‡
WHEN I REACHED FIVE THOUSAND feet, radio communication, which hadn’t worked during the duration of the low-level chase, became available again.
“Control, this is Armchair Two.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “Give me data on landing strips on the Sinai coast. Urgent.”
“Armchair Two?” I heard the surprise and relief in his voice. “Right away, immediately! Roger!”
But I was not relieved. At an altitude of twenty thousand feet my fuel indicator became rooted to the bottom of the gauge. I stopped climbing, reduced power to a minimum, and began cruising horizontally. I tried to fly as perfectly as possible, not moving any control surface, to minimize drag. I kept counting the passing seconds. Every second meant another 125 meters east.
Zero fuel. The little fuel pressure light began to flicker. I didn’t know where the fuel that fed my engine was coming from, but the engine continued to sing its impossible music.
“Armchair Two, come in.”
“Armchair Two, go ahead.”
“Your only available field is Abu Rudeis. Do you copy?”
“Copy that, control.”
I pulled out a map and located Abu Rudeis. Then, scanning the landscape, I decided that it had to be somewhere on that line of sand below that distant high, black mountain to the south, beyond this terrible sea. Then the details came in: Abu Rudeis was a single asphalt strip, 1,500 meters in length. Fit for light aviation, not for jet fighters with a landing speed of 165 knots (300 kilometers) per hour. Oh, shit.
And as if sensing my hesitation, the whining sound of the falling engine revolutions meant that my engine gave up and died. The air pressure in the cockpit fell. I lowered the nose and began to glide down the slope. I had twenty thousand feet to descend, and under me passed the bewitching, frighteningly beautiful surface of the Red Sea, its depths covered with a dark blue curtain. No pilot who ditched there had ever come out alive. Not even their bodies were ever found. This was the sea that had already swallowed up Aki, Dovik, Raz, and Khagay.
And then another call: “On the landing strip at Abu Rudeis,” said the controller, “strong northwesterly winds, twenty-five knots.”
I was coming in from the northwest, too, and I understood—this strong tailwind was pushing me forward, helping me to reach the strip. But if I did arrive at Abu-Rudeis and came in to land, the tailwind would add to my landing speed. At 190 knots only God would be able to stop me in just 1,500 meters. I knew if I couldn’t stop we would go off the end of the runway into the soft sand. My Mirage would flip over. And even if I was not in pieces by then, there was nobody at Abu Rudeis to pull me out of the wreck.
The nose of my Mirage didn’t like this plan. It kept trying hard to turn left and take me to the nearest beach. There was no place to land there, but the sand was white, soft, and nice, and I could punch out over there and parachute safely to the ground. And I really wanted to let my Mirage take command and take me there. But somehow something in me was already committed to Abu Rudeis. I already knew that all comes from inside, and that part of me was being tested again. So I forced myself to point the nose at that black mountain in the distance, and we continued gliding toward it, crossing the sea in a long, diagonal line. I knew that if we ran out of altitude halfway, I would have to bail out low into this terrible beautiful water with all the disgusting creatures swarming there, waiting. And so, with chills along my spine, I continued to glide, losing a thousand feet and then another.
My hands were shaking but my Mirage had turned into a glider. We floated silently in a blue space, out of this world, and I felt the plane’s body getting cold. Down and down, and to my amazement—not my relief—it gradually became clear that the tailwind was really pushing us. The mountain came closer and closer. Gradually, yellowing sand hills appeared at its foot. And then I saw a comma among the dunes. The comma grew, and a whitish strip materialized, dreadfully short and narrow. But the wind worked in my favor, and the closer I approached, the steeper the glide angle became. At five thousand feet I had to make my final decision, whether to go for this landing, or turn left and bail out safely on the beach nearby. I lowered my landing gear, and this was it.
“We’ll make it and land safely,” I told my Mirage. “We just have to brake successfully.”
“All from inside,” it answered me, and I understood. It was just a Mirage, a speedy metal missile that couldn’t possibly stop in 1,500 meters with a strong tailwind. The solution had to come from me, from inside.
And I found it inside, too, the last answer to the last puzzle of this hard, spectacular morning. I told myself to imagine my touchdown point way before the real beginning of the paved runway. I flew my aircraft as if we were to touch down on the coastline, several hundred meters before the actual landing point, and I forced myself to descend between lines of foaming surf. It was weird, and I had to convince us both that that was where we would really touch down.
“And when we get there,” I silently told my ship at the last moment, “all we have to do is stay airborne just a bit more, a few hundred meters more, avoiding those white sands.” No fighter aircraft flies this way. But this was the only way we could get to the beginning of the tarmac almost “standing on our tail.”
Our altitude was gone and we leveled out above the surf and dark blue water. The aircraft felt tired and wanted to sink, but I held it with a firm hand and did not let it go down. I sensed the airflow swishing and growling on our wingtips, threatening to flip us over head down, as Hassan had done before our eyes two hundred kilometers and eons past. Then the coastline slid under us and everything got big real fast. I lifted my aircraft’s nose even more to the sky. Nose up, we floated, hurtling, another half kilometer with the wheels caressing sand dunes and rush thorns, totally concentrated on the short runway before us. The stick was already pulled fully back, pressing my belly, and all of a sudden a line of rim stones passed below us.
Airbrakes! We fell like a stone to the tarmac. I deployed the brake chute, and felt with relief its pull take hold. And now the brakes! And again—one more time. Then there was no need for more. My lovely Mirage stopped gracefully a long way before the runway’s end, its nose nodding.
I opened the canopy to the oven breath of the morning hamsin. The hot, dry wind hit hard on my wet back. Let me get down and sit on the tarmac near my Mirage. Let me wait for somebody. Somebody will come sooner or later. Let me get down.
I tried to get to my feet but couldn’t. My knees trembled and folded under me.
Chapter
12
Nissim
MiG 21: a lightweight, single-engine, single-seat fighter produced in the USSR. First flew in 1956. Top speed, 2.1 Mach. Ceiling, sixty thousand feet above sea level. Armament, one 23mm cannon and four air-to-air missiles.
The MiG 21, lightweight, high-performance, and agile, was simple to operate and reliable, a classic “pilot’s plane.” It was developed and improved successively and became the most widely flown jet fighter in history. Took part in wars all over the world.
AERIAL COMBAT IN THE WAR OF ATTRITION became more frequent and more difficult. In November 1968 I had an especially tough dogfight that in time influenced my thinking on the matter.
I scrambled with a younger pilot, Gordon, against some enemy aircraft penetrating our area in the northern part of the Suez Canal. The controller sent us to chase them, and we crossed over the Small Bitter Lake and pulled up but saw no MiGs. The interception was so lame that when we looked around, we found MiGs on our tails and launching missiles at us. We broke and separated, each of us carrying on alone.
I closed rapidly on one of the MiGs. He went high and I followed, and we stopped in the air with me close behind him, but before I could finish him off, I received a call for help. I left the MiG immediately and went to help Gordon get a MiG off his tail.
Suddenly the skies around us filled with enemy aircraft. The feeling was like being in a cloud of wasps: I saw targets in every direction, but every time I lo
oked back there was a nose pointed at me with four missiles under its wings, one of them already spitting fire on my six. I broke, and broke again. A missile passed and exploded very close to my cockpit. Another break, and the MiG came in on me. We locked horns. It looked cool: a new, shiny aircraft painted in dark colors. For a moment we came so close I could see that the pilot wore no helmet but only a black leather hood, similar to those we had worn in the Stearman trainer in flight school. As I was lining him up in my sight to take a shot, another MiG came in on my six and spoiled my aim.
This battle was nasty. Throughout the fight, Gordon and I were trying to look out for each other, but we were two against ten. We were forced to fight separately, unable to support each other. The battle was full of action and a strange excitement—many targets passed before my eyes—but the pressure was unrelenting, and I couldn’t concentrate on any particular one.
Finally, after I had shot at four MiGs and missed every one of them (my aim was way too hurried), I decided that discretion was the better part of valor. We both turned east and dived to maximum speed. On disengaging we received a parting gift: a Russian Atoll missile hit Gordon’s aircraft and luckily caused just minor damage. After landing, I found a long, deep scratch in the Plexiglas of my canopy.
“This is becoming dangerous,” I wrote in my report. But it took me some more time till I came to do anything about it.
IN APRIL 1969 I WAS TRANSFERRED to the flying school to instruct air cadets. The flying school wasn’t in Tel Nof anymore, but had moved down south to the Negev, to the new air force base at Hatzerim.
I didn’t want to go. The war raged on in the Golan Heights and the Suez Canal. My Mirages fought night and day. My comrades were being worn down with the strain. I felt that the Fighting First needed me, especially since some of our best pilots, especially the deputy commander and my friend Sam Khetz, had been sent to study the new Phantom aircraft in America. Their departures had left a big hole.
But there was something else, too: I was worried about another run-in with Ran Pecker, who was now the commander of the flight school. I tried to avoid it and stay in the Fighting First. But Yak, who was now the commander of Hatzor, refused to listen to my pleas. “We need pilots. You are needed at the flight school. Get over it.”
Ran Pecker received me in his office as a friend. Our last conversation seemed to be forgotten. Puzzled, I kept my guard up.
We flew small twin-jet Fouga trainers, the student in the front seat and the instructor behind him. To my total amazement, I found flight instruction interesting and enjoyable. Even more than that, I enjoyed commanding men. I was given a pretty large unit to manage; there were fifty cadets and twenty flight instructors, and a new class came in every four months. Certainly the workload was heavy here, too, but the operational tension was less. We lived in a calmer atmosphere. Hatzerim was at that time just a couple of runways in the desert, with a few concrete buildings nearby, which housed the training squadrons. A little farther on, beyond a dusty Negev hill, three rows of housing were squeezed in, surrounded by yellowing attempts to grow lawns. The wind blew dust and weeds on the roads. The job came with a car, so we could go out on Saturdays for trips in the Negev, or for a dip in the salty, heavy water of the Dead Sea, or to fill bottles with the multicolored layers of sand in the Negev’s craters. Sometimes we even drove north to visit family.
MY JOB IN FLIGHT SCHOOL was comprehensive and hard. The air force needed new pilots badly, and we were the production plant. We flew a lot. I was in the air every day, all the day. In my logbook I find months with seventy-five training sorties, plus dozens of operational flights and transport sorties in light aircraft. My subordinates, the young instructors, certainly flew even more; after all, I was a manager. In the evening, when there were no night flights, I had my chance to help Ali feed and wash the children. Ali was also tired after a long day of work and studies in the institute for training for librarians in Beer-Sheva. So after we put the kids to bed—now we had two, when Etay became five we had our second son, Omri—we looked at each other, and instead of going to sleep summoned our last reserves of strength and went out to a show in Tel Aviv, a restaurant with friends at Beer-Sheva, to visit Ilan and Judy in Hatzor, or to sit around Nissim’s bed. In the small hours we returned home and hung on to each other with our fingernails.
BEING A FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR captivated me. I became a researcher, breaking new ground. I wanted to explore the secret of military flying and the way to break it down into its component parts, using short, clear, and accurate words and phrases so my students could understand them and later elaborate on their own. I strove to reveal the clean, perfect lines beneath the rococo overlay of operational flying.
I began to sense that behind the rules I had learned hid unplumbed depths. A successful, efficient turn of the aircraft was much more complicated than just manipulating the controls the way they taught me at school. I would input a clear requirement and get back complicated, delicate responses. Sometimes the craft gave just hints; on other occasions it opposed my will by certain side skids, or abruptly tightening its turn, even raging and bucking at me. And if I used force on the stick to compel it, it would take its revenge and put us into a spin. I began to realize that I had partners in the art of fighter flying: the airframe and the engine, together with the air that streamed through and around them, and the force of gravity, were discussing my wishes and processing them. It was like driving a fast car on a slick road in pouring rain: the wheels, the surface, and the wind have something to say, too.
I searched for general rules, for me and for my trainees. I felt that we pilots had no common language to communicate in. I turned to art, trying to draw flight. After landing, while the Fouga was refueled for the next sortie, I sat with my student on the wing and drew on the aluminum surface the maneuvers he had performed, drawing the correct pattern with a full line and what he had done with a dotted one. I tried to draw in three and four dimensions, and all the Fougas were covered with my scribbling.
In my pursuit of the art of flying I followed the footprints of former seekers of perfection. One hint was sent to me by none other than Picasso himself, in Françoise Gillot’s book about her life with Picasso. “Try to use colors at a minimum,” he once told her. “This way the painting shall acquire stored power.” Stored power, energy—that was the thing! Since then I sought that ideal: not to waste energy on futile maneuvers, to use every movement to its maximum.
In this way I discovered that the way to conserve my energy, that stored power, came from foresight: broad vision, understanding the general situation was the key to the next stage. And if you acted early, you won: something you could get from a small move early on, you could not achieve later, even with a radical maneuver.
I defined an order of things to myself: First, you must know what you want to do. Second, you have to achieve it fully; without that there is no meaning to anything. And then comes the art of flying, which is the question of the price. The art of flying, I concluded, is the achievement of the target with the absolute minimum of energy.
But there was more than that to it. One day Ali showed me a magazine interview with a famous Israeli artist, the mime Sammy Molcho. He said, “Every movement must be meaningful, but better yet if it has several meanings.” Immediately I recalled General Sherman, who stood the Confederate army on the horns of a dilemma, since his every movement had two possible interpretations and his enemies couldn’t decide which way to turn. Now I saw the wisdom behind the route of chase they had taught us in the operational training course: a sharp cut into the opponent’s curve combined threat and temptation, and the opponent was confronted with a dilemma. Molcho’s words generalized for me that actions are two-and threefold more valuable once they are not simplistic, when they create diversified possibilities. Instantly I envisioned the possibilities hidden in operating several aircraft in varying ways against one target, and I got pale with wonder and joy.
The good artist is neither simplistic nor
one-dimensional. He does not do the expected and banal, does not put his nose right on the target, like a dog chasing a bicycle. The sophisticated artist divides his powers into meaningful actions, and enriches his creation with overt and subtle layers, possibilities within possibilities. And all along he builds the moment when he shall put his last brushstroke into place, in one sleek and cruel move, and finish it all with a single speck of color. And at the end of the battle the good artist shall not have all his power spent, shall not have used his entire palette. He has spare energy, fuel, and ammo, and is ready for the next fight. His creation leaves something unsaid; it contains stored power.
“There are many good artisans,” I lectured my students, “but the true artist is one who sees the whole, who can tell the geometry of the arc that hides behind the simple stones. Only in this way can he see the next phase, and achieve the result with absolute minimum of waste of effort.” Once, when I left time for questions, a young officer rose in the audience. “You were not talking about flight,” he said. “You were talking about life in general, weren’t you?”
That day I felt I hadn’t wasted my efforts.
HATZERIM WAS REMOTE, but the war found us. Regularly we, the flight instructors, were called to our operational squadrons to help with training or flying operational missions. Every few weeks I spent a busy weekend in the Sinai, on duty in Refidim. There was action all the time. Wild artillery battles raged on the Suez Canal, and every day casualty lists were published in the newspapers. The air force fought also, and all of us pilots—from the colonel to the last first lieutenant instructor—were called on to fly missions with our parent fighter squadrons.
In some strange way, the Mirage pilots among us were given some rest from the hard work in Refidim, in the Sinai. The small, dusty ready room, with its eight beds, was a holy shrine where nobody interrupted sleep. There, once you were in your gear and were ready to scramble if the bell rang, you could loaf around. Only in Refidim we could read books, prepare for our entrance exams, or just play Dominos. We saw plenty of schlocky Westerns—sometimes two, three, and more films a day—and invented gourmet dishes that no man’s palate had ever tasted. And best of all, we slept and slept.
Loud and Clear Page 20