I feel the hard ground widening about me, falling up to me.

So this is the way it will end. With a violent shuddering of airplane and an unreadable instrument panel; with a smothered engine and heavy white wings. Again the feeling: I am not really ready to end the game. I have told myself that this day would come to meet me, as inevitably as the ground which rushes to meet me now, and yet I think, quickly, of a future lost. It cannot be helped. I am falling through a hard splintering storm with a control stick that is not a control stick. I am a chip in a hurricane a raindrop in a typhoon about to become one with the sea a mass of pieces-to-be a concern of air traffic controllers and air police and gendarmerie and coroners and accident investigators and statisticians and newspaper reporters and a board of officers and a theater commander and a wing commander and a squadron commander and a little circle of friends. I am a knight smashed from his square and thrown to the side of the chessboard.

Tomorrow morning there will be no storm and the sun will be shining on the quiet bits of metal that used to be Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five.

But at this instant there is a great heavy steel-bladed storm that is battering and crushing me down, out of the sky, and the thing that follows this instant is another just like it.

Altimeter is a blur, airspeed is a blur, vertical speed is a blur, attitude indicator is a quick-rocking blurred luminous line that does not respond to my orders. Any second now, as before, I am tense and waiting. There will be an impact, and blackness and quiet. Far in the back of my mind, behind the calm fear, is curiosity and a patient waiting. And a pride. I am a pilot. I would be a pilot again.

The terrier flings the rat free.

The air is instantly smooth, and soft as layered smoke. Altimeter three thousand feet airspeed one-ninety knots vertical speed four thousand feet per minute down attitude indicator steep right bank heading indicator one seven zero degrees tachometer eighty-three percent rpm at full throttle. Level the white wings. Air is warm. Thudthudthud from the engine as ice tears from guide vanes and splinters into compressor blades. Wide slabs of ice rip from the wings. Half the windscreen is suddenly clear. Faint blue fire on the glass. Power is taking hold: 90 percent on the tachometer . . . thud . . . 91 percent . . . thudthud . . . 96 percent. Air speed coming up through 240 knots, left turn, climb. Five hundred feet per minute, 700 feet per minute altimeter showing 3,000 feet and climbing I am 50 degrees off course and I don’t care attitude indicator showing steady left climbing turn I’m alive the oil pressure is good utility and power hydraulic pressure are good I don’t believe it voltmeter and loadmeter showing normal control stick is smooth and steady how strange it is to be alive windscreen is clear thud 99 percent rpm tailpipe temperature is in the green. Flash-FLASH look out to the left look out! Hard turn right I’ll never make it through another storm tonight forget the flight plan go north of Phalsbourg 15,000 feet 320 knots flash to the left and behind, faint.

And strangely, the words of an old pilot’s song: “. . . for I, am, too young, to die . . .” It is a good feeling, this being alive. Something I haven’t appreciated. I have learned again.

Rpm is up to 100 percent. I am climbing, and 20,000 feet is below flash 21,000 feet is below. Blue fire washes across the windscreen as if it did not know that a windscreen is just a collection of broken bits of glass.

What a ridiculous thought. A windscreen is a windscreen, a solid piece of six-ply plate glass, for keeping out the wind and the rain and the ice and a place to look through and a place to shine the gunsight. I will be looking through windscreens for a long time to come.

Why didn’t I bail out? Because the seat was bolted to the cockpit floor. No. Because I decided not to bail out into the storm. I should have bailed out. I definitely should have left the airplane. Better to take my chances with a rough descent in a torn chute than certain death in a crash. I should have dropped the external tanks, at least. Would have made the airplane lighter and easier to control. Now, at 32,000 feet, I think of dropping the tanks. Quick thinking.