Tail of the Storm

by Alan Cockrell

  I was awed at my roommate, Dan, who was an advanced T-37 student and had soloed three or four times. I immediately regarded him as a squire would his knight, and Dan, delighted, instantly became my mentor.

  I strolled over to the officer's club that first night and looked around for another new facesomeone with wide, searching eyes, like mine; someone who stood to the side, and wore civvies instead of flight suits because he had not gotten his yet. And immediately I found one. His name was Steve Hart, and yes! He also was in 73–06, the new class starting tomorrow. I had found a classmate. Tall and stout, he was from an Oregon timber family, and we were instant friends. We left the club that night drunk not with alcohol but with exhilaration. The dream was to begin tomorrow.

  "Gentlemen, welcome to Vance Air Force Base, and to Enid, Oklahoma. Let me first tell you a few things about Enid. It has four bars and forty-four churches, so don't expect much in the way of nightlife."

  The base commander paused for the obligatory laughter.

  "Now, if you decide to go into one of the drinking establishments here, you should fit in fairly well as long as you don't bad-mouth wheat, cows, or oil."

  I didn't intend to bad-mouth anything or anyone. I was just glad to be there. We looked around and sized one another up. After all, the year ahead would be a race to see who could finish at the top of the class for the choicest of follow-on assignments. A few of the guys had been in the Air Force for a while. One was a captain already. Word spread like wildfire that another guy already had logged 500 civilian hours. He would likely do well. Yet solid friendships began to form immediately

  The first few weeks were a breeze. They bused us out each morning to Woodring Airport on the east side of town (Ringworm Field, we called it) and began screening us in the USAF's smallest trainer, the T-41. It was nothing more than a beefed-up Cessna 172. Having over 200 hours in my logbookmostly from lifting the University of Alabama Skydiving ClubI sailed through the program but not without some trepidation. My instructor's impatience with my undisciplined civilian flying habits began to show on the fourth flight.

  "Lieutenant Cocktell, you're gonna learn to fly this thing the Air Force way, or go back to whatever the hell barnstorming act you came from!"

  I didn't want to go back. I learned it his way.

  But my stick partnerthe other student with whom I shared an instructorwasn't so fortunate. He was the academic type who knew all the book answers. He reminded us of an eager grade schooler who was constantly raising his hand in class, waving it back and forth, and begging to answer the question, while the rest of us cut eyes toward one another and suppressed snickers. "Right, OK," was his standard transition to a follow-up argument with the classroom instructors, but the poor guy pinked every single ride. (Back then we referred to a failed flight lesson as a "pink" because it was documented on pink paperwork. These days UPT students use the term "hook" to signify the same thing. "Hook" alludes to the "U" for unsatisfactory.) After three straight pinks, they gave you an "88" ride with a senior flight examiner. If you pinked that one, you then took a "99" ride with the chief of standardization/evaluation. If you hooked that one, you were history.

  By the end of week number two, I was the lone student at the table. Then they moved an eager young guy from Ohio named Pete Lee over to my table. He became my friend and brother in Christ forever.

  T-37 Tweet

  The T-41 program ended after about fifteen hours of flying, and those of us who were left were fitted for helmets and masks. Our time had come. The academic portion of our training had begun in earnest, and those who had majored in nontechnical studies in college began to feel pressure. In the mornings they threw heavy doses of aerodynamics, weather, propulsion, navigation, and aviation physiology at us. In the afternoons we ambled out with our instructors to the pudgy little Tweets to put our newfound wisdom to use.

  The name "Tweet" evolved not because the plane appeared birdlike or flew with the grace of an eagleGod knows it didn'tbut because it screeched with a shrill that set teeth on edge and made ears quiver. The Tweet was a preposterous six-thousand-pound dog whistle. It was a machine from hell that happily carried out the devil's mandate of converting fuel into insane noise.

  But it was easy to fly and was an especially good trainer because of its side-by-side seats. Your instructorhis helmet, visor, and oxygen mask giving him the appearance of a frightful monstercould spy your every move, with a godlike eminence.

  I took to the Tweet well and had a good instructor. Steve and Pete weren't so lucky. Their IPs were screamersimpatient hotheads who wished they were somewhere else, flying "real" airplanes. Still, Steve and Pete hung tight. But Dan, my roommate, was beginning to have problems with his advanced instrument maneuvers.

  Shortly before my first solo in the Tweet, I came back to the room, and found Dan in a near stupor. The living room of our small apartment smelled like a distillery His head hung low and he looked up at me when I walked in. His face was smeared with tears. Dan had had his 99 ride that morning. The whiskey and tears testified to its results. I tried in my feeble way to console him, but he just slipped away into his bedroom and shut the door. When I returned from flying the next afternoon, his room was cleaned out.

  UPT Class 73–06 plodded along through a hot summer of T-37 flying, and most of us soloed. Those who couldn't turned in their gear and cleared the base. While Steve and Pete struggled with ornery instructors, I continued in good fortune with levelheaded IPs who treated me well. Still, I lived in fear that I would be assigned one of the screamers.

  I marveled at how UPT could be so stressful and yet so enjoyable at the same time. I was having the time of my life, but occasionally I needed to get away from the base. I took therapeutic drives down Enid's tranquil streets, watching children playing and people mowing lawns. I dined with the farmers at the Wagon Wheel Cafe and paused to watch combines harvest the golden wheat in the shadows of the giant grain elevators north of town.

  Enid seemed the all-American town to me. It was a family town where the work ethic was a respected way of life, where beef and bread and energy were produced to feed the impersonal metropolises that seemed so far away (and good riddance). I liked it there. It just seemed rich. And it got a great deal richer when my grandmother's wishes for me proved prophetic.

  I tested the limited nightlife around town and didn't care much for it. I met Eleanor at a picnic held by one of the forty-four churches. She was tall and beautiful, and within a couple of weeks the T-37 had to move over and make room for her in the hangar of my affections.

  Pete and I seemed to be the only two bachelors of 73–06 who found quality female companionship in Enid. Eleanor became the focal point of my life, and many Sunday afternoons found us in Meadow Lake Park, in the shade, where she quizzed me from study guides. Four months into UPT and still I was pinching myself. Here I was, lying with my head in the lap of this angel, pretending to be studying, and tomorrow I would be flying jets again. Yes, yes! There was a God.

  Still, the long hours in academia and the intense flying took its toll on our vitality, and we devised various ways to vent. Poker was the most expedient escape, and consequently a couple of times a week someone would write an announcement on the scheduling board to the effect that a seminar in combinations and permutations was to be held in so-and-so's room at 1800 hours. The session usually began after a surprise hit-and-run attack on the o-club bar and was almost invariably held in the on-base apartment of one of the bachelors. We sat around the tables in sweat-soaked flight suits, throwing down quarters and cards, begging the married guys, who fidgeted and glanced at their watches, to stay a little longer.

  It was at such a game that the most profound statement ever made about my character was proffered. Although I had pretty good hands for flying airplanes, I couldn't shuffle cards worth a fiddle. On every other attempt the cards exploded and scattered, to the dismay of my impatient classmates, prompting Steve Randle to remark, "Al, the trouble with you is, you ain't got no frigg
in' class."

  Willy Mays, our resident scholar, clown, and dreamer howled. Willy was one of the best fliers in our class and the most charismatic individual. We became good friends, although we differed on some fundamental beliefs about life. I watched his progress closely, knowing that he would be one of my main rivals for a good "pick."

  The competitive atmosphere impressed itself upon us from day one. Our academic test scores and our periodic checkride marks combined to establish class standing, on the basis of which our ultimate duty assignments would be made. As we approached graduation, the Air Force would send the base a number of assignments, corresponding to the expected number of graduates. Each assignment specified a type of aircraft and a base. The list would be published, and each student would submit his preferences in numerical order. The top-ranked student would be awarded his first choice, and subsequently ranked students would get their highest available choice; the bottom guy took what was left. In such a scheme the fighter jobs usually went high on the list, as well as the C-141 assignments, because of their strong airline quality experience. The instructor, C-130, and tanker assignments usually went about the middle of the class, and the bomber jobs went toward the bottom. And because of this, our class had become somewhat of a test case. The Strategic Air Command was so tired of getting pilots from the bottom of the classes that they demanded that some of their bomber assignments be earmarked for the middle of the class. Thus, some of our good fliers were bound for bombers, whether they wanted to go or not. I preferred a C-141 slot because I wanted to travel the world and build flying time quickly. But that aspiration was to be snuffed out when I lit the afterburners on my first T-38 flight.

  About the time the weather began to cool, we finished the T-37 phase and were fitted with G-suitsthose of us who remained. The T-38 Talon was the second of the UPT jets, but it contrasted vividly with the first one, the venerable T-37. Where the Tweet was flounderlike and round nosed, the '38 was supremely streamlined and beautiful. Where the Tweet was slow, the '38, with its powerful afterburners, was canned speed. While the Tweet screeched, the '38 thundered. It was long and sleekyears ahead of its time. Its flowing aerodynamic lines radiated visions of flight, fast flight, and nothing else. A stranger to the ground, it appeared oddly out of place, there on the flight line. Heaven-sent, it was the stuff of young men's dreams and old men's treasured memories. It was love from the first millisecondthe most beautiful, graceful creature God had ever begotten.

  T-38 Talon

  When the throttles were shoved into the afterburner range on that first demonstration ride, you sank back into the seat under the tremendous acceleration. Your lungs seized and the name of your Savior escaped your lips as the runway stripes raced at you with a blur. Within seconds you were cutting through the air like a knife on stubby blades that somehow passed for wings, while Garfield County angled back and shrank into yesterday. You sat out on the long needle point nose and gawked at a new stratospheric world that was bigger, higher, clearer, and faster changing than any altitude the Tweet could ever aspire to. Feeling like a rookie jockey clinging to a blind racehorse, you burned white contrails against the blue heavens over the Oklahoma panhandle and left sonic booms cascading across the prairies. You worked to develop that delicate touch on the sensitive control stick but sometimes blundered into roll rates of over 360 degrees per second. Or maybe you dished out and let your nose get buried inthe brown and green of the beneath world, and your guts knotted up while your instructor cursed and took over the controls, slamming the throttles to idle, gingerly pulling the nose back into the realm of blue. Gradually, you learned to keep your mind well out in front of a creature that gobbled 800 feet of airspace per second. You developed an uncommon sense of awareness, unparalleled in any other human endeavor.

  And within a few short weeks, your solo was at hand. But now the event was much different. In the world of the Tweets, the first solo was a big deal. Your instructor rode with you on the appointed day and got out of the little jet after a few satisfactory landings. He then entered the runway supervisory unit, the RSU, and watched you carefully, microphone in hand, as you nervously flew a few patterns around the field. Afterward, you were locked into a seventeenth-century-style wooden stock while your classmates happily hosed you down. But come time for you to go it alone in a T-38, it was all business.

  You walked in one morning and saw the S-word beside your name, and when the time came, you grabbed your gear and went out to your assigned jet alone. And you secured the straps in the empty rear cockpit, mounted up on that magnificent white steed and mated yourself to it, and rocketed out to the "tubes," where you were supposed to practice the basic maneuvers in a special piece of airspace assigned you. You didn't practice much of anything. You just held on, trying to keep it pointed in some relatively safe direction while your senses buzzed, and you marveled at the tightrope you were walkingmishap was only a slip away, yet you were riding the pinnacle of life. Then you found your way back to Vance Air Patch before the fuel got too low, set that puppy down on one seven right, and taxied it back into the same hole you came out ofyou hoped. You stopcocked the throttles and listened to the engines spool down and rode the bus back in, and your IP said "How'd it go?" without even looking up at you, and you knew that at last your epiphany was at hand.

  But for some of us bitternessand worseawaited still.

  We were about halfway through the '38 program when the wing commander met with us in the officer's club for a rendition of his safety philosophy. Midway through his presentation, his portable radio squealed, and he spoke into it. We all sat horrified at the hissing message that came back to him. A T-37 had crashed near the town of Nash. One fatality was suspected. Later that day we learned his identity. I didn't know his name, but his face burned through my memory. It was the red-haired kid who was a couple of classes behind us. I had shot the breeze with him in the break room. He was the quintessential kid next dooralways smiling, always talking of home. And now he was dead. The Tweet, spinning out of control, had slammed into a wheat field. The red-haired kid had stayed with it too long. He had ejected too late. His body was found still strapped to the ejection seat.

  For the next few days our mood was somber, and then the pressures of the program compelled us to look ahead and concentrate on the task at hand. But violent death would strike our band eventuallywe knew it. We just didn't talk about it.

  By T-38 midphase I was reaching my stride. On my first formation flight I discovered one of flying's greatest joysto waltz the sky inches from another aircraft. I reveled in the challenge of absolute concentration and was truly at home on the wing. I dreamed of becoming a Thunderbird, flying one of the beautifully painted jets in the famous diamond formation, thundering across an azure sky; crowds looking up, shading their eyes in unbelieving awe. I don't know what it is that makes pilots want to impress surface dwellers with their thundering prowessjust ego, I guess. But I know that any pilot who doesn't have such a desire is probably minimally skilled anyway. And this "shine-ass" tendency, as it's known, is the torment of commanders, who work hard to suppress it and to make examples of those who succumb to it. Yet a chosen few have both the means and the license to bathe crowds in thunder, to wash them with waves of wild delight and wonder. I should have been one of them. But Willy Mays was the one destined for Thunderbird blue.

  We took our formation flight checkride together, he with a check pilot in his jet, me with an examiner in mine. I knew he was good, and I set about to bring it out. We were flying a standard USAF formation. I was leading and Willy was on my left side, or left wing. No matter what I didwhether I climbed, descended, or turnedhe stayed in his position, which was slightly low and slightly behind. From his vantage point, my left wing tip was superimposed on the circle-and-star symbol painted on my air intake. Keeping the wing tip on that star was his sole objective.

  And there he sat, as if glued to some invisible bar between us, making us one instead of two, his wing tip only three feet out and behind
mine. He was doing well, and I decided to challenge him. The signal for directing the wingman to change positions to the other side of the leader is a quick wing dip by the leader to the opposite side. To do this, the wingman reduces power very slightly and gently slips under and across to the opposite wing. But we had never been taught to do this except in level flight. We were in a 45 degree left bank when I swallowed hard and gave him the signal. I watched as Willy first hesitated, then slowly dropped low and crossed to the high side of the formation, resuming a perfect position on the right side. I rolled into a steep right bank and signaled him again to cross back to the left side. He was good, damn good. I challenged him again later, after signaling him to fall back into extended trail, by immediately starting a four-G loop. As soon as he had radioed that he was in his position 2,000 feet behind me, I jerked the stick back, pulled the T-38's long nose straight up, and continued the pull over the top into a giant 600-mile-per-hour loop. It was standard practice to give the wingman a little breather before starting such maneuvering, but again, I knew Willy could hack it.

  Then it was his turn to lead, and I reaped what I had sown. I hung tight on the wing and stayed solid through the maneuvers. Then he signaled me back to extended trail. I took the spacing and settled back to follow him through the enormous loops. At one point during an almost vertical climb his jet entered a supercooled layer of air and began to "conn." It was as if a great white tentacle were reaching out from his tailpipes and racing toward me. I had the wild feeling that Willy had impossibly and instantly reversed his course and was screaming straight at me. I flinched when the vapors hit. No drug could ever duplicate the euphoria of the spectacle. It was no trivial expression that the words "naturally high," a slogan concocted by Willy Mays, were embroidered on our class patches.

  We finished the ride and climbed onto the crew bus, soaked with sweat in midwinter, as our check pilots wondered aloud why we hated each other. But it wasn't so. We grinned at one another. And we both passed with high marks.