Stranger to the Ground

I wish that I could warn him about the kittens.

Fifty miles from Chaumont. Fifty miles and Through the Looking-Glass of cloud and rain and Hi there, ace, how’d the crosscountry go? Fifty miles is a very long way.

I have a not-working radio, above the clouds. Not a great problem, but enough of one so that I force my attention from the peaceful meadow of black to the task of putting my airplane back on the earth. Throttle forward at 33,000 feet, and again the rumble and whines and squeaks and moans from my comic in spinning steel.

No radio. I can fly on to the west, looking for a hole in the clouds, descend, fly back to Chaumont and land. A very poor plan for the fuel that remains in my tanks and for the vagaries of French weather.

I can fly a triangular pattern to the left, with one-minute legs. After a few patterns, a radar

site will notice my path and its direction, vector an interceptor to me, and I will fly a letdown and instrument approach as his wingman. A drastic plan, but one to remember as a last-ditch, last-resort action.

I can fly a letdown at Chaumont as I had planned, hoping that the weather is not so bad that I need a Ground Controlled Approach in order to find the runway. At last report the weather was not so bad. If I do not break out of the weather at the TACAN low-approach minimum altitude, I will climb back on top and try a penetration at my alternate, Etain Air Base, ten minutes to the north. I have just enough fuel for this plan, and I shall follow it. For interest’s sake, I will try my radio once more when I am directly over Chaumont. One can never tell about UHF radios.

Forty miles. Five minutes. To home. But months still to a home where there is a wife and daughter and where the people in the towns speak English.

The bulletin board in the Chaumont pilots’ quarters is a mass of newspaper clippings from that older Home. On the board are charges and countercharges concerning the wisdom of recalling the Guard without a war to make it necessary. There are letters to the editors from wives and families and employers, asking questions and offering answers. The newspapers tell of poor conditions into which we were forced, of our trials and our difficulties, of the state of our morale. The picture they paint is a bleak one, but our lot is not really so bleak.

I left an interesting civilian job, flying small airplanes and writing for an aviation magazine, and was ordered back into the Air Force. It was disrupting, of course. But then I have never before been needed by the country to which I owe so much. I would be happier in the freedom of my old life, but my country has come fearfully close to war. The recall was not convenient for me or for my family, but it was a wise plan of action. The recall showed that Air Guard pilots were not merely sportsmen at government expense; a feeling that I sometimes harbored, guiltily, after pleasant weekends spent flying military airplanes, at $80 per weekend.

My squadron crossed the Atlantic in three hops. It made the crossing without air refueling, without proper air navigation stations covering the route, without an incident. We landed at Chaumont Air Base one month after we were called to active duty, flying whenever ceilings were higher than 500 feet.

The multiengine pilots in their tremendous airplanes brought hundreds of tons of support equipment and parts and supplies. We listened to briefings from NATO pilots about the strange new world of European air traffic control. Ammunition specialists emptied boxcars of 50-caliber machinegun bullets and racks of olive-drab, yellow-striped high-explosive bombs and long aluminum tanks of napalm and rack on rack of slim unpainted rockets. We were assigned areas of battle and we met with the army that we were to support. We held practice alerts that began as chaos, progressed through orderly confusion, and became, finally, quick and efficient.

Though the complaints are made and duly printed, though the crisis that called us has subsided, we accomplished the task set for us. We arrived in France with all our pilots and all our airplanes. Today the Alert pilots play bridge and chess and pingpong near the red telephone.

Not all without cost, of course. To date, our readiness has cost Don Slack, pilot, and the flags are still at halfmast.

For us who fly the ’84F, the mobilization is one long weekend of Air Guard duty. In town the people speak a different language, and there are sentries and rolls of barbed wire surrounding the flight line, but we fly with the same friends (except one) and the same airplanes (except one) that we have always flown with, and the life is not cause for complaint (except one). We fly, and the sky of France is much the same as the sky of home. Wind and rain and sun and stars. It is its own kind of home, the sky, and for the brief hours of my flight I do not miss the other home across the sea. I do miss Don Slack.

The stars glow steadily in the darkness of their meadow, part of my world. I think, for a moment, of all that has been said of the enchantment of this cathedral of air. A million words, written and spoken and turned to photograph, in which people who fly risk the curse of sentiment, that deadly curse, to tell of what they have seen. The enchantment does not lend itself to paper and ink or to syllables, or even to sensitized film, but the people’s risk of the curse is itself witness to the sight and the mood that awaits the man who travels the high land. Cloud and star and bow of color are just so many words to be laid carefully in a shallow grave of corrasable bond. The sky, in the end, can only be called an interesting place. My beloved sky.

The wide needle of the TACAN wobbles, the distance-measuring drum turns through 006, and it is time to put my set of plans into action.

I begin the left turn into the holding pattern, and my right glove half-turns the cockpit light rheostats, soaking itself in soft red. The IFF dial goes to Mode Three, Code 70. I should now be an identified and expected dot on the radar screen of Chaumont Radar. Thumb down very hard on microphone button, throttle back, speed breaks out and the rumble of shattering air as they extend from the side of the plane. “Chaumont Approach Control, Jet Four Zero Five, high station on the TACAN, requesting latest Chaumont weather.” There is a sidetone. A good sign. But there is no reply.

Fly along the pattern, recheck defrosters and pitot heat on, a quick review of the penetration: heading 047 degrees outbound from the holding pattern, left descending turn to heading 197 degrees, level at 3,500 feet and in to the 12-mile gate.

I level now at 20,000 feet, power at 85 percent rpm and ready in my mind for the letdown.

“. . . measured nine hundred feet overcast, visibility five miles in light rain, altimeter two niner eight five.”

I have never had a more capricious radio. Hard down on the plastic button. “Chaumont Approach, Zero Five leaving flight level Two Zero Zero present time, requesting GCA frequency.” Stick forward, nose down, and I am through 19,000 feet, through 18,000 feet, through 17,000 feet, with airspeed smooth at 350 knots.

“. . . ive, your radar frequency will be three four four point six, local channel one five.”

“Roj, Approach, leaving your frequency.” In the left bank of the turn, I click the channel selector to one five. And back to the instruments. Look out for vertigo. “He went into the weather in a bank, and he came out of it upside down.” But not me and not tonight; I have come through worse than vertigo, and I have been warned. “Chaumont Radar, Jet Four Zero Five, how do you read on three four four point six.” A pause, and time to doubt the errant radio.

“Read you five square, Zero Five, how do you read Radar?” So the radio becomes better as I descend. Interesting.

“Five by.”

“Roger, Zero Five, we have you in positive radar contact one eight miles north of Chaumont. Continue your left turn to heading one three five degrees, level at two thousand five hundred feet. This will be a precision approach to runway one niner; length eight thousand fifty feet, width one hundred fifty feet, touchdown elevation one thousand seventy five feet. If you lose communication with Radar for any one minute in the pattern or any thirty seconds on final approach . . .”

I am gratefully absorbed in familiar detail. Continue the turn, let the nose down a little more to speed the descent, recheck engine screens retracted and pneumatic compressor off and oxygen 100 percent and engine instruments in the green and hook again the lanyard to the D-ring of the parachute ripcord. My little world rushes obediently down as I direct it. Concentrating on my instruments, I do not notice when I again enter the cloud.

The voice continues, directing me through the black with the assurance of a voice that has done this many times. The man behind the voice is an enlisted man, to whom I speak only on official business. But now I give myself and my airplane wholly to his voice and rank is a pompous thing. Microphone button down.

“Zero Five is level . . .” No sidetone. I am not transmitting. Microphone button down hard and rocking in its little mount under the left thumb. “Zero Five is level, two thousand five hundred feet, steady one three five degrees.” Flaps down. Airspeed slows through 220 knots. Left glove on the clear plastic wheel-shaped handle of the landing gear lever. A mechanical movement: pull the handle out a quarter-inch and push it down six inches. At the instant that the lever slams down into its slot, the tall hard wheels of my airplane break from their hidden wells and press down, shuddering, into the rush of cloud. Three bright green lights flare at the left of the instrument panel. Speed brake switch forward.