A Gift of Wings

Carl Langley’s ice-blue eyes sparkled with the challenge. He was at his best doing the job that anyone else would have called impossible. “They’ve got the knowledge. They probably know instrument flying better than you and I, they’re so fresh out of school. All they need is experience. We’ve got a Link. We can run that thing ten hours a day and fill our pilots with every instrument approach for every base in France. They volunteered to join the 167th, and they want to work for the squadron. It’s up to you and me to work ’em.”

The squadron commander smiled suddenly. “When you talk like that, I can almost accuse you of being eager yourself.” He paused, and then spoke slowly. “I remember the old 167th, in England in 1944. We had the new Thunderbolt then, and we painted our little Persian battle-cat on its side. We weren’t afraid of anything the Luftwaffe could get into the air. Eager in peace is brave in war, I guess.” He nodded to his operations officer. “Can’t say that I think we won’t have our share of in-flight emergencies with this old airplane or that we won’t need a lot of good luck before the boys start giving a meaning back to this squadron,” he said. “But draw up your Link and flying schedules starting tomorrow and we’ll begin to see just how good our youngsters really are.”

In a moment Major Robert Rider stood alone in his darkening office, and he thought of the old 167th. Sadly. Of Lieutenant John Buckner, trapped in a burning Thunderbolt, who still attacked a pair of unwary Focke-Wulfs and took one of them with him into the hard ground of France. Of Lieutenant Jack Bennett, with six kills and glory assured, who deliberately rammed an ME-109 that was closing to destroy a crippled B-17 over Strasbourg. Of Lieutenant Alan Spencer, who brought back a Thunderbolt so badly damaged by cannonfire that he had to be freed from the wreckage of his crash landing by a crew with cutting torches. Rider had seen him after the crash. “It was the same ’190 that got Jim Park,” he had said from the whiteness of the hospital bed. “Black snakes down the side of the fuselage. And I said, ‘Today, Al, it’s going to be you or him, but one of us isn’t going to make it home.’ I was the lucky one.” Alan Spencer volunteered to go back into combat when he was released from the hospital, and he did not return from his next mission over France. No one heard him call, no one saw his airplane hit. He simply didn’t come back. Despite their battle-cat insignia, the 167th pilots did not have nine lives. Or even two.

Eager in peace is brave in war, Rider thought, looking absently at the scar along the back of his left hand, his throttle hand. It was wide and white, the kind of scar left only after an encounter with a Messerschmitt’s thirty-caliber machine-gun bullet. But eagerness is not enough. If we’re going to make it through the winter without losing a pilot, we’ll need more than eagerness. We’ve got to have skill and we’ve got to have experience. So thinking, he walked outside into the overcast night.

The days whipped quickly by for Second Lieutenant Jonathan Heinz. All this talk of weather and look out for Europe in the winter was nonsense, sheer nonsense. November was bright and spilling with sun. December was ready to spring onto the calendar and the base had had only four days of low ceilings, which the pilots spent working on the ops officer’s latest instrument quiz. Major Langley’s instrument quizzes had become a standard of the squadron; a new one every third day, twenty questions, one wrong answer allowed. Fail a test and you stay another three hours at the flight line with the instrument manuals, until you pass the alternate test, one wrong answer allowed.

Heinz pressed the starter switch of his aging Thunder-streak, winced in the concussion of a good start, and taxied to the runway behind Bob Henderson’s airplane. But that’s the way to get to know instruments, he thought. At first everyone was staying the three hours and cursing the day that they volunteered for the 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron. Tactical Instrument Squadron, they called it. Then you got the knack of it, and it seemed somehow that you knew more and more of the answers. It was pretty rare now to have to stay the three hours.

There was a little thud in the engine’s roar when Heinz retracted his engine screens before takeoff, but all the engine instruments showed normal, and strange noises and little thuds are not unusual in the F-84. Oddly enough,

though, at a time when he usually noticed little but the instruments and the leader’s airplane rocking firmly against full throttle and locked brakes, Jonathan Heinz noticed a gray Persian cat sitting calmly at the edge of the runway a few hundred feet ahead of his airplane. Cat must be completely deaf, he thought. His engine, linked to the thick black throttle under his left glove, crackled and roared and spun blue fire through stainless-steel turbine blades to unchain seventy-eight hundred pounds of thrust within his airplane.

He was ready to roll, and he nodded to Henderson. Then, for no reason, he pressed the microphone button under his left thumb on the throttle. “There’s a cat out on the edge of the runway,” he said into the microphone set into his green-rubber oxygen mask. There was a short silence.

“Roj on the cat,” Henderson said seriously, and Heinz felt foolish. He saw the mobile control officer in his miniature control tower at the right side of the runway reach for his binoculars. Why did I say a dumb stupid thing like that, he thought. I will not say one more word this flight. Radio discipline, Heinz, radio discipline! He released his brakes at the nod of Henderson’s white helmet, and the two airplanes gathered a great reserve of speed and lifted into the air.

Eight minutes later Heinz was talking again. “Sahara Leader, I got an aft overheat light and the rpm’s surging about five percent. Power’s back, light’s still on. Check me for smoke, will you?” What a calm voice you have, he thought. You talk too much, but at least you’re calm. Sixty hours in the ’84 and you should be calm. Take it easy now and try not to sound like a little kid on the radio. I’ll turn around and drop the external tanks, fly a simulated flameout pattern, and land. I couldn’t be on fire.

“No sign of smoke, Sahara Two. How’s it doing now?”

Calm voice, Heinz. “Still surging, Leader. Fuel flow and tailpipe temp are going back and forth with it. I’m going to drop the tanks and land.”

“OK, Two, I’ll keep an eye for smoke and handle the radio calls if you’d like. But be ready to jump out of the bird if she starts to burn.”

“Roj.” I’m ready to jump out, Heinz thought. Just raise the ejection seat armrest and squeeze the trigger. But I think I can get the airplane back down all right. He listened to Henderson declare an emergency, and as he descended slowly into the flameout pattern he saw the square red fire trucks burst from their garages and race to their alert slots at the taxiways. He could feel the engine surge in the throttle. It will be sort of touch-and-go here. I’ll drop the tanks on final approach before I get down to five hundred feet, I’ll pull the nose up and eject. Below five hundred feet, I’ll have to take it on in, no matter what. He brought the throttle back to give an engine speed of fifty-eight percent rpm, and the heavy airplane dropped more quickly through the pattern. Flaps down. I have the field made, for sure … Gear down. The wheels locked in place. He passed through four hundred feet. Thud. Thudthud. A big surge.

“There’s a lot of smoke from your tailpipe, Sahara.”

Wouldn’t you know it! This thing’s going to explode on me, and I’m too low to bail out. What do I do now? He pressed the drop tank jettison button and the airplane bounced a little as four thousand pounds of fuel fell away. A harsh grinding from the engine, behind him. He noticed, suddenly, that the oil pressure was at zero.

A frozen engine, Heinz! You got no flight control with a frozen engine. What now, what now? The control stick went solid and immovable in his gloves.

The officer in mobile control did not know about the frozen engine. He did not know that Sahara Two would make a gentle roll to the right and strike the ground inverted, or that Jonathan Heinz was helpless and committed to die. “You have a cat by the runway,” the mobile officer said, with the mild relaxed humor of one who knows that danger has passed.

And it came to Heinz suddenly. In a burst of light. Emergency hydraulic pump, the electric pump! His airplane was beginning to roll, a hundred feet in the air. His glove smashed the pump switch to EMERG, and the stick came alive again, quickly. Wings level, nose up, nose up, and a beautiful touchdown in front of mobile. At least it felt beautiful. Throttle off, drag chute out, fuel off, battery off, canopy open and be ready to jump out of the thing. The giant square fire trucks, scarlet lights blazing atop their cabs, roared along next to him as he slowed through thirty knots on the landing roll. His airplane was completely quiet, and Heinz could hear the truck engines, sounding like great inboard cruiser engines, laboring in high gear. In a moment he had rolled to a stop, unstrapped from the cockpit, and jumped down to stand behind a fire truck that hosed thick white foam on a broad patch of discolored aluminum aft of the wing root.

The airplane looked forlorn, unwilling to be the center of such concentrated attention. But it was down, and it was in one piece. Jonathan Heinz was very much alive, and not a little bit famous. “Nice going, ace,” the pilots would say, and they’d ask him about how it felt and what he thought and what he did and when, and there would be the routine accident investigation and there could be no other conclusion than well done, Lieutenant Heinz. No one would guess that he came within a few seconds of dying because he had completely forgotten, like a brand-new pilot, about the emergency hydraulic pump. Completely forgotten … and what had reminded him? What had snapped his thought to the red-covered switch at the last instant that it could save him? Nothing. It had just come to him.

Heinz thought some more. It had not just come. Mobile control told me about the cat by the runway, and I remembered the pump. There’s an odd one for you. I’d like to meet that cat.

He looked down the long white runway. He could see no cat. Even the mobile control officer, with his binoculars, could not then have seen any cat. The squadron was later to ride him unmercifully about his unlucky cat, but at that moment, by the runway or across the whole of the base, there was no such thing as a gray Persian cat.

It happened again, less than a week later, to another second lieutenant. Jack Willis had almost finished his first simulated combat mission after completing his checkout in the F-84. It had been a good mission, but now, in the landing pattern, he was worried. Twenty-knot crosswind, where did that come from? It was ten knots down the runway when we took off, and now it’s twenty knots across. He rolled his airplane level on the downwind leg of the pattern. “Say again the wind, please, tower,” he called.

“Roj,” the tower’s last explanation was entirely unnecessary. The wind was as cross as it could possibly be.

“OK, Two, let’s watch the crosswind,” said Major Langley, and called, “Eagle Lead is turning base, gear down, pressure up, brakes checked.”

“Cleared to land,” the tower operator replied.

Willis reached forward with his left glove and slammed the landing gear lever to DOWN. OK, OK, he thought, this will be no problem. I’ll just keep the right wing way down through the round-about, touch on the right wheel, and follow through with plenty of rudder. Plenty of rudder.

He turned toward the runway, and pressed the microphone button. Haven’t run off a runway yet, and I don’t intend to do it today. “Eagle Two is turning base …” The right main gear indicator, the green light that should have been shining, was out. Left main was locked down, nosegear was locked down. But the right main gear was still retracted. The red warning light in the transparent plastic landing gear handle was shining, and the squeal of the gear unsafe warning horn filled the cockpit. He heard the horn in his own earphones as he held the microphone button down. On their radios, the tower operators would hear the horn. He lifted his thumb, then pressed it down again. “Eagle Two is going to make a low approach; requests a gear check by mobile control.”

An odd feeling, to have something wrong with the airplane. The landing gear usually works so well. He leveled at one hundred feet over the runway and flew past the miniature glass tower. The mobile control officer stood outside, in the blowing waves of autumn grass. Willis watched him for a second as he passed. The mobile control officer was not using binoculars. Then he was gone, and the