Stranger to the Ground

The Florida sky is a gay blue one, puffing with the high cumulus that prevails in southern summers. The metal of my primary trainer is hot in the sun, but before my first flight in the United States Air Force, I am not concerned with heat.

The man who settles himself in the rear cockpit of the airplane is not a big man, but he has the quiet confidence of one who has all power and knows all things.

“Start the engine and let’s get out of here,” are the first words that I hear in an airplane from a flight instructor.

I am not so confident as he, but I move the levers and switches that I have studied in the handbook and call, “Clear!” as I know I should. Then I touch the starter switch to start, and feel for the first time that strange instant awareness of my ability to do everything that I should. And I begin to learn.

I discover, as the months pass, that the only time that I am afraid in an airplane is when I do not know what must be done next.

The engine stops on takeoff. Whistling beneath my airplane is a swamp of broken trees and hanging spanish moss and alligators and water moccasins and no dry ground for wheel to roll upon. At one time I would have been afraid, for at one time I did not know what to do about the engine failure and the swamp and the alligators. I would have had time to think, So this is how I will die, before I hit the trees and my airplane twisted and somersaulted and sank in the dark green water.

But by the time that I am able to fly the airplane by myself, I know. Instead of dying, I lower the nose, change fuel tanks, check the fuel boost pumps on and the mixture rich, retract the landing gear and wing flaps, pump the throttle, aim the airplane so that the fuselage and cockpit will go between the tree stumps, pull the yellow handle that jettisons the canopy, lock the shoulder harness, turn the magneto and battery switches off, and concentrate on making a smooth landing on the dark water. I trust the shoulder harness and I trust my skill and I forget about the alligators. In two hours I am flying another airplane over the same swamp.

I learn that it is what I do not know that I fear, and I strive, outwardly from pride, inwardly from the knowledge that the unknown is what will finally kill me, to know all there is to be known about my airplane. I will never die.

My best friend is the pilot’s handbook, a different book for each type of airplane that I fly. Technical Order 1F-84F-1 describes my airplane; every switch and knob of it. It gives the normal operating procedures, and on red-bordered pages, the emergency procedures for practically any critical situation that can arise while I sit in the cockpit. The pilot’s handbook tells me what the airplane feels like to fly, what it will do and what it will not do, what to expect from it as it goes through the speed of sound, procedures to follow if I suddenly find myself in an airplane that has been pushed too far and has begun to spin. It has detailed charts of my airplane’s performance to tell just how many miles it will fly, how quickly it will fly them, and how much fuel it will need.

I study the flight handbook as a divinity student studies the Bible. And as he goes back time and again to Psalms, so I go back time and again to the red-bordered pages of Section III. Engine fire on takeoff; after takeoff; at altitude. Loss of oil pressure. Severe engine vibration. Smoke in the cockpit. Loss of hydraulic pressure. Electrical failure. This procedure is the best to be done, this one is not recommended.

In cadet days, I studied the emergency procedures in class and in spare time and shouted them as I ran to and from my barracks. When I know the words of the red-bordered pages well enough to shout them word for word as I run down a long sidewalk lined with critical upperclass cadets, it can be said I know them well.

The shined black shoe touches the sidewalk. Run. “GLIDE NINETY KNOTS CHANGE FUEL TANKS BOOST PUMPS ON CHECK FUEL PRESSURE MIXTURE RICH PROP FULL INCREASE GEAR UP FLAPS UP CANOPY OPEN . . .” I know the forced landing procedures for that first trainer as well today as I knew them then. And I was not afraid of that first airplane.

But not every emergency can be put in a book, not even in a pilot’s handbook. The marginal situations, such as planning a flight to an airport that I know is buried in solid weather to its minimums, such as losing sight of my leader in a formation letdown through the weather, such as continuing a flight into an area of thunderstorms, is left to a thing called pilot judgment. It is up to me in those cases. Bring all of my experience and knowledge of my airplane into play, evaluate the variables: fuel, weather, other aircraft flying with me, condition of the runway, importance of the mission—against the severity of the storms. Then, like a smooth-humming computer, I come up with one plan of action and follow it. Cancel the flight until I get more rest. Make a full circle in the weather and make my own letdown after my leader has made his. Continue toward the storms. Turn back.

When I make the judgment I follow it without fear, for it is what I have decided is the best course of action. Any other course would be a risky one. Only in the insecure hours before I touch the starter switch can I see causes for fear; when I do not take the effort to be alert.

On the ground, if I concentrated, I could be afraid, in a detached, theoretical sort of way. But so far I have not met the pilot who concentrated on it.

I like to fly airplanes, so I learn about them and I fly them. I think of my job in the same light that a bridge builder on the high steel thinks of his: it has its dangers, but it is still a good way to make a living. The danger is an interesting factor, for I do not know if my next flight will be an uneventful one or not. Every once in a long while I am called to step on the stage, under the spotlight, and cope wit

h an unusual situation, or, at longer intervals, an emergency.

Unusual situations come in all sizes, from false alarms to full-fledged emergencies that involve my continued existence as a living member of a fighter squadron.

I lower my landing gear on the turn to final approach. The little green lights that indicate wheels locked in the down position are dark longer than they should be. The right main gear locks down, showing its light. The left main locks down. But the nosewheel light is dark. I wait a moment and sigh. The nosewheel is a bother, but not in the least is it an emergency. As soon as I see that it is not going to lock down, the cautious part of me thinks of the very worst that this could mean. It could mean at worst that the nosegear is still locked up in its wheel well; that I will not be able to lower it; that I will have to land on only two wheels.

There is no danger (oh, once long ago an ’84 cart-wheeled during a nosegear-up landing and the pilot was killed), even if that very worst thing happens. If the normal gear lowering system does not work after I try it a few times again; if the emergency gear lowering system, which blows the nosegear down with a high-pressure charge of compressed air, fails; if I cannot shake the wheel loose by bouncing the main gear against the runway . . . if all these fail, I still have no cause for concern (unless the airplane cartwheels). Fuel permitting, I will circle the field for a few minutes and the fire trucks will lay a long strip of white foam down the runway, a place for my airplane’s unwheeled nose to slide. And I will land.

Final approach is the same final approach that it has always been. The fence pulls by beneath the wheels as it always does, except that now it pulls beneath two landing gear instead of three, and with a gear warning horn loud in the cockpit and the red warning light brilliant in the clear plastic handle and the third green light dark and the word from the control tower is that the nosewheel still looks as if it is up and locked.

The biggest difference in the final approach is in the eye of the observer, and observers are many. When the square red fire trucks grind to the runway with their red beacons flashing, the line crews and returning pilots climb to stand on the swept silver wings of parked airplanes and watch to see what will happen. (Look at that, Johnny, turning final with no nosewheel. Heard about an eighty-four that cart-wheeled on the runway trying this same trick. Good luck, whoever you are, don’t forget to hold the nose off as long as you can.) It is interesting to them, and mildly annoying to me, for it is like being pushed on stage without having anything to perform. No flames, no eerie silence of a frozen engine, a practically nonexistent threat of spectacular destruction, no particular skill on display.

I simply land, and the twin plumes of blue rubber-smoke pout back from the main wheels as they touch the hard concrete. I slow through 100 knots on the landing roll, touching right rudder to put the narrow strip of foam between the wheels. Then, slowly and gently, the unwheeled nose of the airplane comes down.

At that moment before the metal of the nose touches the runway and I tilt unnaturally forward in my cockpit and the only sight in the windscreen is the fast-blurred strip of white foam, I am suddenly afraid. This is where my control ends and chance takes over. A gust of wind against the high rudder and I will surely cartwheel in a flying swirling cloud of brilliant orange flame and twisted metal; the airplane will tumble and I will be caught beneath it; the hot engine will explode when the cold foam sprays up the intake. The ground is hard and it is moving very fast and it is very close.

Throttle off, and the nose settles into the foam.

White. Instant white and the world outside is cut away and metal screams against concrete loudly and painfully and I grit my teeth and squint my eyes behind the visor and know in a surprised shock that my airplane is being hurt and she doesn’t deserve to be hurt and she is good and faithful and she is taking the force of a 90-knot slab of concrete and I can do nothing to ease her pain and I am not cart-wheeling and the scream will never end and I must have slid a thousand feet and I am still slammed hard forward into the shoulder harness and the world is white because the canopy is sprayed with foam and get that canopy open now, while I’m still sliding.

The foam-covered sheet of plexiglass lifts as I pull the unlock lever, as smoothly as if nothing was the least unusual and there is the world again, blue sky and white runway sliding to a stop and grass at the side of the concrete and visor up and oxygen mask unsnapped and it is very quiet. The air is fresh and smooth and green and I am alive. Battery off and fuel off. As quiet as I have ever heard. My airplane is hurt and I love her very much. She didn’t somersault or cartwheel or flip on her back to burn and I owe my life to her.

The advancing roar of firetruck engines and soon we’ll be surrounded by the square monsters and by talking people and Say, why couldn’t you get the nosewheel down and That landing was a pretty good one boy and You should have seen the foam spray when your nose hit. But before the people come, I sit quietly in the cockpit for a second that seems a long time and tell my airplane that I love her and that I will not forget that she did not trap me beneath her or explode on the runway and that she took the pain while I walk away without a scratch and that a secret that I will keep between us is that I love her more than I would tell to anyone who asks.

I will someday tell that secret to another pilot, when he and I happen to be walking back from a night formation flight and the breeze is cool and the stars are as bright as they can get when you walk on the ground. I will say in the quiet, “Our airplane is a pretty good airplane.” He will be quiet a second longer than he should be quiet and he will say, “It is.” He will know what I have said. He will know that I love our airplane not because she is like a living thing, but because she truly is a living thing and so very many people think that she is just a block of aluminum and glass and bolts and wire. But I know and my friend will know and that is all that must be said.

Though it had its moment of fear and though it opened the door of understanding a little wider, the nosegear failure is an incident, not an emergency. I have had a few incidents in the hours that I have spent in the little cockpit, but so far I have never experienced a real emergency or been forced to make the decision to pull the yellow ejection seat handles, squeeze the red trigger, and say a quick farewell to a dying airplane. Yet that sort of thing is what the newspapers would have me believe happens every day in the Air Force.