Stranger to the Ground

by Richard Bach

  The ease of flying is a thing that is never mentioned in the motion pictures or on the recruiting posters. Flying a high-performance military airplane is exacting and difficult, men, but maybe, if you take our training, you will become a different person, with supernatural power to guide the metal monster in the sky. Give it a try, men, your country needs fine-honed men of steel.

  Perhaps that is the best approach. Perhaps if the recruiting posters said, “Anyone walking down this street, from that ten-year-old with his schoolbooks to that little old grandmother in the black cotton dress, is able to fly an F-84F jet fighter airplane,” they wouldn’t attract exactly the kind of initiate that looks best on a recruiting poster. But just for fun, the Air Force should train a ten-year-old and a grandmother to fly quick aileron rolls over airshows to prove that the tactical fighter pilot is not necessarily the mechanical man that he is so often painted.

  There is little to do. I have another six minutes before the wide needle of the TACAN will swing on its card to say that the little French city of Laon has been pulled by beneath me. I drag my tiny cone of thunder behind me for the benefit of the hills and the cows and perhaps a lonely peasant on a lonely walk through the cloudy night.

  A flight like tonight’s is rare. Normally, when I fit myself into the cockpit of this airplane, there is much to be done, for my job is one of being continually ready to fight. Each day of the week, regardless of weather or holidays or flying schedule, one small group of pilots wakes earlier than all the others. They are the Alert pilots. They awaken and they report to the flight line well before the hour that is Target Sunrise. And each day of each week a small group of airplanes are set aside to wait on the Alert pad, power units waiting by their wing. The airplanes, of course, are armed for war.

  After the innocuous flying of the Air National Guard, it is chilling at first to spend the dawn checking the attachment of thousands of pounds of olive-drab explosive under my wings. The Alert procedure sometimes seems an impossible game. But the explosive is real.

  The day wears on. We spend an hour studying the target that we already know very well. The landmarks about it, the conical hill, the mine in the hillside, the junction of highway and railroad, are as familiar to us as the hundred-arch viaduct that leads to Chaumont. We have in our minds, as well as on the maps stamped SECRET, the times and distances and headings to the target, and the altitudes we will fly. We know that our target will be as well-defended as anyone’s, that there will be a massive wall of flak to penetrate and the delicate deadly fingers of missiles to avoid. Oddly enough, the flak does not really bother us. It does not make a bit of difference whether the target is defended from every housetop or not at all . . . if it is necessary to strike it, we shall go along our memorized route and strike it. If we are caught by the screen of fire, it will be one of those unfortunate happenings of war.

  The siren blows, like a rough hand jerking sleep away. My room is dark. For more than a second, in the quick ebb of sleep, I know that I must hurry, but I cannot think of where I must go. Then the second is past and my mind is clear.

  The Alert siren.

  Hurry.

  Into the flight suit, into the zippered black jump boots, into the winter flying jacket. A hurried toss of scarf about throat, leave the door swinging closed and open again on my tousled room and join the rush of other Alert pilots in a dash down the wooden stairs and into the waiting Alert truck. The square wooden buildings of Chaumont Air Base are not yet even silhouettes against the east.

  There is a husky comment in the darkness of the rattling truck: “Sleep well, America, your National Guard is awake tonight.”

  The truck takes us to the airplanes that wait in the dark. The maintenance Alert crew has beaten us to the airplanes, and the APU’s are roaring into steely life. I climb the ladder that is chipped lemon in the daytime and invisible in the night, a feel of aluminum rungs more than a ladder-being. “Power!” the lights blaze in the cockpit, undimmed by the little night-shields that close off most of their light for flying in the dark. The light from them shows me the parachute straps and the safety belt ends and the belt release lanyard and the G-suit and oxygen hoses and the microphone cables. Helmet on, oxygen mask on (how can rubber get so icy cold?), radio on. Night-shields down on the warning lights, twist the rheostats that fill the cockpit with a bloody glow. “Hawk Able Two,” I say to the microphone, and if my flight leader has been faster strapping in than I, he will know that I am ready to go.

  “Roj, Two.” He is fast, my flight leader.

  I do not know whether this is a real-thing alert or another practice. I assume it is another practice. Now I tend to the finer points of getting ready to go; checking circuit breakers in, bomb switches set in safe positions, gunsight properly set for the delivery that we will use.

  “Hawk Able Four.”

  “Roj, Four.”

  Check the battle damage switches all down where they should be. Turn the navigation lights on to bright flash. We will turn them to dim as we approach the target.

  “Hawk Able Three.” Three was awake too late last night.

  “Roj, Three. Parsnip, Hawk Able flight is ready to go with four.”

  In the combat operations center, the time is checked as we call in. We checked in well before the maximum time allowed, and this is good.

  “Hawk Able, Parsnip here. This is a practice alert. Maintain cockpit alert until further notified.”

  “Roj.”

  So much meaning can be packed into three letters. Hawk Able Leader didn’t just acknowledge the notice, he told the combat operations center that this is a ridiculous dumb stupid game to be played by grown men and good grief you guys it is THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING and you had just better have orders from high headquarters to call this thing at this hour or you will not be getting much sleep tomorrow night.

  “Sorry,” says Parsnip, into the silence. They must have had the orders from high headquarters.

  So I close the canopy and lock it against the eternal cold wind and I settle in the red light to wait.

  I have waited fifteen minutes in the cockpit for the alert to be canceled. I have waited three hours for it. After the three-hour wait, I had climbed stiffly down from the cockpit with the perfect torture for recalcitrant prisoners of war. You take them and strap them by safety belt and shoulder harness to a soft, comfortable armchair. Then you walk away and leave them there. For the incorrigible prisoners, the real troublemakers, you put their feet into tunnels, sort of like rudder-pedal tunnels in a single-engine airplane, and put a control stick in the way so that they don’t have room to move either foot into a different position. In a very few hours the prisoners will become docile, tractable, eager to mend their ways.

  The sun isn’t up yet. We wait in our cockpits. I drift idly in the great dark river of soft-flowing time. Nothing happens. The secondhand on my watch moves around. I begin to notice things; as something to do. I hear a quiet tik . . . tik . . . tik . . . very regular, slow, metronomic. Tik . . . tik . . . tik . . . And the answer comes. My navigation lights. Without the engine running and with the canopy closed to keep out the rustle of the wind, I can hear the opening and the closing of the relays that control the flashing of the lights on wingtip and tail. Interesting. Never would have thought that I could hear the lights going on and off.

  Outside is the efficient high-speed pokpokpok of the APU. What a truly efficient thing that power unit is. It will stand there all night and through all tomorrow if it has to, pumping a constant stream of electricity to power the radio and keep the cockpit bathed in scarlet light.

  My airplane rocks slightly. I think someone has climbed to the wing and wants to talk to me, but there is no one there. The wind, that gentle cold wind, rocks this massive hard airplane. Every once in a while, and faintly, the wind moves the airplane on its landing gear struts. Thirty feet to my right the airplane of Hawk Able Leader waits, lights on, tikking silently to itself. The bloodlight of the cockpit reflects from the foamwhite ena
meled helmet of the pilot just as it would reflect if we were cruising now at 30,000 feet. Canopy is closed and locked, the air inside the cockpit is still and cold, and I wish that someone would invent a way to pipe warm air into the cockpit of an airplane that waits in the cold of a very early day. I can feel my warmth being absorbed in the cold metal of the instrument panel and the ejection seat and canopy rails and rudder-pedal tunnels. If I could only be warm and move around a bit and have someone to talk to, sitting cockpit alert would not be too bad a thing.

  I have made a discovery. This is what Lonely is. When you are walled up where no one can come inside and talk to you or play a game of cards or chess with you or share a joke about the time over Stuttgart when Number Three mistook the Moselle River for the Rhine and . . . Insulated from the outside. A track that I know is a noisy line truck that clatters and squeaks and needs a new muffler glides noiselessly by on the road in front of my revetment. The locked canopy seals away the sound of its passing. It seals me in with my thoughts. Nothing to read, no moving things to watch, just a quiet cockpit and the tik of the nav lights and the pok of the APU and my very own thoughts.

  I sit in an airplane that is mine. The commanders of Wing and Squadron have given it to me without question, trusting utterly in my ability to control it and guide it as they want it guided. They are depending on me to hit the target. I remember a line from the base newspaper that I read during a gigantic war game of a few weeks ago: “Yesterday the Wing saw action while it flew in support of the Army. . . .” The Wing did not see any such action. It was me that saw that action, arcing low and fast with simulated ordnance across the troops on the tanks, trying to streak low enough to make the troops jump into the mud but not low enough to take the whip antenna off the tanks.

  Not the Wing making them jump.

  Me.

  Egoistical? Yes. But then the Wing did not take the chance of misjudging and driving its 12 tons of airplane into the side of a 50-ton armored tank. So this is me sitting Alert, in my airplane, and if it were a real Alert, it would be me who came back or did not come back from the flak and the missiles over the target. They trust me. That seems odd, that anyone should trust anyone else with so much. They give me an airplane without question and without thinking twice about it. The number of the airplane comes up by my name on the scheduling board and I go out and fly it or sit in its cockpit and be ready to fly it. It is just a number on the board. But when I sit in it I have a chance to see what a remarkably involved, what an intricately fashioned thing it is, and what power the commanders have given me by putting that number next to my name.

  The crew chief, heavy-jacketed, steel-helmeted, appears abruptly on the aluminum ladder and knocks politely on the plexiglass. I open the canopy, grudging the loss of my pocket of still air, however slightly heated, to the cold wind, and pull one side of my helmet away from my ear so I can hear him. Red light paints his face.

  “D’ymind if we climb in the truck and wait . . . be out of the wind a little bit if it’s OK with you. Flash your taxi light if you need . . .”

  “OK.” And I resolve to discipline my thought and go over again the headings and the times and the distances and the altitudes to my target. And the great dark river of time moves slowly on.

  As I sometimes have long moments for thought on the ground, so every once in a while there is a long cross-country flight that allows a moment to think and be alone with the sky and my airplane. And I smile. Alone with the airplane that has been called “the unforgiving F-84.”

  I have been waiting to fly the airplane that is unforgiving. There must be such an airplane somewhere that is so very critical that it must be flown exactly by the book or crash, for the word “unforgiving” appears often in the magazines racked in the pilots’ lounges. But just when I think that the next type of airplane I am to fly has such high performance that it will be unforgiving, I learn to fly it. I learn its ways and its personality, and suddenly it is a forgiving airplane like all the others. It might be a little more critical on its airspeeds as I fly it down final approach to land, but as our acquaintance grows I discover that it has tolerances to either side of the best airspeed and that it will not spin into the ground if I am one knot too slow turning to the runway.

  There is always a warning of danger, and only if a pilot fails to heed his airplane’s warning will it go ahead and kill him.

  The red fire-warning light comes on after takeoff. It could mean many things: a short circuit in the fire-warning system; too steep a climb at too low an airspeed; a hole in a combustion chamber wall; an engine on fire. Some airplanes have so much difficulty with false fire warnings that their pilots practically disregard them, assuming that the warning circuit has gone bad again. But the F-84F is not one of these; when the light comes on, the airplane is usually on fire. But still I have time to check it—to pull the throttle back, to climb to minimum ejection altitude, to drop the external stores, to check the tailpipe temperature and tachometer and fuel flow, to ask my wingman if he wouldn’t mind taking a little look for smoke from my fuselage. If I am on fire, I have a few seconds to point the airplane away from the houses and bail out. I have never heard of an airplane that exploded without warning.

  Jet airplanes are unforgiving in one common respect: they burn great quantities of fuel, and when the fuel is gone the engine stops running. Full tanks in a four-engine propeller-driven transport airplane can keep it in the air for 18 hours nonstop. Twin-engine cargo airplanes often have enough fuel aboard for eight hours of flying when they take off on a two-hour flight. But when I take off on an hour-forty-minute mission, I have enough fuel in the tanks of my ’84F to last through two hours of flying. I do not have to concern myself with long minutes of circling in the air after the mission while other airplanes take off and land.

  Occasionally I fly into the landing pattern with 300 pounds of JP-4 in the tanks, or enough for six minutes of flying at high power. If I was seven minutes from the runway with 300 pounds of fuel, I would not make it home with the engine running. If I was ten minutes from the runway, my wheels would never roll on that concrete again. If an airplane is disabled on the runway after I enter the landing pattern with six minutes of fuel, there had better be a fast tow truck waiting to pull it out of the way, or a second runway ready to be used. I will be coming to earth, in an airplane or in a parachute, within the next few minutes.

  With the engine stopped, my airplane does not sink like a streamlined brick or a rock or a block of lead. It glides smoothly down, quietly down, as an airplane is designed to glide. I plan a deadstick pattern so that my wheels should touch half way down the runway, and I hold the landing gear retracted until I am certain that I am within gliding range of the field. Then, on final approach, with the runway long and white in the windscreen, it is gear down and flap down and speed brakes out and emergency hydraulic pump on.

  Though it is a hidden point of pride to have shut down the engine after a flight with 200 pounds of fuel remaining, tactical fighter pilots rarely give the required minimum fuel notice to the tower when they have less than 800 pounds remaining. The red low-level warning light may be blazing on the instrument panel near a fuel gage needle swinging down through 400 pounds, but unless it looks as if he will be delayed in his landing, the pilot does not call minimum fuel. He has pride in his ability to fly his airplane, and an unimportant thing like eight minutes of fuel remaining is not worthy of his concern.

  A transport pilot once cut me out of the landing pattern by calling minimum fuel, receiving a priority clearance to land immediately. I had a full ten minutes of JP-4 in my main fuselage tank, so didn’t mind giving way to the big airplane that needed to land so quickly. A week later I learned that the minimum fuel level set for that transport was thirty minutes of flying time; my engine could have flamed out three times over in the minutes before his fuel would have been really critical.

  I respect the fact that my airplane burns fuel and that each flight ends without a great deal of fuel remaining,
but it is a point of pride that I do this every day and that when I become concerned with the amount of fuel in my tanks, it is something that deserves concern.

  It is a little, more than a little, like playing hooky from life, this airplane-flying business. I fly over the cities of France and Germany at ten o’clock in the morning and think of all the people down there who are working for a living while I pull my contrail free and effortlessly above them. It makes me feel guilty. I fly at 30,000 feet, doing what I enjoy doing more than anything else in all the world, and they are down there in the heat and probably not feeling godlike at all. That is their way. They could all have been fighter pilots if they had wished.

  My neighbors in the United States used to look upon me a little condescendingly, waiting for me to grow out of the joy of flying airplanes, waiting for me to see the light and come to my senses and be practical and settle down and leave the Air Guard and spend my weekends at home. It has been difficult for them to believe that I will be flying so long as the Guard needs men in its airplanes, so long as there is an Air Force across the ocean that is training for war. So long as I think that my country is a pretty good place to live and should have the chance to go on being a pretty good place.

  The cockpits of the little silver dots in front of the long white contrails are not manned only by the young and impractical. There is many an old fighter pilot still there; pilots who flew the Jugs and Mustangs and Spitfires and Messerschmitts of a long-ago war. Even the Sabre pilots and the Hog pilots of Korea are well-enough experienced to be called “old pilots,” and they are the flight commanders and the squadron commanders of the operational American squadrons in Europe today. But the percentage changes a little every day, and for the most part the line pilots of NATO fighter squadrons have not been personally involved in a hot war.