In any case, it didn’t matter to Angie. Angie was confronting a modern dilemma: She liked the Navy just fine, and loved flying fighters. But there was something else she wanted even more.
Though she was a product of the new age of feminism—women as warriors and nurturers—she didn’t think it would work for her. She wanted a traditional family. She had three and a half years of squadron duty ahead of her. And during that time she would have to make a decision: could she be a career naval officer and seagoing fighter pilot—and a mother?
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J. J. “Sniper” was still the oddball among the nuggets of Class 2-95. Before he reported to his new Marine F/A-18 squadron at Beaufort, South Carolina, J.J. had already pinned on his major’s leaves. His elevated rank only accentuated his oddness. As a senior officer in a fighter squadron, he should have been one of the most experienced. Instead, he was as much a nugget as the newest graduate of flight training.
But J. J. was a survivor. He had passed with a qualifying score on every test that he took—eventually. He had gotten to the cockpit of a Hornet fighter by tenacity and guts.
On the inside of J.J.’s locker door was taped the same motto that had gotten him through strike fighter training: CUNNING AND TREACHERY WILL TRIUMPH OVER YOUTH AND SKILL.
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Chip Van Doren, like all the Navy nuggets of Class 2-95, wound up in a Cecil-based squadron. Since his squadron was not scheduled to deploy overseas for nearly a year, Van Doren had ample opportunity to indulge his other passion—computers. With a fellow techno-geek, a Hornet pilot in another squadron, he started a small Jacksonville-based computer company specializing in optical storage devices. During its first nine months in business, the company’s revenue swelled to nearly a quarter million dollars.
Once upon a time, Van Doren had considered himself a lifer. He would fly fighters for as long as the Navy let him. Now he had changed mind. He had other things to do.
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They were clustered on the concrete ramp at Maxwell Air Force Base, all four hundred of them, squinting upward at the hazy blue sky. Their mouths were open. Their eyes were fixed on a dot low against the horizon.
It was Memorial Day, 1996. The Tuskegee Airmen Association—the black fighter pilots from World War II—had brought in this bunch of minority kids from all over the country to Tuskegee, Alabama for their annual convention. Tuskegee was a place where black kids interested in aviation could find a support network. It was a place where they could find mentors and role models.
One such role model was just arriving. Four hundred young faces tilted skyward like sunflowers, following the blurred image of an F/A-18 fighter streaking toward them.
Vrrrrrrooooooom! The jet ripped across the field at six hundred feet, then broke sharply to the left. Vapor from the moist morning air spewed from each wing. The sleek jet entered the traffic pattern, slowed and glided down to the runway. When it had landed, the fighter rolled right up to where the kids stood waiting.
The engines whined to a stop. The pilot climbed down from the cockpit. He wore the twin bars of a Marine Corps captain on each shoulder of his gray-green flight suit. He waved at the kids, giving them a big toothsome grin.
Road Ammons, alumnus of the Tuskegee kids’ program, was returning to his roots. It was payback time.
ROBERT GANDT is a former naval aviator, international airline captain, and a prolific military and aviation writer. He is the author of thirteen books, including the novels The Killing Sky and Black Star Rising and the definitive work on modern naval aviation, Bogeys and Bandits. His screen credits include the television series Pensacola: Wings of Gold. His acclaimed account of the Battle for Okinawa, The Twilight Warriors (Broadway Books, a division of Random House) was the winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature. He and his wife, Anne, live in the Spruce Creek Fly-In, an aviation community in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Connect with him online at:
Robert Gandt Author’s web site; Facebook fanpage; Amazon’s Robert Gandt Page ; Smashwords Author Page; Random House Author’s Page
Here’s an excerpt from
Fly Low Fly Fast
Robert Gandt’s inside account of the world’s fastest motorsport, the National Championship Air Races. Fly Low Fly Fast ignites with the fierce rivalries, the heroic struggles to keep the hypertuned ex-fighter racing planes flying, and the heart-stopping drama of the races themselves . . .
Prologue
8 September
It was damned peculiar, he thought. Tiger Destefani had never heard this particular noise before. Here he was, ripping across the floor of the desert at nearly five hundred miles per hour—and there was this sudden… silence.
But it wasn’t really silence. The big throbbing sound of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine had been replaced by a kind of… shriek. It sounded like a howling banshee. It took Destefani several seconds to realize what he was hearing—the high-pitched screech of the airstream slipping over Strega’s aluminum skin at nearly supersonic speed. The sound had always been there, of course, but it was usually drowned out by that baritone bellow of the Merlin engine cranking out three-thousand horse power.
The Merlin: It was one of the most goose-bump-inducing engine noises on the planet, ranking somewhere between the space shuttle and the Harley-Davidson in charismatic sound effects. Anyone who had ever been in the vicinity of a low-flying Mustang or Spitfire fighter never forgot the sound.
The Rolls Royce Merlin engines, race pilots said, were like high-strung mistresses. When they were good, they were really good. They could transport you to a state of ecstasy. When they were bad, they could spit flame and oil and molten metal like screaming furies from hell. Of all the racing airplanes out there at Reno, the Merlin-powered Mustangs were the most temperamental. Over the years Mustangs had made more spectacular returns to the earth at Reno than any other type of race plane.
It wasn’t hard to understand why. Inside the cowling (which in layman terms meant “under the hood”) of a Mustang was a scene of unimaginable violence: twenty-one-thousand high-compression explosions each minute, three thousand hunks of sizzling metal alloy flailing, rotating, gyrating in unison, sucking in an exotic high-octane compressed air-fuel vapor with the explosive property of nitroglycerin. What was even more unimaginable was that all this violence stayed somehow contained within the fragile metal shell of the engine compartment.
Of course, sometimes it didn’t.
In his secret heart every Mustang pilot knew that someday, if he flew long enough behind a Merlin, a certain day would come. That sweet-sounding, contented purr of the Merlin would be replaced by a cacophony of metallic violence. Or a flash of godawful orange flame. Or a sheet of super-heated oil blackening the windshield.
Or the ghastly silence of a stopped engine.
Everyone who raced Mustangs knew that such a day might come. The bitch-mistress Merlin would turn on him. The big throbbing rumble would become a hideous shriek. For Tiger Destefani, that day was today.
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Tiger Destefani was the reigning world’s Unlimited Air Racing champion. He had already won this event five times, held annually at Stead Field in Reno, Nevada, and this year he intended to make it six. But first, before they began the heat races and then the final trophy race on the upcoming Sunday, everyone had to go out on the course and post a qualifying time.
Strega, Destefani’s very tricked-out Mustang with clipped wings and a hugely overstretched engine, was humming nicely. The Merlin sounded like a happy animal mounted up there in the Mustang’s long graceful nose. In its original WWII version the Merlin cranked out 1475 horsepower, which gave the Mustang enough clout to eat up anything the Luftwaffe could put in the sky.
That was then. Strega’s engine had been modified, stretched, and stroked so that it was capable of an incredible 3800 horsepower! Of course, Destefani wasn’t pushing it that hard, at least not today. All that high-end, unrestrained eyeball-popping torque he intended to save for Sunday, the
day of the unlimited gold race. Then he’d use it all if necessary—whatever it took to be in front of the pack when they waved the checkered flag.
Yes, things were humming nicely—as far as Tiger knew. But what he didn’t know was that certain events were transpiring inside the cowling that would change his day.
It was Monday afternoon, nearly five o’clock, and Tiger had Strega’s nose pointed down the chute. Except for an hour-long test flight and then the ferry flight over the mountains from Bakersfield, this newly installed engine had not been worked hard. Tiger was taking it easy. For his first lap around the course he nudged the throttle up to sixty inches of manifold pressure—less than half of Strega’s full power.
All okay. The early evening air was smooth, and Strega was handling well. Destefani was rounding the pylons on a counter-clockwise circuit, staying level, not wasting energy by letting the Mustang climb in the turn, then descending back to the straightaway. This kind of flying was a treat, zipping around the course without the presence of other racers to challenge and harass him. His only rival out here today was the clock. All he had to do was fly fast and post the best qualification time. Then he could take the next three days off until the first heat races.
Strega was ready, and so was Destefani. No need to waste fuel or engine life. Approaching the home pylon, he radioed, “Race Seven, On the clock.”
He pushed the throttle up. The throb of the Merlin deepened. Tiger felt himself nudged back in the seat as the Mustang accelerated.
Strega was moving now, approaching five hundred miles per hour on the straightaway. Coming up on pylon eight, Destefani rolled the Mustang up on its left wing, pulling four-and-a-quarter Gs as he entered the turn. Under the force of over four times his normal weight, he felt himself squashed down in the seat. Little streams of perspiration squirted down from beneath his helmet. Coming around the pylon, he was aimed down the home stretch, the last leg of the course, past the grandstands and the pits and the ramp area. For Destefani, this was a familiar scenario.
Meanwhile, the other scenario—the one being played out just beyond the periphery of Tiger Destefani’s awareness— was reaching a climax.
At some point since its installation, the flange of the Merlin engine’s rear left exhaust stack had become warped, causing it be imperfectly mated to the engine’s exhaust port. Through the tiny leak between the exhaust port and the stack, a jet of white-hot exhaust gas was spewing against the aluminum cowling. And now that the engine was being revved up to very high power—nearly twice its original design limit— the heated gas was melting away the cowling frame that separated the hot engine compartment from the ignition magnetos.
Something had to give. And, in the space of the next three seconds, it did. A sequence of events brought the two scenarios—the one in Destefani’s cockpit and the one beneath the cowling—into chaotic union.
The jet of hot exhaust reached the vital P-leads—the two main cables from the magnetos to the Merlin’s twenty-four spark plugs…
Zzzzzssst! The P-leads melted, followed by...
A cessation of electricity from the magnetos to the spark plugs, causing…
All twenty-four spark plugs to stop firing, resulting in…
Silence—a quietness so profound and ghastly that it triggered a surge of adrenaline in Tiger Destefani powerful enough to jolt a mule.
Destefani’s happiness vanished in a heartbeat. Here he was, at five hundred miles per hour, one hundred feet over the desert floor, in full charge toward the home pylon. And his 3800-horse-power engine was putting out this sudden, utter, ghastly… nothing. He could hear just this... shriek.
The most peculiar thing about it was that he couldn’t hear a sound from the freaking engine. Not a growl, not even a croaking groan. It was as though every spark of life had been removed from the damned thing.
But the strangest noise was that goddamned shrieking sound. Shit, that was really weird, hearing all that air noise—without the accompanying roar of a healthy, full-throated Merlin engine.
He’d practiced this scene a hundred times—in his head. That had always been Destefani’s training technique, to play over and again such events in his imagination, going through each phase of the emergency procedure when things suddenly went to hell. It was the same visualization technique professional athletes used to rehearse their games. Destefani would rehearse each sequence in his mind until he could see himself handling it without a mistake.
But that was all in his imagination. This was the real thing.
Destefani hauled the nose of Strega upward, converting the nearly five-hundred-miles per hour of kinetic energy to life-saving altitude. The more the better.
“Race Seven, Mayday!” he called on the operations frequency.
“Roger, Tiger,” came the calm voice of Jack Thomas, the operations director up in his open air tower. “The airport’s yours. Wind one-three-zero at ten knots. Which runway do you want?”
“Zero-eight.”
“You’re cleared to land, runway zero-eight.”
Cleared to land. That sounded like a joke, except that no one was laughing. You were always supposed to get clearance before you landed. In this case Strega was going to land in exactly ninety seconds—clearance or not. The only question was whether it would be on concrete or dirt.
Up, up, high above the desert the engineless fighter soared. At four thousand feet Destefani nosed over. The Mustang was indicating one-hundred-seventy knots of airspeed—the optimum speed for an engine-out descent.
Now Strega was a glider. But unlike a real glider, the stubby-winged, nine-thousand-pound Mustang fighter had all the gliding characteristics of a descending dump truck.
Down he came. Below he could see the sprawl of Stead Field, with its three connected runways, all looking pitifully short and narrow. And he could see the surrounding terrain—rocks and dwarf trees and serrated ridges. It looked like the surface of an asteroid.
Tiger knew the procedure by heart. This would be a dead stick landing—the pilots’ term for an arrival in an airplane without power. Not only had he practiced it a hundred times in his head, he’d already lived through a dozen such experiences, most of them here at Reno.
Tiger was acting out all the moves he’d rehearsed in his visualization drills: Fly abeam the landing end of the runway at no less than two thousand feet. Keep the thing turning toward the runway. Don’t land short! Landing short was ugly. It meant gullies and boulders and explosions. Landing short trashed your million-dollar airplane and turned you into a crispy critter. Aim a third of the way down the runway. That gave you some room for error. Get the gear down, then wait on the landing flaps. Use only a few degrees of flaps at first, just what you need. Flaps were high drag items, meaning they increased your sink rate, shortened your glide, put your butt in the sagebrush. Save full flaps until you had the runway made.
It was working. Destefani brought Strega around the base leg of the approach, turning all the way, lining up with runway zero-eight. He had the Mustang’s gear down. He could tell that on this descent path he would land nearly half way down the runway.
Good. Time to lower some more flaps, steepen the glide path. That would shorten the glide land him only about a third down the runway.
The end of runway zero-eight swept beneath him. He lowered the flaps to full, letting the Mustang slow to landing speed.
Chirp! Chirp! The wheels of the main landing gear stroked the concrete. Tiger let the Mustang roll out, gently lowering the tail wheel to the runway.
From the pit area, Strega’s worried ground crew watched the drama play itself out. They had heard the engine go dead as the racer was roaring down the home stretch, seen Destefani pull up, held their collective breath while he executed the dead stick approach and landing.
It was over. Strega and Destefani were safe. They could breathe again. But like Destefani, they still had not a clue what had gone wrong.
While Strega was still rolling out, Bill Kerchenfaut, the team’s c
rew chief, called on the radio. In the high drama of the moment, no one seemed to notice the pointlessness of his question: “Can you make it on your own power or do you need a tug?”
For several seconds, no one said anything. The Mustang rolled to a stop on the runway. Strega’s big four-bladed propeller was motionless. The Merlin engine was silent as a tomb.
Destefani said, deadpan, “Better bring the tug.”
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