Tail of the Storm

by Alan Cockrell

  "What?" the real Lemanski shouts from the doorway.

  "Huh? Never mind, I'll explain later. Let's get out of here."

  Seven.

  Pain of a Different Death

  When a pilot dies in the harness, his death seems something that inheres in the craft [flying] itself, and in the beginning the pain it brings is perhaps less than the pain sprung of a different death.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars

  Our Starlifter is cruising back uprange, straight into the setting sun, away from the gathering storm of war. Ahead is the Red Sea with the jagged, ocher Egyptian mountains beyond. Cockpit instrument lights are being turned on. Sunglasses are being stowed. We're prepping the jet for dark flight.

  Unencumbered by haze and pollutants, the sun departs with a great brilliance at this altitude. But the panoramic splay of crimson and orange lasts much longer tonight because we're chasing the sun. We will of course lose the race; the earth turns twice as fast as our speed, but the lingering spectacle inspires a kind of silent reverence through the cockpit. Only the rush of the slipstream and the occasional crackle of modulated radio voices intrude on our sunset ponderings.

  "MAC Victor 6522, Red Crown, you're radar contact, cleared area transition."

  "6522, roger," I reply, staring at the sunset, with visions of Dave's little plane silhouetted against it. It seemed we were always flying late in the evening, the closing of the day forcing us back to the world.

  And I remember how we, the group of us, sat there on that old concrete fence rail until the sun went down, watching the Cessnas take off and land. Watching with envy. Trading dreams. Breaking out of the egg of adolescence, feeling a calling swell within us. Certain that it would be fulfilled but electrified with impatience, we sensed our day was coming.

  We were about evenly endowed then with the traits of future professional fliers. And if God had combined the three of us into one pilot, Gene Key would have been the brain and I the hands. But the heartthat would have been Dave DeRamus.

  The three of us were cut from the same mold: products of financially comfortable working-class families, the oldest sons, townies who lived at home while attending college, the seeds of flight planted in us by fathers who themselves were occasional fliers. But Dave was different in a delightful, inspirational way.

  He was the extrovert, the talker, the dreamer, the romanticizer. And he grew to love flying with every fiber of his being. While Gene quietly, confidently calculated his course in life, and t ambled toward my goal, depending on luck and divine help, Dave swaggered ahead with bold declarations and unabashed single-mindedness, leaving in his wake a reputation of cockiness.

  Dave had a stocky athletic build. He had a passion for football and water skiing and pursued them with intensity and determination, as he did everything. Yet his eyes were soft and far-focused, as if he were discontented and a bit melancholy. His slight smile was always there except when he was directing scorn at his two favorite targets: government bureaucracy and rotten flying weather. He had a tremendous sense of humor and loved to laugh but was also moody. In those early years Dave was a model young Christian who was active in church. He often delivered the invocation at our Air Force ROTC social functions. But change came. An elective course in religious studies, he claimed, had opened his mind. He questioned some of the teachings of his faith and left the church after someone told his mother that Dave was going to Hell for doubting.

  His intellectual departure from traditional belief troubled Gene and me, who stayed the course, but we all remained steadfast friends, bonded by our passion for flight.

  And finally our day came, but the Air Force sent us to different bases for flight school and later gave us sharply different flying assignments. Gene became an instructor, I went to tactical fighters, and Dave was assigned to the secretive world of electronic warfare. Soon Gene and I had taken wives, while Dave chose a single life. But we stayed in touch and visited when we could.

  On one such visit Dave and I met in Spokane, Washington. I recall so clearly what he said that crystal clear afternoon, there in the beautiful, forested mountain countryside north of Spokane. I had a weekend off from the rigors of Survival School at Fairchild AFB, and he had driven over from Malmstrom AFB at Great Falls, Montana, to see me. Neither of us yet had an airplane of our own. We noticed a lone biplane performing aerobatics over a large deserted meadow. Dave and I stopped and watched as the red wings rolled, looped, and spun, the little engine reverberating in the silence of the valley. The pilot obviously intended his private air show for the eyes of God only, but we watched, beholden. And as the plane finally faded away he remarked that he expected his life would end some day in the cockpit of an airplane. I berated him for being a fatalist. Now I wish he had been right.

  I got a letter from him while I was stationed in Thailand. He had bought an airplane, a used Grumman Yankee. He wrote of the plane's sporty handling characteristics and fighterlike appearance. I decided that if he could afford one on first lieutenant's pay, then so could I. And so I too bought a plane as soon as I returned Stateside, an old Cessna 140. But when I visited with Dave and flew the wonderful little low-wing two-seater that embodied the sheer joy and exaltation of flight, I knew I had to have a Yankee as well. I sold the '140.

  We flew together military style whenever we met, wing to wing with only a few feet of separation, waltzing in cumulus-studded skies, pursuing one another in mock air battles. Afterward we would sip Mountain Dew, which was his drink of preference, and rap at length about the stuff of flying. As always, I listened mostly and watched the flash in his eyes as he talked about aspect ratios, power loadings, and corner velocities. He would sketch out dreams of elaborate modifications to his Yankee and talk of plans for air journeys to fascinating places. And he talked of new friends he had made. Friends, he said, who were open-minded and unpretentious, who shared his spirited views and philosophies.

  Dave was clearly jealous of me when I landed a fighter assignment out of pilot training. He was a good flier, but there were no fighter slots available for his class, so he settled for flying EB-57s. The old 1950s vintage twin jet bomber had been converted so that it could carry electronic equipment to test the defensive capabilities of the more modern interceptors of the North American Air Defense Command. Dave's ho-hum job, as he described it, was to fly around and be blown out of the northern skies by imaginary missiles. And I knew, as I learned and practiced fighter tactics in the southwestern deserts, that he felt destiny had forsaken him. But Dave had a plan to find his way into a fighter cockpit and eventually to his ultimate dream: test pilot school.

  We took chances in those days that we would never take now. We flew cross-country one summer in formation from Montana to Alabama. Low clouds stranded us in Springfield, Missouri, and we became impatient. Neither of our planes were equipped for safe instrument flying. While waiting we began to compare the planes and discovered that, together, we had the basic tools to make an instrument flight. He had a good attitude indicator; mine was mushy. I had a transponder; he didn't. We both had VOR receivers. We could back each other up! We didn't have the capability to make a precision instrument approach but reasoned that it didn't matter because the weather was reported to be improving along our intended route. We would make our two planes one. We would pierce the gray clouds glued to one another's wings. We had both done it in Air Force jets. Why not now? We decided to file an instrument flight plan and launch in formation.

  The guy at the flight service station counter looked over our flight plan and pointed to an obvious error. We had written in two different aircraft numbers in the box reserved for such identification. Dave advised him to read on, and he would see why. We had written in the remarks section "Flight of two AA-l's." The technician was incredulous. He, like most general aviation people, thought of formation flying as two or more planes separated by a couple of city blocks of airspace at a minimum.

  "No, no. You can't do that," he responded.

/>   We assured him we could.

  "How you gonna see each other?" he demanded.

  We explained how we proposed to do it and assured him that we regularly did it in the military.

  He finally accepted that we were serious but, doubting that our plan was legal, he phoned the Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center and informed them of the suicidal request he had received. He came back to the counter and removed his glasses.

  "The center says the military does it all the time but they had never seen civilians do it. They said they don't know of any rules against it. So I guess I can't stop you if this is what you want to do."

  A few minutes later we were taxiing out together under a 300-foot cloud ceiling, and Dave took our clearance from the tower.

  "Grumman 5713 Lima Flight is cleared to Greenwood, Mississippi, as filed, maintain five thousand, squawk 0133."

  The tower controller seemed to understand that we were a flight of two, but after giving us takeoff clearance, he was aghast when we taxied onto the runway together.

  "One three Lima, are you taking off in formation?" he queried.

  "Yeah, that's how we filed" was Dave's response.

  He told us to stand by. Obviously, more phone calls were being made as legalities were being checked and our sanity was being questioned, but a minute later he came back up.

  "OK, one three Lima flight, you're cleared for takeoff. Maintain runway heading. Good luck."

  We launched into the murk with me on the wing. I could easily see his dark blue plane in the clouds, and I stayed glued to his wing for almost an hour until we broke into the clear. But still there was a solid undercast beneath us. A little while later we flew over a hole that looked to be a few acres in size, through which we could see the green Mississippi woodlands below. Out ahead of us there was little sign that the undercast was breaking up as we neared our refueling stop at Greenwood, so we canceled instrument flight rules with the center.

  We were then on our own, but visual flight rules required that we remain clear of all clouds. Dave was cautious. He radioed me that the hole looked so small that he didn't know how we were going to descend through it and maintain cloud clearance. I knew he was assuming that we would use a normal shallow descent profile that would put us back into the cloud deck before we descended through the hole, but that's not what I intended. I was a fighter pilot; I knew how to get through the hole.

  I told him to follow me and broke away from his wing. I rolled the Yankee nearly inverted, closed the throttle, pulled the nose down and dove through the hole as if in a dive-bomb attack. He followed. Luckily no one was cruising along under the cloud deck near the hole. But I didn't think anything of it. Such maneuvers were normal for me but not for him. When we landed he was ecstatic about it, and he laughed about it often as time went by.

  A few days later we were out skirmishing over Lake Tuscaloosa. The two Yankees rolled and dove, unnoticed, I'm sure, among the scattered cumulus high above the bass boats and skiers. It really wasn't much of a match. I was pulling a high side "yo-yo" maneuver to gain a tracking solution on him when he decided to reverse his direction of turn. It was a reckless move. I unloaded the G-pressure on my Yankee and reversed my turn in unison with him, rolling out with a perfect lead on his plane. I smiled and pressed the mike button, uttering the three words that told Dave he was beaten.

  "GUNS, GUNS, GUNS."

  Dave knew far more than I about aerodynamics, flight theory, and suchhe had an aerospace engineering degreebut he simply had no experience in air combat science. He rolled out of his breaking turn, and after a minute of silent straight flight, he keyed his radio.

  "How'd you do that?"

  Later, over Mountain Dew, I explained it, as he nodded in pensive analysis.

  A couple of years later, Dave had succeeded in finding his coveted fighter job: an F-106. The '106, or "six pack," was said to be the Cadillac of the fighters, definitely the prettiest fighter plane ever made, and unlike the ponderous brown and green tactical fighter that I flew, it was designed to defend the homeland against bomber attack.

  Later in its years, during dissimilar air combat training, the Six proved to be very adept at preying on other fighters, as well. This was Dave's big break, and he proceeded to make up for lost time.

  We compared notes often. His mission and mine were acutely different. Dave was a liberal political thinker. The politics and tactics of the recently ended Viet Nam war was always a hot subject with us, and such discussions led him to remark that he could never drop bombs on folks, innocent or not. But he loved to vow, with a squinty-eyed grinas if it would be great funthat if a Soviet bomber ever threatened his mother or anyone else's, he wouldn't hesitate to "hose the sons-a-bitches down."

  Once again, we were home on leave when I called him one morning and explained that I was flying my brother to Jasper and would return to attack the VOR at eleven o'clock. The VOR was an unmanned navigation station with a distinctive antenna that resembled a great inverted ice cream cone. It was a challenge to air combat, of course. No more needed to be said. But he allowed as how he planned to go water skiing and had no time for such games. I knew it was a smoke screen.

  At about 10:45 a.m. as I approached Lake Tuscaloosa I tuned my radio to the control tower frequency and, sure enough, heard Grumman 5713L receive takeoff clearance. The cork had been sucked under, as I suspected. My juices started to flow. I retuned my radio to 122.75, the civil air-to-air common frequency, and dropped down low. I maneuvered to approach the station from the east. He wouldn't expect that, since the route down from Jasper was from the north. I began weaving left and right, with each turn "checking six": looking behind for signs of Dave's blue Yankee. He was not to be seen; the plan was working.

  With the target almost in sight, it seemed I had a clear shot. Then with about a mile left and a good head of speed, I popped up to a thousand feet and began a left roll to bring my nose to bear on the station. As I rolled out in a shallow dive, my headphones erupted with his triumphant shouts.

  "GUNS, GUNS, GUNS, YOU TURKEY!"

  It was I who had taken the bait. Expecting him, and still I had been ambushed. It was indeed a turkey shoot. I needed to get back into this fight quickly, needed to salvage some dignity. I ignored his guns call and pulled up, broke hard and checked six. There was Dave about a thousand feet back, his nose pulling a deadly lead on me. I had fallen for the oldest trick in the proverbial book, allowing him to attack from out of the sun. I was aghast at my stupidity. But I pressed the fight, turning, breaking, rolling, yo-yoing to gain an inside advantage, all to no avail. He wouldn't be shaken loose. Then I began to realize that the playing field was more than even. Dave now thoroughly understood fighter tactics and spiced his performance with application of a superior understanding of his Yankee's aerodynamic characteristics. Countering my every maneuver, he zoomed higher, dove faster, and turned fighter than I could. I simply couldn't match him.

  Cleanly whipped, I finally declared Mountain Dew time, and we recovered in a formation overhead pattern, to the delight of the weekend airport bums. We taxied the two petite Grummans onto the ramp and shut down, and Dave waited gleefully while I jumped out of the cockpit and vaulted over the leading edge of the wing, as Grumman pilots are disposed to do. Dave leaned against his Yankee with a smirky grin looking like the cartoon coyote gorged on roadrunner. We exchanged a few irrelevant clipped sentences, each waiting for the other to make the first comment about the fight. But then he unlatched his cowling and showed me the new 150 horsepower engine that had replaced the stock 108 horsepower, which is of course what I had. He was charitable enough to attribute his performance to the extra power, but I knew that I would never be equal to his skills, engines aside.

  The years went by, and we all left the active duty Air Force. Gene eventually landed his dream job with Delta Airlines, and Dave became an instant Boeing 737 captain with an upstart no-frills airline called People Express (PEX). He joined a Guard unit but served only a couple of yea
rs.

  Although he was flying his beloved F-106, Dave was unhappy in the New Jersey Air Guard. I never knew exactly why. He complained of the same things that he did on active duty ("too much paperwork, too much bullshit"), which puzzled me. I was in a Guard unit also and was very happy with it. I knew it was radically different from the active Air Force. He just didn't fit the military mold, I figured. But Dave had always been profoundly different, a self-proclaimed marcher to a different drummer.

  Finally one day he up and quit the Guard. His story was classically DeRamus. He had flown his Yankee into Atlantic City Airport and called the Guard Base, asking them to come over from their side of the field and pick him up, as they usually did. But he waited for an hour, and becoming impatient, he impulsively decided to walk over to the personnel office, which was nearby, and file separation papers. He then crawled back into the Yankee and left the military forever.

  He made the papers and TV when he flew PEX's inaugural flight into Birmingham. It was a godsend for him. He could then live in Birmingham and commute to his base in Newark, and the publicity seemed to him a warm invitation to come home to the South and settle. And despite his despondency about his new employer, Continental Airlines, which acquired PEX, he seemed to be happier than he ever had been. But something was happening to him.

  I called him and learned that he had just gotten over a bout with pneumonia and was on extended sick leave from the airline. But he assured me that he was doing well and in fact welcomed the respite as a chance to begin writing a book. The book would be about flying, of course, a techno-thriller about a Russian bomber pilot. It was something he had been inspired to do after he had met Victor Belenko, the heralded Soviet pilot who had defected in a MiG-25 several years earlier.