A Gift of Wings

solitary F-84 whipped over the far end of the runway, above Eagle Lead, safely on the ground.

“Your right main gear is up and locked,” the voice came flatly from mobile control.

“Roj. I’ll cycle the gear.” Willis was pleased with his voice. He climbed slowly to one thousand feet, raised the landing gear, and lowered it again. The right main “safe” light remained stubbornly out, and the warning light in the plastic handle persisted redly. Another fifteen minutes of fuel. Four times Willis recycled the landing gear, and four times the right main gear indicated unsafe. He pulled the handle out a half inch and pressed it to EMERG DOWN. There was a faint click from the right, but the condition was the same. He was concerned. There was no time for the fire trucks to lay a strip of foam down the runway, if he was forced to land with the right gear still locked up. To land with it up on a hard dry runway, crosswind, would be inviting an end-over-end cartwheeling crash as soon as the unwheeled wing touched the concrete. The only alternative was bailout. Here’s a decision for you, he thought. And irrationally: one more flyby, maybe the gear is down now.

“It’s still up,” the mobile control officer said, before Willis had even flown by the miniature tower. The grass was waving greenly, briskly, and he noticed suddenly at the edge of the runway a small gray dot. With a shock of surprise, he realized that it was a cat. Heinz’s lucky cat, he thought, and for no reason he smiled under his oxygen mask. He felt better. And a thought came from nowhere.

“Tower, Eagle Two is declaring an emergency. I’m going to make one more pass around; try to bounce on the left gear to knock the right one down.”

“Understand you are declaring an emergency,” the tower replied. The tower was primarily concerned with meeting its responsibility, which was to ring the bell that sent crash crews scrambling for the red trucks. Responsibility met, the tower became only an interested observer, and very little help.

Jack Willis, oddly, felt like a new person, enormously confident. The bounce on a left wheel in a strong right crosswind was a trick of coordination reserved for thousand-hour pilots, and Willis had just over four hundred hours in the air, sixty-eight in the F-84.

Those who watched the next approach called it the work of an old-time professional pilot. With left wing down, with hard right rudder, with controls only moderately responsive at landing airspeed, Second Lieutenant Jack Willis bounced his twenty-thousand-pound airplane six times on its left main landing gear. On the sixth bounce, the right gear swung suddenly down and locked into place. The third green light came on.

The crosswind landing that followed was simple by comparison, and his airplane touched smoothly down on its right wheel, then its left, and last of all, the nosewheel. Full left rudder in the landing roll and a touch of left brake as the airplane slowed and tried to weathervane into the wind, and the emergency was over. The crash crews in their bulky white suits of asbestos were unnecessary and out of their element in the normalcy that followed. “Nice job, Eagle Two,” mobile said simply. And the gray Persian cat, that had watched the landing with uncatlike, one might almost say, professional interest, was gone. The 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron was gradually pulling itself into fighting shape.

The winter came. Low clouds moved in from the sea to become a permanent companion of the hilltops that surrounded the airbase. It rained much, and as the winter wore on, the rain became freezing rain and then snow. The runway was icy and drag chutes and very careful braking were necessary to keep the heavy airplanes on the concrete. The tall emerald grass turned pallid and lifeless. But a fighter squadron does not cancel its mission each winter, there is always flying and training to be done. There were incidents as the new pilots were faced with unusual aircraft problems and low ceilings, but they had been trained well on instruments and somehow the gray Persian cat sat carefully at the edge of the runway as each of the afflicted airplanes landed. The Persian became known to the pilots simply as “Cat.”

One freezing afternoon, just as Wally Jacobs touched down uneventfully after a hydraulic system failure and a no-flap, no-speedbrake approach through a five-hundred-foot ceiling, Captain Hendrick, on duty as mobile control officer, ventured to capture the cat. It sat quietly, looking down the runway, absorbed in watching Jacobs’s airplane after it whistled past. Hendrick approached from behind and gently lifted the cat from the ground. At his first touch it became a ball of gray lightning. There was an instant slash of claw along Hendrick’s cheek, and the Persian streaked to the ground and away, disappearing at once in the tall dry grass.

Five seconds later the brakes on Wally Jacobs’s airplane failed completely, and he swerved off the runway at seventy knots into the not-quite-frozen dirt. The nosewheel strut sheared immediately. The airplane disappeared in a great sheet of flying mud, slewed to collapse the right main landing gear and split the droptank, and slid around, backward, for another two hundred feet. Jacobs left the cockpit at once, forgetting even to close the throttle. In a second, as Hendrick watched, the airplane burst into brilliant flame. It burned fiercely, and with the airplane was destroyed a record for flying safety unmatched by any other fighter squadron in Europe.

The findings of the investigation were that Lieutenant Jacobs was at fault for allowing the airplane to leave the runway and for neglecting to close the throttle, allowing the still-turning engine to ignite the fire. If he had not forgotten, like a grossly inexperienced pilot, to stopcock the throttle, the airplane would have been able to fly again.

The board’s decision was not a popular one with the 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron, but the cause of the destruction of the airplane was laid to pilot error. Hendrick mentioned the cat, and an order, unwritten but official, was sent through the squadron: the Persian was never to be approached again. From that moment, Cat was rarely mentioned.

But once in a while, as a young lieutenant brought an ailing airplane down through the weather, he would ask of mobile control, “Cat there?” And the mobile control officer would scan the runway edge for the sculptured gray Persian, and he would pick up his microphone and say, “He’s there.” And the airplane would land.

Winter wore on. The young pilots became older, absorbed experience. And as the weeks went by, Cat was seen less and less frequently at the edge of the runway. Norm Thompson brought in an airplane with the windscreen and canopy completely iced over. Cat was not waiting by the runway, but Thompson’s GCA was a professional one, born of training and experience. He made a blind touchdown, jettisoned the canopy to be able to see, and rolled to an uneventful stop. Jack Willis, now with one hundred thirty hours flying experience in the F-84, came back with an airplane heavily damaged by ricochets picked up after a firing run at a new strafing range laid over a base of solid rock. He landed smoothly, although Cat was nowhere to be seen.

The last time Cat appeared by the runway was in March. It was Jacobs again. He called that his oil pressure was falling, and that he was trying to make it back to the field. The ceiling was high, three thousand feet, when he broke into the clear after a radar vector and called the runway in sight.

Major Robert Rider had raced his staff car to mobile control as the notice of emergency in progress reached him. This is it, he thought. I’m going to see Jacobs die. He closed the glass door behind him as the pilot asked, “Cat happen to be down there?”

Rider reached for the binoculars and scanned the edge of the runway. The Persian sat quietly waiting. “Cat’s here,” the squadron commander told the mobile control officer seriously, and seriously the information was relayed to Jacobs.

“Oil pressure zero,” the pilot said matter-of-factly. Then, “Engine’s frozen, the stick is locking. I’ll try to make it on the emergency hydraulic pump.” A moment later he said, suddenly, “No I won’t. I’m getting out.” He turned his airplane toward the heavy forest to the west and ejected. Two minutes later he was sprawling in the frozen mud of a plowed French field, his parachute settling like a tired white butterfly about him. It was over that quickly.

The investigation board was to find later that the airplane struck the ground with both hydraulic systems completely locked. The emergency hydraulic pump failed before impact, they discovered, and the airplane hit with controls frozen and immovable. Jacobs was later to be commended for his judgment in not attempting to land the stricken airplane.

But that was to be later. As Jacobs’s parachute drifted down behind a low hill, Rider leveled the binoculars at the gray Persian, who stood suddenly and stretched luxuriously, claws digging into the frozen earth. Cat, he noticed, was not a perfect sculpture. Along his left side, from ribs to shoulder, ran a wide white scar that the battle-gray fur could not cover as he stretched. The graceful head turned as Rider watched, and the amber eyes gazed squarely at the commander of the 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron.

The cat blinked once, slowly, one might almost say amusedly, and walked to disappear for the last time in the tall grass.

Tower 0400

I closed the door behind me just as the twenty-four-hour clock by the light gun ticked through 0300. It was dark, of course, in the tower, but it was a much different sort of darkness than the black I had just stepped in from. That dark was a thing that anyone could use for any purpose; for cards or for crime, or for the war hinted and threatened in the headlines downstairs.

The darkness in this aerie of glass and steel was a specialized dark. Everything it touched had the same air of professional purpose about it; the clock, the lightly hissing radio receivers in their bank along one low wall, the silent never-ending sweep of the pale green line of the radar scope. It was a professional darkness to shroud the

world of people who fly airplanes. There was no malice in this dark, it was not there to drag the airplanes down or to make it difficult for them to fly. It was just a matter-of-fact, businesslike, I-am-here-now darkness. The beacon rotating with its busy hum a few feet overhead was not turning to fight this dark, but to pinpoint a landing field on a map of black.

The two tower operators who worked the graveyard shift were expecting me, and extended hands from behind the orange glow of their cigarettes. “What brings you up here at this hour?” one asked quietly. All the talk on this shift was quiet, as if to keep from waking the city that slept at our backs.

“Always wondered what it was like,” I said.

The other man laughed, again quietly. “Now you know,” he said. “This one minute is a pretty good example of what it’s like all through the shift.”