by Richard Bach
Now, neither crazy nor stupid, I am at the last link of the chain: I dodge the storms by the swerving radiocompass needle and the flashes of lightning that I see from the cockpit. The TACAN is not in the least disturbed by my uneasy state of mind. The only thing that matters in the world of its transistorized brain is that we are 061 miles from Phalsbourg, slightly to the left of course. The radiocompass has gone wild, pointing left and right and ahead and behind. Its panic is disconcerting among the level-headed coolness of the other instruments, and my right glove moves its function switch to off. Gratefully accepting the sedative, the needle slows, and stops.
Flash to the left, alter course 10 degrees right. Flash behind the right wing, forget about it. Flash-FLASH directly brilliantly ahead and the instrument panel goes featureless and white. There is no dodging this one. Scattered.
The storm, in quick sudden hard cold fury, grips my airplane in its jaws and shakes it as a furious terrier shakes a rat. Right glove is tight on the stick. Instrument panel, shock-mounted, slams into blur. The tin horizon whips from an instant 30-degree left bank to an instant 60-degree right bank. That is not possible. A storm is only air.
Left glove, throttle full forward. My airplane, in slow motion, yaws dully to the left. Right rudder, hard. Like a crash landing on a deep-rutted rock trail. Yaw to the right. My airplane has been drugged, she will not respond. Vicious left rudder.
The power, where is the power? Left glove back, forward again, as far as it will go, as hard as it will go. A shimmering blurred line where the tachometer needle should be. Less than 90 percent rpm at full throttle.
I hear the airplane shaking. I cannot hear the engine. Stick and rudders are useless moving pieces of metal. I cannot control my airplane. But throttle, I need the throttle. What is wrong?
Ice. The intake guide vanes are icing, and the engine is not getting air. I see intake clogged in grey ice. Flash and FLASH the bolt is a brilliant snake of incandescent noon-white sun in the dark. I cannot see. Everything has gone red and I cannot even see the blurred panel. I feel the stick I feel the throttle I cannot see. I have suddenly a ship in the sky, and the storm is breaking it So quickly. This cannot last. Thunderstorms cannot hurt fighters. I am on my way to Chaumont. Important mission.
Slowly, through the bone-jarring shake of the storm, I can see again. The windscreen is caked wife grey ice and bright blue fire. I have never seen the fire so brightly blue. My wings are white. I am heavy with ice and I am falling and the worst part of a thunderstorm is at the lowest altitudes. I cannot take much more of this pounding. White wings, covered in shroud. Right glove grips the stick, for that is what has kept my airplane in the sky for six years. But tonight the airplane is very slow and does not respond, as if she were suddenly very tired and did not care to live. As if her engine had been shut down.
The storm is a wild horse of the desert that has suddenly discovered a monster on its back. It is in a frenzy to rid itself of me, and it strikes with shocks so fast they cannot be seen. I learn a new fact. The ejection seat is not always an escape. Bailout into the storm will be just as fatal as the meeting of earth and airplane, for in the churning air my parachute would be a tangled nylon rag. My airplane and I have been together for a long time, we will stay together now. The decision bolts the ejection seat to the cockpit floor, the Thunderstreak and I smash down through the jagged sky as a single dying soul. My arm is heavy on the stick, and tired. It will be good to rest. There is a roaring in my ears, and I feel the hard ground widening about me, falling up to me.
So this is the way it will end. With a violent shuddering of airplane and an unreadable instrument panel; with a smothered engine and heavy white wings. Again the feeling: I am not really ready to end the game. I have told myself that this day would come to meet me, as inevitably as the ground which rushes to meet me now, and yet I think, quickly, of a future lost. It cannot be helped. I am falling through a hard splintering storm with a control stick that is not a control stick. I am a chip in a hurricane a raindrop in a typhoon about to become one with the sea a mass of pieces-to-be a concern of air traffic controllers and air police and gendarmerie and coroners and accident investigators and statisticians and newspaper reporters and a board of officers and a theater commander and a wing commander and a squadron commander and a little circle of friends. I am a knight smashed from his square and thrown to the side of the chessboard.
Tomorrow morning there will be no storm and the sun will be shining on the quiet bits of metal that used to be Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five.
But at this instant there is a great heavy steel-bladed storm that is battering and crushing me down, out of the sky, and the thing that follows this instant is another just like it.
Altimeter is a blur, airspeed is a blur, vertical speed is a blur, attitude indicator is a quick-rocking blurred luminous line that does not respond to my orders. Any second now, as before, I am tense and waiting. There will be an impact, and blackness and quiet. Far in the back of my mind, behind the calm fear, is curiosity and a patient waiting. And a pride. I am a pilot. I would be a pilot again.
The terrier flings the rat free.
The air is instantly smooth, and soft as layered smoke. Altimeter three thousand feet airspeed one-ninety knots vertical speed four thousand feet per minute down attitude indicator steep right bank heading indicator one seven zero degrees tachometer eighty-three percent rpm at full throttle. Level the white wings. Air is warm. Thudthudthud from the engine as ice tears from guide vanes and splinters into compressor blades. Wide slabs of ice rip from the wings. Half the windscreen is suddenly clear. Faint blue fire on the glass. Power is taking hold: 90 percent on the tachometer . . . thud . . . 91 percent . . . thudthud . . . 96 percent. Air speed coming up through 240 knots, left turn, climb. Five hundred feet per minute, 700 feet per minute altimeter showing 3,000 feet and climbing I am 50 degrees off course and I don’t care attitude indicator showing steady left climbing turn I’m alive the oil pressure is good utility and power hydraulic pressure are good I don’t believe it voltmeter and loadmeter showing normal control stick is smooth and steady how strange it is to be alive windscreen is clear thud 99 percent rpm tailpipe temperature is in the green. Flash-FLASH look out to the left look out! Hard turn right I’ll never make it through another storm tonight forget the flight plan go north of Phalsbourg 15,000 feet 320 knots flash to the left and behind, faint.
And strangely, the words of an old pilot’s song: “. . . for I, am, too young, to die . . .” It is a good feeling, this being alive. Something I haven’t appreciated. I have learned again.
Rpm is up to 100 percent. I am climbing, and 20,000 feet is below flash 21,000 feet is below. Blue fire washes across the windscreen as if it did not know that a windscreen is just a collection of broken bits of glass.
What a ridiculous thought. A windscreen is a windscreen, a solid piece of six-ply plate glass, for keeping out the wind and the rain and the ice and a place to look through and a place to shine the gunsight. I will be looking through windscreens for a long time to come.
Why didn’t I bail out? Because the seat was bolted to the cockpit floor. No. Because I decided not to bail out into the storm. I should have bailed out. I definitely should have left the airplane. Better to take my chances with a rough descent in a torn chute than certain death in a crash. I should have dropped the external tanks, at least. Would have made the airplane lighter and easier to control. Now, at 32,000 feet, I think of dropping the tanks. Quick thinking.
Flash.
I flew out of the storm, and that is what I wanted to do. I am glad now that I did not drop the tanks; there would have been reports to write and reasons to give. When I walk away from my airplane tonight I will have only one comment to make on the Form One: UHF transmitter and receiver failed during flight. I will be the only person to know that the United States Air Force in Europe came within a few seconds of losing an airplane.
Flashflash. Ahead.
I have had enough stor
m-flying for one night. Throttle to 100 percent and climb. I will fly over the weather for the rest of the way home; there will be one cog slipping tonight in the European Air Traffic Control System, above the weather near Phalsbourg. The cog has earned it.
CHAPTER SIX
The people on the ground who operate the air traffic control system are very important people, but not indispensable. The system, although it is a good one, is not an indispensable system. Airplanes were flying long before the first sign of air traffic control appeared, they will go on flying if it all suddenly disappears.
When the rules of the air were set down, there was a very wise man present who knew that cogs will slip now and then, and that the system had best be flexible. I am still in command of my airplane, and I will put it where I think that it is best for it to go, system or no system. Now I have decided that I would rather not engage another thunder storm. I climb away from my assigned altitude of 33,000 feet to seek the clear air and smooth flying above the clouds. I am passing through altitudes that might have been assigned to other airplanes, and there is the possibility of midair collision.
Yet the chance of my colliding with another airplane is almost nonexistent. I am off course; in order to collide with me, another airplane would have to be precisely as far off course as I am.
Though I have not talked to a ground station for a long while, I have not been forgotten; I am a flight plan written on a strip of paper at all the stations along my route. Other airplanes will be told of my course and my estimated times over those stations.
I am a quarter-inch dot on the radar screens, and controllers will vector other airplanes around me.
The primary reason that I will not collide with any other airplane is that my Thunderstreak is 43 feet 3 inches long, its wingspan is 33 feet 6 inches, and it flies in a block of air that is a thousand cubic miles of empty space. And so I climb.
My approach time to Chaumont will be held open for a half hour past my estimated time of arrival. I dial the familiar channel 55 on the TACAN and listen to the identifier. Chaumont. I never would have thought that a little French village could be so like Home. Bearing is 239 degrees, distance is 093 miles. Phalsbourg is drifting behind me to the left. I should have reported over the French border and over Phalsbourg. But the cog is slipping.
Thirty-eight thousand feet on the altimeter and still no top to the cloud. The blue fire is gone. Fuel is down to 2,700 pounds, and at this weight a practical ceiling for my plane will be about 43,000 feet. It is rare to have clouds in Europe that top at more than 40,000 feet, and I am not concerned. My interest is directed only over the instruments in front of me. There is now, without a radio, no other world.
The old pilots tell of days when it was “needle-ball and alcohol” through the weather: a turn-and-bank indicator and a magnetic compass their only aid in the cloud. But this is a modern age, and tonight I fly by the seven instruments in the center of the panel, and have my navigation solved second by second in the two dials of the TACAN.
If the inverter that changes the generator’s DC power to AC were to fail, my gyro instruments, attitude indicator and heading indicator would slowly run down into uselessness. But the ’84F is an American airplane, and therefore has safety systems for the safety systems. In this instance, the safety factor is called the alternate instrument inverter, waiting to drive the gyros should the engine-driven generator or the main inverter fail. Should both inverters fail, I am moved back through the years to fly a fighter airplane by needle-ball and alcohol.
There is a light tremble through my airplane as I climb through 40,000 feet, and the wings begin to rock. There has been no lightning. I scan the windscreen, looking for ice. I cannot carry much ice and continue to climb. The windscreen is clear.
With no sound and with no warning, like the magician’s silk from above the hawk, the cloud is gone. In one instant I am checking for ice, in the next I am looking through the glass, as through a narrow gothic arch in steel, at two hundred miles of crystal air, floored 20,000 feet below by unruffled cloud. It is vertigo, as if I had run over a hidden cliff and discovered myself in thin air. Right glove tightens on the stick.
I have flown from a sheer wall of cloud, and it tumbles away toward the earth like the mountains south of Strasbourg tumble away to the valley of the Rhine. The giant wall swings in wide arc to my left and right, and it flickers here and there with its storms.
I am an invisible speck of dust sifting on a tiny breath of air.
A hundred and fifty miles behind me to the north, the wall becomes the smooth gentle-rising slope that I entered long ago. But this is helpless knowledge, for I can see in the starlight that the only real thing in all the world is the awesome mass of cloud around my 43-foot airplane. There is no ground, there is no steady glow of lighted city through the floor of the mist. There is not one other flashing navigation light from horizon to horizon. I am alone, with one thousand stars for company.
I rest my helmet against the ejection seat headrest and look out again at the sky. The sky is not blue or purple or merely black. It is a deep meadow of powdered carbon, a bed for the stars. Around me.
Back with the throttle, to make the engine quiet. Right glove reaches to the three knobs that control the red light of the cockpit, and my own little red world fades into the meadow.
The dust mote settles gently back toward 33,000 feet, and its voice is the barest whisper in the dimension of the night.
I am one man. Tonight, perhaps, I am Man, alive and looking out over my planet toward my galaxy, crystallizing in myself, for a span of seconds, the centuries of looking out from this little earth that Man has done.
We have much in common, we men.
Tonight I, who love my airplane with all its moods and hardships and joys, am looking out upon the stars. And tonight, 20 minutes to the east, there is another pilot, another man who loves his airplane, looking out at these same stars. These symbols.
My airplane is painted with a white star, his with a red star. It is dark, and paint is hard to see. In his cockpit is the same family of flight instruments and engine instruments and radio control panels that is in my cockpit. In his airplane as in mine, when the stick is pressed to the left, the airplane banks to the left.
I know, unquestioningly, that I would like the man in that cockpit. We could talk through the long night of the airplanes that we have known and the times that we were afraid and the places that we have been. We would laugh over the half-witted things that we did when we were new in the air. We have shared many things, he and I, too many things to be ordered into our airplanes to kill each other.
I went through flying training at a base near Dallas, he went through it at a base near Stalingrad. My flight instructors shouted at me in English, his at him in Russian. But the blue fire trickles once in a while across his windscreen as it does across mine, and ice builds and breaks over his wings as it does mine. And somewhere in his cockpit is a control panel or a circuit breaker panel or a single switch that he has almost to stand on his head to reach. Perhaps at this moment his daughter is considering whether or not to accept a pair of Siamese kittens. Look out for your curtains, friend.
I wish that I could warn him about the kittens.
Fifty miles from Chaumont. Fifty miles and Through the Looking-Glass of cloud and rain and Hi there, ace, how’d the crosscountry go? Fifty miles is a very long way.
I have a not-working radio, above the clouds. Not a great problem, but enough of one so that I force my attention from the peaceful meadow of black to the task of putting my airplane back on the earth. Throttle forward at 33,000 feet, and again the rumble and whines and squeaks and moans from my comic in spinning steel.
No radio. I can fly on to the west, looking for a hole in the clouds, descend, fly back to Chaumont and land. A very poor plan for the fuel that remains in my tanks and for the vagaries of French weather.
I can fly a triangular pattern to the left, with one-minute legs. After a few patterns, a radar
site will notice my path and its direction, vector an interceptor to me, and I will fly a letdown and instrument approach as his wingman. A drastic plan, but one to remember as a last-ditch, last-resort action.
I can fly a letdown at Chaumont as I had planned, hoping that the weather is not so bad that I need a Ground Controlled Approach in order to find the runway. At last report the weather was not so bad. If I do not break out of the weather at the TACAN low-approach minimum altitude, I will climb back on top and try a penetration at my alternate, Etain Air Base, ten minutes to the north. I have just enough fuel for this plan, and I shall follow it. For interest’s sake, I will try my radio once more when I am directly over Chaumont. One can never tell about UHF radios.
Forty miles. Five minutes. To home. But months still to a home where there is a wife and daughter and where the people in the towns speak English.
The bulletin board in the Chaumont pilots’ quarters is a mass of newspaper clippings from that older Home. On the board are charges and countercharges concerning the wisdom of recalling the Guard without a war to make it necessary. There are letters to the editors from wives and families and employers, asking questions and offering answers. The newspapers tell of poor conditions into which we were forced, of our trials and our difficulties, of the state of our morale. The picture they paint is a bleak one, but our lot is not really so bleak.
I left an interesting civilian job, flying small airplanes and writing for an aviation magazine, and was ordered back into the Air Force. It was disrupting, of course. But then I have never before been needed by the country to which I owe so much. I would be happier in the freedom of my old life, but my country has come fearfully close to war. The recall was not convenient for me or for my family, but it was a wise plan of action. The recall showed that Air Guard pilots were not merely sportsmen at government expense; a feeling that I sometimes harbored, guiltily, after pleasant weekends spent flying military airplanes, at $80 per weekend.