Stranger to the Ground by Richard Bach
I call the bogies to Three, my element leader, and look around for the others. After the first enemy airplanes are seen, it is the leader’s responsibility to watch them and plan an attack. I look out for other airplanes and keep my leader clear. When I am a wingman, it is not my job to shoot down enemy airplanes. It is my job to protect the man who is doing the shooting. I turn with Three, shifting back and forth across his tail, watching, watching.
And there they are. From above the con level, from five o’clock high, come a pair of swept dots. Turning in on our tail. I press the microphone button. “Dynamite Three, bogies at five high.”
Three continues his turn to cover Dynamite Lead during his attack on the bogie lead element in their climb. The decoys. “Watch ’em,” he calls.
I watch, twisted in my seat with the top of my helmet touching the canopy as I look. The two are counting on surprise, and are only this moment, with plenty of airspeed, beginning to pull cons. I wait for them, watching them close on us, begin to track us. They are F-84’s. We can outfly them. They don’t have a chance.
“Dynamite Three, break right!” For once the wingman orders the leader, and Three twists into a steep bank and pulls all the backpressure that he can without stalling the airflow over his wings. I follow, seeking to stay on the inside of his turn, and watching the attackers. They are going too fast to follow our turn, and they begin to overshoot and slide to the outside of it. They are not unwise, though, for immediately they pull back up, converting their airspeed into altitude for another pass. But they have lost the surprise that they had counted on, and with full throttle we are gaining airspeed. The fight is on.
A fight in the air proceeds like the scurrying of minnows about a falling crumb of bread. It starts at high altitudes, crossing and recrossing the sky with bands of grey contrail, and slowly moves lower and lower. Every turn means a little more altitude lost. Lower altitudes mean that airplanes can turn more tightly, gain speed more quickly, pull more G before they stall. Around and around the fight goes, through the tactics and the language of air combat: scissors, defensive splits, yo-yos and “Break right, Three!”
I do not even squeeze my trigger. I watch for other airplanes, and after Three rivets his attention on one enemy airplane, I am the only eyes in the element that watch for danger. Three is totally absorbed in his attack, depending on me to clear him of enemy planes. If I wanted to kill him in combat, I would simply stop looking around.
In air combat more than at any other time, I am the thinking brain for a living machine. There is no time to keep my head in the cockpit or to watch gages or to look for switches. I move the control stick and the throttle and the rudder pedals unconsciously. I want to be there, and I am there. The ground does not even exist until the last minutes of a fight that was allowed to get too low. I fly and fight in a block of space. The ideal game of three-dimension chess, across which moves are made with reckless abandon.
In two-ship combat there is only one factor to consider: the enemy airplane. I seek only to stay on his tail, to track him with the pipper in the gunsight and pull the trigger that takes closeups of his tailpipe. If he should be on my tail, there are no holds barred. I do everything that I can to keep him from tracking me in his gunsight, and to begin to track him. I can do maneuvers in air combat that I could never repeat if I tried.
I saw an airplane tumble once, end over end. For one shocked moment the fighter was actually moving backwards and smoke was streaming from both ends of the airplane. Later on, on the ground, we deduced that the pilot had forced his aircraft into a wild variation of a snap roll, which is simply not done in heavy fighter airplanes. But the maneuver certainly got the enemy off his tail.
As more airplanes enter the fight, it becomes complicated. I must consider that this airplane is friend and that airplane is enemy, and that I must watch my rolls to the left because there are two airplanes in a fight there and I would fly right through the middle of them. Midair collisions are rare, but they are always a possibility when one applies too much abandon in many-ship air combat flights.
John Larkin was hit in the air by a Sabre that saw him too late to turn. “I didn’t know what had happened,” he told me. “But my airplane was tumbling and it didn’t take long to figure that I had been hit. I pulled the seat handle and squeezed the trigger and the next thing I remember, I was in the middle of a little cloud of airplane pieces, just separating from the seat.
“I was at a pretty good altitude, about thirty-five thousand, so I free-fell down to where I could begin to see color on the ground. Just when I reached for my ripcord, the automatic release pulled it for me and I had a good chute. I watched the tail of my airplane spin down by me and saw it crash in the hills. A couple of minutes later I was down myself and thinking about all the paperwork I was going to have to fill out.”
There had been a great amount of paperwork, and the thought of it makes me doubly careful when I fly air combat, even today. In a war, without the paperwork, I will be a little more free in my fighting.
When it spirals down to altitudes where dodging hills enters the tactic, a fight is broken off by mutual consent, as boxers hold their fists when an opponent is in the ropes. In the real war, of course, it goes on down to the ground, and I pick up all the pointers I can on methods to scrape an enemy into a hillside. It could all be important someday.
The wide luminous needle of the TACAN swings serenely as I pass over Spangdahlem at 2218, and one more leg of the flight is complete.
As if it recognized that Spangdahlem is a checkpoint and time for things to be happening, the thick dark cloud puts an end to its toying and abruptly lifts to swallow my airplane in blackness. For a second it is uncomfortable, and I sit tall in my seat to see over the top of the cloud. But the second quickly passes and I am on instruments.
For just a moment, though, I look up through the top of my canopy. Above, the last bright star fades and the sky above is as dark and faceless as it is about me. The stars are gone, and I am indeed on instruments.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Rhein Control, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Spangdahlem, over.” From my capricious radio I do not know whether or not to expect an answer. The “over,” which I rarely use, is a wistful sort of hope. I am doubtful.
“Jet Four Zero Five, Rhein Control, go ahead.”
Someday I will give up trying to predict the performance of a UHF radio. “Roger, Rhein, Zero Five was Spangdahlem at two niner, flight level three three zero assigned instrument flight rules, Wiesbaden at three seven, Phalsbourg next. Latest weather at Chaumont Air Base, please.” A long pause of faint flowing static. My thumb is beginning to be heavy on the microphone button.
“Roger your position, Zero Five. Latest Chaumont weather is one thousand overcast, visibility five miles in rain, winds from the west at one zero knots.”
“Thank you, Rhein. How about the Phalsbourg weather?” The static is suddenly louder and there is a light blue glow across the windscreen. St. Elmo’s fire. Harmless and pretty to watch, but it turns low-frequency radio navigation into a patchwork of guesses and estimates. The radiocompass needle is wobbling in an aimless arc. It is good to have a TACAN set.
“Zero Five, Phalsbourg weather is garbled on our machine. Strasbourg is calling eight hundred overcast, visibility one-half mile in heavy rain showers, winds variable two zero gusting three zero knots, isolated thunderstorms all quadrants.” Strasbourg is to the left of course, but I could catch the edge of their thunderstorms. Too bad that Phalsbourg is out. Always seems to happen when you need it most.
“What is the last weather you had from Phalsbourg, Rhein?” A garbled teletype weather report is really garbled. It is either a meaningless mass of consonants or a black jumble where one weather sequence has been typed on top of another.
“Latest we have, sir, is two hours old. They were calling five hundred overcast, visibility one-quarter mile in . . .” he pauses, and his thumb comes off the microphone button. It comes on again
“Thank you, Rhein.” The air is very smooth in the stratus, and it is not difficult to hold the new heading at 093 degrees. But I am beginning to think that perhaps my detour did not take me far enough around the severe weather.
I am well established in the routine of the crosscheck now, and occasionally look forward to the liquid blue fire on the windscreen. It is a brilliant cobalt, glowing with an inner light that is somehow startling to see at high altitude. And it is liquid as water is liquid; it twists across the glass in little rivulets of blue rain against the black of the night weather. The light of it, mingling with the red of the cockpit lights, turns the instrument panel into a surrealist’s impression of a panel, in heavy oil paint. In the steady red and flickering blue of the electrical fire on the glass, the only difference between my needles and the painter’s is that a few of mine are moving.
Turn back.
The air is smooth. The needles, except for the wobbling radiocompass needle and the rolling numbered drums of the distance-measuring equipment, move only the smallest fractions of inches as I make the gentle corrections to stay at 33,000 feet. The airplane is flying well and the UHF is back in action.
There are storms ahead, and this airplane is very small.
My crosscheck goes so smoothly that I do not have to hurry to include a look at the fuel flow and quantity gages, the pale green oxygen blinker blinking coolly at me as I breathe, the utility and flight control system pressure gages, the voltmeter, the loadmeter, the tailpipe temperature. They are all my friends, and they are all in the green.
I will not live through the storms.
What is this? Fear? The little half-noticed voices that flit through my thought like scurrying fireflies might warrant the name of fear, but only if I stretch the definition until it applies to the thoughts that scurry before I begin to walk across a busy highway. If I reacted to the half-thoughts, I would have quit flying before I made my first flight in the light propeller-driven trainer that first lifted me away from a runway.
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
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.