Stranger to the Ground

Flash.

I flew out of the storm, and that is what I wanted to do. I am glad now that I did not drop the tanks; there would have been reports to write and reasons to give. When I walk away from my airplane tonight I will have only one comment to make on the Form One: UHF transmitter and receiver failed during flight. I will be the only person to know that the United States Air Force in Europe came within a few seconds of losing an airplane.

Flashflash. Ahead.

I have had enough stor

m-flying for one night. Throttle to 100 percent and climb. I will fly over the weather for the rest of the way home; there will be one cog slipping tonight in the European Air Traffic Control System, above the weather near Phalsbourg. The cog has earned it.

CHAPTER SIX

The people on the ground who operate the air traffic control system are very important people, but not indispensable. The system, although it is a good one, is not an indispensable system. Airplanes were flying long before the first sign of air traffic control appeared, they will go on flying if it all suddenly disappears.

When the rules of the air were set down, there was a very wise man present who knew that cogs will slip now and then, and that the system had best be flexible. I am still in command of my airplane, and I will put it where I think that it is best for it to go, system or no system. Now I have decided that I would rather not engage another thunder storm. I climb away from my assigned altitude of 33,000 feet to seek the clear air and smooth flying above the clouds. I am passing through altitudes that might have been assigned to other airplanes, and there is the possibility of midair collision.

Yet the chance of my colliding with another airplane is almost nonexistent. I am off course; in order to collide with me, another airplane would have to be precisely as far off course as I am.

Though I have not talked to a ground station for a long while, I have not been forgotten; I am a flight plan written on a strip of paper at all the stations along my route. Other airplanes will be told of my course and my estimated times over those stations.

I am a quarter-inch dot on the radar screens, and controllers will vector other airplanes around me.

The primary reason that I will not collide with any other airplane is that my Thunderstreak is 43 feet 3 inches long, its wingspan is 33 feet 6 inches, and it flies in a block of air that is a thousand cubic miles of empty space. And so I climb.

My approach time to Chaumont will be held open for a half hour past my estimated time of arrival. I dial the familiar channel 55 on the TACAN and listen to the identifier. Chaumont. I never would have thought that a little French village could be so like Home. Bearing is 239 degrees, distance is 093 miles. Phalsbourg is drifting behind me to the left. I should have reported over the French border and over Phalsbourg. But the cog is slipping.

Thirty-eight thousand feet on the altimeter and still no top to the cloud. The blue fire is gone. Fuel is down to 2,700 pounds, and at this weight a practical ceiling for my plane will be about 43,000 feet. It is rare to have clouds in Europe that top at more than 40,000 feet, and I am not concerned. My interest is directed only over the instruments in front of me. There is now, without a radio, no other world.

The old pilots tell of days when it was “needle-ball and alcohol” through the weather: a turn-and-bank indicator and a magnetic compass their only aid in the cloud. But this is a modern age, and tonight I fly by the seven instruments in the center of the panel, and have my navigation solved second by second in the two dials of the TACAN.

If the inverter that changes the generator’s DC power to AC were to fail, my gyro instruments, attitude indicator and heading indicator would slowly run down into uselessness. But the ’84F is an American airplane, and therefore has safety systems for the safety systems. In this instance, the safety factor is called the alternate instrument inverter, waiting to drive the gyros should the engine-driven generator or the main inverter fail. Should both inverters fail, I am moved back through the years to fly a fighter airplane by needle-ball and alcohol.

There is a light tremble through my airplane as I climb through 40,000 feet, and the wings begin to rock. There has been no lightning. I scan the windscreen, looking for ice. I cannot carry much ice and continue to climb. The windscreen is clear.

With no sound and with no warning, like the magician’s silk from above the hawk, the cloud is gone. In one instant I am checking for ice, in the next I am looking through the glass, as through a narrow gothic arch in steel, at two hundred miles of crystal air, floored 20,000 feet below by unruffled cloud. It is vertigo, as if I had run over a hidden cliff and discovered myself in thin air. Right glove tightens on the stick.

I have flown from a sheer wall of cloud, and it tumbles away toward the earth like the mountains south of Strasbourg tumble away to the valley of the Rhine. The giant wall swings in wide arc to my left and right, and it flickers here and there with its storms.

I am an invisible speck of dust sifting on a tiny breath of air.

A hundred and fifty miles behind me to the north, the wall becomes the smooth gentle-rising slope that I entered long ago. But this is helpless knowledge, for I can see in the starlight that the only real thing in all the world is the awesome mass of cloud around my 43-foot airplane. There is no ground, there is no steady glow of lighted city through the floor of the mist. There is not one other flashing navigation light from horizon to horizon. I am alone, with one thousand stars for company.

I rest my helmet against the ejection seat headrest and look out again at the sky. The sky is not blue or purple or merely black. It is a deep meadow of powdered carbon, a bed for the stars. Around me.

Back with the throttle, to make the engine quiet. Right glove reaches to the three knobs that control the red light of the cockpit, and my own little red world fades into the meadow.

The dust mote settles gently back toward 33,000 feet, and its voice is the barest whisper in the dimension of the night.

I am one man. Tonight, perhaps, I am Man, alive and looking out over my planet toward my galaxy, crystallizing in myself, for a span of seconds, the centuries of looking out from this little earth that Man has done.

We have much in common, we men.

Tonight I, who love my airplane with all its moods and hardships and joys, am looking out upon the stars. And tonight, 20 minutes to the east, there is another pilot, another man who loves his airplane, looking out at these same stars. These symbols.

My airplane is painted with a white star, his with a red star. It is dark, and paint is hard to see. In his cockpit is the same family of flight instruments and engine instruments and radio control panels that is in my cockpit. In his airplane as in mine, when the stick is pressed to the left, the airplane banks to the left.

I know, unquestioningly, that I would like the man in that cockpit. We could talk through the long night of the airplanes that we have known and the times that we were afraid and the places that we have been. We would laugh over the half-witted things that we did when we were new in the air. We have shared many things, he and I, too many things to be ordered into our airplanes to kill each other.

I went through flying training at a base near Dallas, he went through it at a base near Stalingrad. My flight instructors shouted at me in English, his at him in Russian. But the blue fire trickles once in a while across his windscreen as it does across mine, and ice builds and breaks over his wings as it does mine. And somewhere in his cockpit is a control panel or a circuit breaker panel or a single switch that he has almost to stand on his head to reach. Perhaps at this moment his daughter is considering whether or not to accept a pair of Siamese kittens. Look out for your curtains, friend.