The Warbirds

by Richard Herman

  Two minutes later the Phantom started to fall apart as they crossed the coast. The F-4, an honest airplane, didn’t do things without giving its crew warning, sending signals to both cockpits. First the pilot’s warning lights flashed on and then off, then he got a momentary fire light on the right engine. “I’ve got smoke and fumes back here,” his wizzo announced.

  “Hang in, I’m pulling the emergency vent knob—Jesus, both generators fell off the line.”

  By recycling the generators he managed to bring the left generator back on-line, but smoke kept filling the cockpit.

  “Jettison your canopy,” Sooner ordered.

  The wizzo pulled the emergency jettison handle and the rear canopy separated cleanly from the aircraft, venting the cockpit but increasing the noise level, making it difficult to hear. Sooner realized he had to get his bird on the ground or start thinking about ejecting. His wizzo was thinking the same thing as he told him that a straight-in approach to runway 27, the west runway, was the quickest way to get on the ground, much faster than returning to the North Sea for an ejection. Sooner called the tower, told them he had to land immediately or eject. The tower had already been notified by ATC he had a serious emergency and had scrambled the crash trucks.

  Sooner brought the Phantom down final, electing to take the approach-end barrier, he lowered the hook to snag the cable that was stretched across the end of the runway. When the hook came down the SUU-21 separated from the underside of the right wing. The wingman was flying a loose formation as Sooner brought the disabled plane in and noted the location where the bomb-dispenser came off. Smoke started to trail from the right side of the bird as they crossed the approach lights and then engulfed the Phantom as the cable snatched the big fighter to a halt. The crash crews were still moving toward the plane when they saw two figures emerge from the smoke on the left side of the aircraft.

  Anthony Waters looked at the map that pinpointed the locations where the canopy and SUU-21 had been found. Slowly he shuffled the map with photos of the burned-out hulk of the Phantom that had been given to the accident board investigating the crash. He flipped to the inspection record of the Phantom before turning to the men in front of him. “Sam, Sooner and Mike did well and I want to commend them for the way they recovered the bird.” The DO stared impassively at his commander. “Please tell your crews to think about what happened and tell them I’ve got lots of Phantoms but only one of them. There are times when an ejection is the preferred approach and landing. I can’t make that decision for them, but I’ll back them up when they get their bodies in a jam like this one.”

  The anger he felt was not in his voice as he turned to his deputy for Maintenance. “Colonel Leason, the gun on that bird hadn’t been inspected since the wing arrived in Egypt. The accident board will probably find that to be a contributing if not primary cause of this accident. Just what the hell is going on?”

  “Colonel Morris, sir, waived that inspection since he would not allow the crews to practice strafing…”

  “Well, I do allow strafing. In fact I require it. Never mind Morris. Didn’t it ever occur to you to have the guns inspected after Ops asked for loads of TP ammo? TP does stand for ‘target piercing’ what do you think it’s used for?” No answer. “Get your inspections caught up, even if it means you have to work weekends and take birds off the flying schedule.”

  The maintenance officer understood the long holiday they had been enjoying under Morris was over.

  Another thought occurred to Waters. “Do you have a bird that’s totally current on all inspections?”

  “Only 512,” the DM told him. “The crew chief punched out a gun-plumber for not inspecting the cannon. We gave the chief an Article Fifteen for fighting and took a stripe.”

  “Okay, at least we’ve got one warbird on this air patch. Give the chief back his stripe and assign a pilot and wizzo to 512. Make it Locke and Bryant since they got a MiG with it. Paint their names under the canopies. That’s their bird from now on.”

  “Colonel,” the DM protested, “that’s against regulations—”

  “I’m waiving that reg, Colonel. Second, paint my name on a hangar queen, the worst bird you’ve got. Tell the crew chief that I’m flying it tomorrow and that it had better be on the schedule. I’ll be out to check on my bird soonest. Sam,” he allowed a grin at his DO—“team me with the worst wizzo in the wing. Put his name on the bird with mine and get him on the flying schedule with me tomorrow.”

  “Just how bad of a basketcase do you want?” Hawkins said happily, thinking that he was retiring too early. “I’ve got a few.”

  “The absolute pits of pitters, the guy who has trouble even recognizing an F-4.” Waters looked at the group. “Also, I understand we haven’t found all the practice bombs that fell out of the SUU-21. Get some volunteers to start searching for those puppies tomorrow.”

  The young crew chief was poring over the maintenance forms with Waters, trying to explain why his plane was the wing’s hangar queen. Nothing Maintenance did seemed to cure the Phantom’s ills, and aircraft number 744 spent more time grounded and in the hangar than on the flight line. A roly-poly first lieutenant scurried up to them, out of breath. “S-s-sir,” he stammered. “Lieutenant Ambler Furry reporting as ordered.” He made an awkward salute.

  Waters took a deep breath; Lieutenant Furry looked like a walking disaster area—unkempt, out of shape, in need of fixing—like 744. “You don’t need to salute in a work area,” Waters told him. “It’s considered inefficient.”

  “S-s-sorry, sir. No one ever told me that before,” Furry said, following Waters and the crew chief as they walked around the plane.

  The lieutenant’s slight stammer and fumbling gestures tugged at Waters’ memory…My God, he thought, it’s an overweight version of C. J. Conlan when he was young. Conlan was the air-defense suppression expert he had asked Cunningham for. Waters took a few steps away from the Phantom and pointed at the black letters and numbers painted on the tail. “What’s the SW stand for?”

  “Stonewood, sir,” Furry answered, his stammer disappearing now that he was involved in prosaics.

  “And the number 80-744?”

  “It’s the aircraft serial number,” the crew chief said.

  “And the eighty stands for the year it was built,” Waters said. “This is the last Phantom built by McDonnell Douglas. Five thousand F-4s and we’ve got the tail end. Well, we’re going to fly this baby tomorrow. You two get it ready.”

  “But, sir, what if it’s not fixed—?”

  “Then Ambler had better be damn good pulling the ejection handle,” Waters said, and walked out of the hangar.

  The birdwatcher leveled his long telephoto lens on the tripod and sighted it down the runway. By zooming in on the Phantom he planned on taking a series of shots as the plane made its takeoff roll directly toward him. Then as the F-4 lifted off he would switch to the camera slung around his neck. He watched as the warbird hunkered down on its nose, caging the thrust of its engines as the pilot ran them up. Now the plane started to move and he could hear the crack of the afterburners kicking in. He shot three pictures before the big bird lifted off. He was pleased as the nose came steeply up, giving him a good shot of the underside of the craft. But something was wrong, the pilot ruddered the F-4 to the left, which brought the nose down and put the plane into a hard left turn, its wings perpendicular to the ground.

  The plane was turning away from him when he saw the canopies fly off and the backseater eject parallel to the ground. Then the frontseater came out, but his vector was pointed slightly down and the birdwatcher was sure that he would hit the ground before his chute had time to open. Once the crew had separated from the Phantom, the warbird pitched back up and danced on its tail before flopping onto its back and crashing into the woods less than a thousand feet from the end of the runway. He watched the first parachute deploy and swing once before the strong east wind blew it back onto the runway. The second chute snapped open as the man hit th
e ground. The birdwatcher did not know if it had opened in time. The seat bounced less than twenty yards away from the pilot.

  The birdwatcher had managed to capture the entire sequence on film. Should be worth a fair price to the media, he thought…

  The controller in the tower reached for the crash phone the instant he saw the Phantom pitch up. He had seen films of F-100s doing their “Sabre Dance” from over-rotating on takeoff and prayed the Martin-Baker ejection seat was good enough to get the crew out. Instead of keying the crash net he kept shouting, “Left, left, goddamn it…” To the right of the runway he could see the village where his family lived. When he saw the F-4’s nose come down and the canopies fly off he gave the warning, “Attention on the net, attention on the net. Crash Alert, Crash Alert! F-4 crash off departure end of runway zero-nine. Repeat, F-4 crash off departure end of runway zero-nine. This is not a drill. All units standby for coordinates. Two parachutes sighted. Parachutes at departure end of runway zero-nine. Crash at Juliet-Ten. Repeat. Juliet-Ten.”

  He could hear the sirens start to wail, and glanced at the flying schedule, checking the name of the pilot that had directed his disabled jet away from the village. “I owe you big time, Bull Morgan.”

  Normal activity on the base suddenly halted as the wing reacted to the crash alert. The emergency actions controller in the command post notified Colonels Bradley and Hawkins, then started an accountability check of all the wing’s aircraft that were airborne. By the time Bradley entered the command post the controller had identified the aircraft, pilot, and weapons systems officer. “It wasn’t Waters. He’s dumping fuel and will land in about fifteen minutes,” he told the colonel, then sent out a flash message to the three levels of higher headquarters above the wing. Now they had to wait.

  “Ambler, now’s when we’ve got to be cool,” Waters told his backseater after the command post had called him for an accountability check and given him an RTB, return to base. “We’ve lost another bird and my ass is in a crack. But we are going to recover by the numbers. What’s the first thing I’ve got to do to get our baby on the ground?”

  “Dump fuel to get our landing weight down,” the wizzo said quickly.

  “Rog, dumping fuel now.” Waters’ hand poised over the fuel-dump switch and waited.

  “Not over land,” Ambler shouted, “over water.”

  “Right. Now you’re doing your job. You know how, so do it.”

  The ejection out of the F-4 provided Doc Landis with the wildest ride he’d ever experienced. When Bull had shouted, “Eject, eject,” he had reached for the ejection handle between his legs, only to find it blocked by the stick that was full-back against the seat and the handle. He had reached above his head and pulled on the face-curtain handles, which also started the ejection sequence for both men. The ejection gun fired, propelling the seat up the guide rails, igniting the rocket pack under the seat and sending Landis out of the airplane with a twelve-G kick. In quick sequence he felt a series of jerks as first the controller drogue chute, then the stabilizer drogue chute and the main parachute deployed. In less than three-and-a-half seconds after he pulled the handle, Landis had separated from the seat, taken one swing in his parachute and landed on the runway. As he did, everything that Thunder had taught him came back in a rush. He hit the quick release clips on his chest, releasing the big chute before it could drag him over the ground, then ran toward the other parachute that was still inflated and dragging Bull through the grass. He jumped into the canopy’s fabric, grabbing and pulling until the chute collapsed, quickly rolled the big pilot over, releasing the parachute risers from his harness should the parachute canopy reinflate in the wind. “Hell of a day, Doc,” Bull Morgan said, looking up at Landis. “You wouldn’t happen to have a beer on you?”

  “Lay down,” Landis ordered. “You may be hurt, are likely in a state of shock.” But when he quickly examined the man he found him only bruised, scratched and filthy from being dragged through the grass.

  Bull shook his head. “Doc, you went out too. Why don’t you join me and we’ll swap lies till the crash trucks get here.”

  The first crash truck on the scene found them lying in the short grass on their back, side by side, laughing like loons.

  At the hospital they were just coming out of the lab where a technician had taken the obligatory blood samples for drugs or alcohol when Waters found them.

  “What happened?”

  Bull stood in the corridor, hands on hips and leaning forward into the colonel. “Maintenance again, Colonel. I’m going to nail their asses—”

  “Bull, take it easy,” Waters said. “You’ve been through ejections before. Save what you’ve got for the accident board.” That’s all we need, Waters thought, two accident boards on-base at the same time.

  “What do we do now?” Landis said.

  “The flying safety officer is around here someplace and will want to talk to us,” Bull told him. “But right now I’m going over to Maintenance and find the flight-controls specialist that worked on the bird last.”

  “What the hell happened?” Landis pressed.

  “The goddamn stick programmed full-aft when we lifted off; the bird was trying to do a loop. We didn’t have the airspeed or the altitude for that. I used the rudder to roll us into a ninety-degree bank to the left, which put us into a tight left turn away from the village. Except our lift vector was perpendicular to good old gravity and we didn’t have a hell of a lot of airspeed to help us out. That’s when I told you to eject us. And that’s what goddamn happened.”

  “But why are you going to Maintenance?”

  “The bird was trying to do the same thing yesterday but I broke the stick free. I wrote it up in the maintenance forms and even told them it was a problem with a leaking actuator valve. Airman Siebold didn’t do his job right when he signed it off and I’m just going to explain a few things to him…”

  The doctor trailed after the Bull, trying to talk him out of going to Maintenance. But he went directly to the flight control shop and found the young airman who had repaired the Phantom. To Doc’s surprise, though, Morgan sat the young man down and talked quietly with him, gesturing with his hands and, as he said he would, explaining what had happened. Then he took the nineteen-year-old to a work bench and disassembled an actuator valve like the one that had failed and caused the accident, showing what went wrong. Before he left he gave the airman’s rear a swat and told him to take it easy.

  “That’s the way Colonel Waters handled things at Nellis and Bitburg,” Bull said. “Works good with young troops. The kid will feel like a shithead for a few days, but he’ll learn. He better. I stop being Mr. Nice Guy the second time around.”

  Waters thumbed through the pages of the London newspaper, ignoring the topless pinup on page three. He was concentrating on the birdwatcher’s photographs that had made the first and second page of the national newspaper under the headline: “Death Crash of Fighter—Farmers Live in Fear.” He threw the paper down. “No one was killed,” he snapped at the paper, then picked up the phone and called Childs.

  The English group captain listened to Waters and agreed that the birdwatcher would probably be delighted to meet the crew he had photographed ejecting, hung up and called the president of the Suffolk Birdwatchers Club. He placed a second call to Anglia TV.

  Later that afternoon he ushered Brian Philips into Waters’ office. Philips was a tall and gangly man who kept bobbing his head when he talked, reminding Waters of a stooped whooping crane with two cameras hung around its neck. The three men then drove out to the hangar where the pieces of the wreckage were being collected and examined. Bull Morgan and Doc Landis were already waiting for them, and Philips was delighted as he shot roll after roll of film. When Philips seemed satisfied with the pictures he had taken, Waters rummaged through the wreckage until he found the actuator valve he was looking for. He and Philips then squatted on the floor while the wing commander explained how the valve had malfunctioned and how Bull Morgan h
ad used the Phantom’s rudder to guide the dying aircraft to the left away from the village.

  After the pictures and a television interview with the birdwatcher, public opinion swung in favor of the wing. A few of the older citizens even went on record that they were glad to have neighbors like the 45th, men who would stay with an aircraft to guide it away from their village. Sir David Childs was a bloody genius. But the next time…

  The Maintenance problem lent itself to no PR deal. After investigations were completed, slipshod maintenance was found the primary cause in both crashes. When Waters asked Colonel Leason to come into his office the DM had no illusions why he was there and fully expected Waters to fire him on the spot. He had seen other DMs replaced for much less.

  “Tell me,” Waters said, “why Maintenance can’t hack it.”

  “Colonel Waters,” Leason began, “I’ve been playing a survival game. Took the easy way out…I mean, Colonel Morris was only interested in flying the exact number of hours headquarters allocated to us each calendar quarter. As long as we kept on schedule and maintained the time line he stayed off our backs. Since he cut back on the number of demanding missions the crews were flying, we got out of the habit of keeping the birds fully tweaked—”

  “History, Leason. I asked why Maintenance can’t hack it now. All you’ve done is told me why you were screwing off under Morris.”

  “Given a chance, sir, we can do our job.” Given incentive was more like it, Waters thought. “How long will it take you to get the birds back in shape?”

  “If we have to fly the time line and the required amount of night sorties, at least six months—”