Stranger to the Ground

I press my microphone button, at last. “Four.” And it is quiet. There is no one left after the slot man of the sixth flight.

The long line of airplanes rolls briskly along the taxiway to runway three zero, and the first airplane taxies well down the runway to leave room for his multitude of wingmen. The great formation moves quickly to fill the space behind him, for there is no time allowed for unnecessary taxi time. Twenty-four airplanes on the runway at once, a rare sight. I press my microphone button as I roll to a stop in position by Baker Blue Three’s wing, and have a private little talk with the squadron commander. “Baker Blue Four is in.”

When he hears from me, the man in the polished airplane, with the little cloth oak leaves on the shoulders of his flight suit, pushes his throttle forward and calls, “Falcon formation, run it up.”

It is not really necessary for all 24 airplanes to turn their engines up to 100 percent rpm at the same moment, but it does make an impressive noise, and that is what the people in the stands would like to hear this day. Two dozen throttles go full forward against their stops.

Even with canopy locked and a helmet and earphones about my head, the roar is loud. The sky darkens a little and through the massive thunder that shakes the wooden bleachers, the people watch a great cloud of exhaust smoke rise from the end of the runway, above the shining pickets that are the tall swept stabilizers of Falcon formation. I jolt and rock on my wheels in the blast from the other airplanes, and notice that, as I expected, my engine is not turning up its normal 100 percent. For just a second it did, but as the heat and pressured roar of the other airplanes swept back to cover my air intake, the engine speed fell off to a little less than 98 percent rpm. That is a good indicator that the air outside my small conditioned cockpit is warm.

“Able Red Leader is rolling.” The two forwardmost pickets separate and pull slowly away from the forest of pickets, and Falcon formation comes to life. Five seconds by the sweep secondhand and Able Red Three is rolling to follow, Four at his wing.

I sit high in my cockpit and watch, far ahead, the first of the formation lift from the runway.

The first airplanes break from the ground as if weary of it and glad to be back home in the air. Their exhaust trails are dark as I look down the length of them, and I wonder with a smile if I will have to go on instruments through the smoke of the other airplanes by the time I begin to roll with Baker Blue Three.

Two by two by two they roll. Eight; ten; twelve . . . I wait, watching my rpm down to 97 percent now at full throttle, hoping that I can stay with Three on the roll and break ground with him as I should. We have the same problem, so there should be no difficulty other than a very long takeoff roll.

I look over toward Three, ready to nod OK at him. He is watching the other airplanes take off, and does not look back. He is watching them go . . . sixteen; eighteen; twenty . . .

The runway is nearly empty in front of us, under a low cloud of grey smoke. The overrun barrier at the other end of the concrete is not even visible in the swirl of heat. But except for a little bit of sudden wing-rocking, the earlier flights get away from the ground without difficulty, though they clear the barrier by a narrower and narrower margin.

. . . twenty-two. Three looks back to me at last and I nod my OK. Baker Blue Lead and Two are five seconds down the concrete when Three touches his helmet back to the red ejection seat headrest, nods sharply forward, and we become the last of Falcon formation to release brakes. Left rudder, right rudder. I can feel the turbulence over the runway on my stabilizer, through the rudder pedals. It is taking a long time to gain airspeed and I am glad that we have the full length of the runway for our takeoff roll. Three rocks up and down slightly as his airplane moves heavily over the ripples in the concrete. I follow as if I were a shining aluminum shadow in three dimensions, bouncing when he bounces, sweeping ahead with him, slowly gaining airspeed. Blue Lead and Two must be lifting off by now, though I do not move my eyes from Three to check. They have either lifted off by now or they are in the barrier. It is at this moment one of the longest takeoff rolls I have seen in the F-84F, passing the 7,500-foot mark. The weight of Three’s airplane just now finishes the change from wheels to swept wings, and we ease together into the air. A highly improbable bit of physics, this trusting 12 tons to thin air; but it has worked before and it should today.

Three is looking ahead and for once I am glad that I must watch his airplane so closely. The barrier is reaching to snag our wheels, and it is only a hundred feet away. Three climbs suddenly away from the ground and I follow, pulling harder on the control stick than I should have to, forcing my airplane to climb before it is ready to fly.

The helmet in the cockpit a few feet away nods once, sharply, and without looking, I reach forward and move the landing gear lever to up. There is the flash of the barrier going beneath us, in the same second that I touched the gear handle. We had ten feet to spare. It is good, I think, that I was not number twenty-six in this formation.

The landing gear tucks itself quickly up and out of the way, and the background behind Three changes from one of smooth concrete to rough blurred brush-covered ground; we are very definitely committed to fly. The turbulence, surprisingly enough, was only a passing shock, for our takeoff is longer and lower than any other, and we fly beneath the heaviest whirlpools in the air.

A low and gentle turn to the right to join on Blue Leader and Two as quickly as possible. But the turn is not my worry, for I am just a sandbagger, loafing along on Three’s wing while he does all the juggling and angling and cutting off to make a smooth joinup. The worry of the long takeoff roll is left behind with the barrier, and now, takeoff accomplished, I feel as if I sat relaxed in the softest armchair in the pilots’ lounge.

The familiar routine of a formation flight settles down upon me; I can hold it a little loose here over the trees and away from the crowd. There will be plenty of work ahead to fly the slot during the passes over the base.

There in the corner of my eye drifts Blue Leader and Two, closing nicely above and back to Three’s left wing. Around them are the silver flashes and silhouettes that make the mass of swept metal called Falcon formation, juggling itself into the positions drawn out on green blackboards still chalked and standing in the briefing room. The wrinkles in the monster formation have been worked out in a practice flight, and the practice is paying off now as the finger-fours form into diamonds and the diamonds form into vees and the vees become the invincible juggernaut of Falcon formation.

I slide across into the slot between Two and Three, directly behind Baker Blue Leader, and move my airplane forward until Lead’s tailpipe is a gaping black hole ten feet ahead of my windscreen and I can feel the buffet of his jetwash in my rudder pedals. Now I forget about Three and fly a close trail formation on Lead, touching the control stick back every once in a while to keep the buffet on the rudder pedals.

“Falcon formation, go channel nine.”

Blue Lead yaws his airplane slightly back and forth, and with the other five diamonds in the sky, the four-ship diamond that is Baker Blue flight spreads itself for a moment while its pilots click their radio channel selectors to 9 and make the required cockpit check after takeoff.

I push the switches aft of the throttle quadrant, and the drop tanks under my wings begin feeding their fuel to the main fuselage tank and to the engine. Oxygen pressure is 70 psi, the blinker blinks as I breathe, engine instruments are in the green. I leave the engine screens extended, the parachute lanyard hooked to the ripcord handle. My airplane is ready for its airshow.

In this formation there are probably some airplanes that are not operating just as they should, but unless the difficulties are serious ones, the pilots keep their troubles to themselves and call the cockpit check OK. Today it would be too embarrassing to return to the field and shoot a forced landing pattern on the high stage before an audience so large.

“Baker Blue Lead is good.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

I press the button. “Four.”

Normally the check would have been a longer one, with each pilot calling his oxygen condition and quantity and whether or not his drop tanks were feeding properly, but with so many airplanes aloft the check alone would take minutes. It was agreed in the briefing room to make the check as usual, but to reply only with flight call sign.

Six lead airplanes rock their wings after my call and the six diamonds close again to show formation. I do not often have the chance to fly as slot man in diamond, and I tuck my airplane in close under Lead’s tailpipe to make it look from the ground as if I had flown t

here all my life. The way to tell if a slot man has been flying his position well is to look at his vertical stabilizer as he lands. The blacker his stabilizer and rudder with Lead’s exhaust, the better the formation he has been flying.