Scareforce

by Charles Hough

  It was in one of my classrooms that I saw him. I was sitting at my desk between classes trying to catch up on some reading. I heard the door open and a chair move and I assumed it was one of my students getting in a little early. After a couple of minutes I looked up. Sure enough there was a stud in the back row, with his head down buried in a book. We referred to the students as studs. They thought it meant that they were macho types. We actually meant they were as dumb as a bunch of nails.

  It was quite normal for studs to get to class early and try to learn everything they were supposed to know in five or ten minutes. It never works. I made it a point to pick on them.

  I went back to my reading. A few minutes passed when I heard him say, “Sir, could you explain something to me?” I finished the paragraph I was reading and looked up ready to answer his question. He wasn’t there. Nobody was there.

  I didn’t hear anyone open the door to leave. That was strange because it was a creaky old door. And there was absolutely no place to hide in the classroom. Believe me I’ve made students want to hide.

  I got up and checked the hallway. It was empty. Not a soul. It was on my way back to my desk that I recognized the voice. I knew it couldn’t have been him, but it was his voice. It was only frightening in retrospect.

  I wish I knew what he wanted me to explain.

  Flight training at a training base is just as difficult and serious as the academic training. It isn’t a lot of graceful surly bonds slipping as the poet would have us believe. It is flying with all the fun carefully removed.

  It starts at preflight. The airplanes used for pilot training are modern, capable jet aircraft. There are attack versions of both the initial and the advanced jet trainers. But to the Air Training Command the aircraft are training aids. And the students tend to think of them as booby traps.

  The student arrives at his aircraft and is required to perform a very thorough inspection of every aspect of his appointed beast under the watchful eye of his instructor. He must be able to explain just what he is looking for and how everything should be set, positioned, or adjusted prior to starting engines. And woe to the student who misses something.

  The Air Force tries to instill in the pilot the need for a very complete understanding of how everything must be so that an airplane will fly. They believe in using the carrot-and-stick technique of instruction without the carrot.

  The Crew Chief

  “I saw it, or him, on the flight line. I’m a crew chief for T-38s. I was catching a ride with the ramp tramp out to the bird I was supposed to preflight for an early morning go. It was way out on the end of the line. I was thinking I would get there early when all of a sudden the driver says, ‘Looks like you’re late again.’

  I looked down at the end of the line and sure enough there’s this student already checking the plane over. I looked at my schedule again thinking I must have read it wrong. According to it I still had a half hour before anyone was supposed to show up.

  I watched the stud check the tail of the 38 as we pulled up to the parking stub. I jumped out and ran up and grabbed the forms. The student had disappeared around the tail so I went the other way around to catch up with him and find out why he was there so early.

  He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere on that side of the aircraft. I looked under to see if I could see his feet on the other side. I thought maybe he had doubled back on me. He wasn’t on the other side either. And he wasn’t up in the cockpit. He wasn’t anywhere. He was just gone.

  The crew showed up at the plane right on time but I was so busy trying to find that other guy that I hadn’t even started the preflight. The instructor chewed on me some for that.

  I saw him out here a couple more times but I never got close to him. I know some of the other crew chiefs saw him too, but they don’t like to talk about it much.”

  Flying aircraft, especially high-performance jet flying, is inherently a dangerous business. It’s even more so at a training base. Students find out early that they must do every task exactly right every time if they want to survive. And even if they do everything exactly right, sometimes the aircraft won’t cooperate. It is at that moment that the students take their most difficult tests. They find out if they have really learned the material about the airplane and flying it. They find out the hard way. And inevitably some fail their tests. And they aren’t the kind of tests that you get to retake.

  Air-training bases see more accidents than most bases. Instructors try their best to accident-proof their students, but it just isn’t possible. The unofficial motto at Willy was, “in an operation of this size, you expect to lose a few.” So it’s a common thing. It’s expected. But no one ever gets used to it.

  The Student

  “Yeah, I’ve heard the stories. I knew a lot of the guys who told them, too. They were all sterling gentlemen and I’d never call any of them liars.

  I myself have never seen a ghost stalking the flight line or whatever. But I did see something pretty strange. I saw it twice in fact. Blew my mind both times. Almost caused me to pink a ride. A pink is a deficiency on a flight mission. I guess somewhere back in the deep dark past they were printed on pink paper or something. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what color they are. Students don’t want any of them. You get more than one and you have to start looking around for a desk job.

  Let me go back a little ways first. It was when I just checked into the program. They hit you hard and fast at first and I was walking around in a daze most of the time except I didn’t have much time to walk around. One night around nine or ten o’clock a friend of mine who works in the tower gave me a call. He said that a stud in a T-38 just bought the farm. Ran right into a mountain.

  I headed out to the base to see what was going on. Wanted to make sure it wasn’t somebody I knew. It took me twenty minutes to get to the flight line and even after all that time I could still see where the accident happened. It was in the middle of a sheer face in the Superstitions. The fire was still burning brightly. A good share of the 38 is made out of magnesium. The plane was literally melting down the face of the cliff. He must have been busting the Mach when he hit that mountain.

  Turns out I didn’t know him but I’d heard of him. Had a reputation for flying with his head in the cockpit all the time. Trusting the instruments too much. He became object lesson number one for situational awareness.

  Anyway, almost a year later, I was finally solo in a T-38. It was a night mission. I was flying in the local area when suddenly I saw the whole side of the mountain light up. It was right where the other guy hit but I didn’t remember that until later. I called RAPCON but they said that everyone was accounted for. I made a quick 180-degree turn to take a closer look. But it was gone. I almost flew out of my area trying to look for it. The instructor in the mobile tower saw the sloppy turn I made and started yelling at me. I was just barely able to lie my way out of it. I remembered the accident later in the club.

  I saw it one more time when I was dual with an instructor. I pointed it out to him. He glanced at it and I know he saw it but he just told me to keep my mind on what I was doing. He didn’t mention it after the flight and I didn’t either.”

  When an aircraft goes down at a military base, the emergency team swings into action. The Air Force has some of the best-equipped, best-trained, and unfortunately, most-experienced rescue workers in the world. And those at pilot-training bases tend to be the best of the best. It’s almost like the experience gained in a war.

  During a war the pilots are often hampered in their attempts to return to base by battle-damaged aircraft. At a pilot-training base the aircraft are often hampered by the inability of the novice pilot behind the controls. Whatever the reason, all the personnel charged with the safe operation of the airfield have definite jobs to perform during an emergency. And those personnel at a pilot-training base have seen so many types and colors of emergencies that they know what to do immediately.

  The Controller

  “I never saw the
ghost or whatever at Willy but the more I think about it the more I’m sure I talked to him. It was during an accident response. I was working the mid shift on a Wednesday night in the tower and we got a call from the radar guys that they had lost contact with one of the students. The bad thing was that they didn’t know which one. It was never simple at a training base.

  Anyway what happened was that it was a nice clear night and some of the students were going visual flight rules or VFR. They would just pop up and talk to radar when they wanted an approach. The pattern controller said some guy popped up and asked for vectors for a ground-controlled radar approach to the main runway. The controller identified his target and gave him a turn to the radar pattern, then asked for him to say his call sign. It had been garbled on first call-up. All the pop-up said was, ‘Oh, shit,’ and then stopped talking.

  That was enough to get the controller’s attention because swearing on the radio is a definite no-no. But then the radar target disappeared right after so he called us real fast. I checked with the super and he said to start a comm search. In a comm search everyone who is in the airport traffic area is supposed to give his call sign and location. As each one calls in the controller checks him off on the active flight progress board and makes sure everyone is accounted for.

  I was taking the calls and rogering all the studs as they checked in. I was keeping a running count of the numbers because I knew we had twenty-seven airborne that night. We got calls from twenty-seven different aircraft and I thought everything was okay. But the ground controller said that there was a mistake because one of the call signs was wrong.

  I asked her which one was wrong and which one was still missing. I thought maybe one of the studs had mixed up his call sign. It happens. I made a call for both of them to report in to the tower. The one who supposedly had the wrong call sign answered up but the other one failed to answer.

  About that time things really went into afterburner. An instructor in a T-38 reported a fire on the ground about seven miles out on final. We scrambled the rescue helicopter and he beat it out reverse course to check it out. In the meantime we closed the center runway, which led to an emergency situation in itself. The wing king ordered all aircraft back to the ground.

  They found the guy who didn’t answer his call sign in the comm check. He was walking back to base after jettisoning the aircraft in some farmer’s field.

  It was about then that the senior controller pointed out what was wrong with the bad call sign. It was one we hadn’t used in almost a year. None of the present-day students would have even heard it.

  It wasn’t until later at the club over a cold one that we got to talking about it. I’m almost sure that the call sign we heard that night was the same one the guy was using the night he plowed into the mountain.

  Wonder what would have happened if I had cleared him to land?”

  At a pilot-training base the students are introduced to another time-honored tradition of the Air Force. Since men first learned to fly they have maintained the tradition of the post flight. This post flight is usually carried out in a darkened, cozy room filled with similarly inclined fellow aviators. The room can come in many shapes and sizes, but it must be equipped with a friendly resident serving large quantities of soothing libation. Said libation must be of sufficient potency to ensure that the celebrants can wind down from the rigors of their flying.

  Such places in the Air Force are never referred to as bars or saloons. Never anything so crass. They are dubbed “clubs” and are distinguished from bars and saloons primarily by their name.

  A club on a pilot-training base can be a dangerous place for the uninitiated. It’s hard for an outsider to understand how a group of people can get so wound up trying to wind down. Another danger in these places is the preponderance of hand flying going on. A pilot can get so caught up using both hands to demonstrate that impossible feat he just performed in his air machine, that he becomes a danger to himself and to innocent bystanders.

  Suffice it to say that pilots never tire of trying to describe that undescribable experience of controlling a mechanical device through the air. Every club on every pilot-training base has a sign that says “Airplane Spoken Here.”

  The Bartender

  “Oh yeah he was around the club all the time. At first it gave me the shakes something fierce. After a while I sort of got used to it. Sort of.

  We first noticed it when the bell would ring. We had this bell at the end of the bar. If a student walked in wearing his hat or did something else he wasn’t supposed to do, like forget his manners, one of his friends would ring the bell. Then the perpetrator would have to buy a round for the whole bar, whoever was there at the time. As soon as the bell went off, me or one of the other bartenders would make a quick count of the room to see how bad the poor fool would get nicked. We made it a rule that we only served beer on the bell. Some of those studs screwed up so often that anything else would have broke ’em.

  Well, every time we had a bell round on a Wednesday night we’d end up with one too many beers. Not that somebody wouldn’t volunteer to drink the extra. But we didn’t want to charge the guy for any more than he should have to pay. It happened so regular that finally we started automatically subtracting one beer. But only on Wednesdays. We said to remember to subtract one beer for the ghost. Nobody complained.

  That wasn’t bad. Nobody actually saw the ghost or knew they saw the ghost anyway. But two or three times when we were closing up, one of the barmaids would see him. They didn’t know who it was at first. One girl came up to me and said, I thought you threw out all the officers. There’s one sitting at the corner of the bar nursing a drink.’

  So, I went in to tell him we were closed. Wasn’t anybody there. I looked all over, really searched the place, thinking he might have headed for the john and passed out or something. After searching the joint for the third Wednesday in a row I gave up. I figured out who he was, but I didn’t tell the girls. Didn’t want to scare them.

  But I did ask them what he looked like. They all agreed that he looked like any normal second lieutenant student pilot. But they said he looked like a student pilot who just pinked a ride and was worried about making it through the program.

  Wonder if any of those guys ever noticed when he joined them on Wednesday night. They were usually so jazzed up that even if they did know they were talking to a ghost, they probably would have just gone right on hand flying at Mach one.”

  Williams Air Force Base is closed now, the drastic need for military pilots reduced by the demise of the cold war. The runways that were so busy and so crucial to the activities of the base are just silent strips of useless concrete.

  The pilots who learned their trade at Willy are spread throughout the world flying fighters and tankers and bombers and yes, airliners, with a consummate skill learned from the best of aviation classrooms.

  But on a cold, dark desert night if you listen carefully you can just make out the whine of the power cart and the roar of twin jet engines. You might catch a glimpse of red and green wingtip lights as a white shape soars from the deserted field. He’s up there trying again. Maybe this time he can get it right. Maybe this time he’ll demonstrate his mastery of the air.

  Maybe this time he’ll earn his wings.

  HISTORY LESSON

  I WAS proud of my uniform. Still am. I’ve been to places where civilians felt the same way I did about wearing the uniform. And I’ve been places where people hated me because I was inside the uniform. I’ve even been to places where just wearing the uniform was dangerous. But I’ve been to only one place where I’ll never wear a uniform or carry a weapon again.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It won’t run.”

  “Great. Wonderful. You just spent twenty minutes under the hood of this beast and all you can tell me is that it won’t run? I know it won’t run. That’s why I called you in the first place. I’m stuck here in the middle of wh
erever this is with a truck full of pissed-off sky cops and the ‘expert’ from the motor pool tells me that the problem is that the truck won’t run. Sarge, are you sure you were never an officer?“

  The burly sergeant slid out from under the hood of the diesel vehicle and regarded the questioner with a sneer in his eyes.

  “Keep your insults to yourself, Jensen. What I’m trying to tell you is that for the last twenty-two minutes I have gone over every system that makes this piece of crap a truck. I have checked every nook and cranny of this United States Air Force, one-each vehicle, type truck, and everything checks out according to book and checklist. And I have come to the considered conclusion based on many years of experience and skill. There is only one thing wrong with this truck.”

  “And what is that?”

  “It… won’t… run.”

  “Whatdaya mean…”

  “What I mean is,” the master mechanic interrupted the flustered driver. “What I mean is that the only thing wrong is it won’t run. Everything else is fine. It should run. According to the laws of physics, mechanics, and sophisticated engineering, that engine should be purring along at two hundred decibels. I can’t find a thing wrong.”

  “Maybe you didn’t look hard enough. Maybe you missed something.”

  “Missed what?” The large NCO wiped the grease from his hands in a manner that indicated his disdain.

  “I don’t know… the carburetor or the belts… or that other gizmo, that what’s-it.”

  “Look, Jensen, trust me. I didn’t miss anything. I didn’t miss the carburetor, or the wiring, or even the what’s-it. I didn’t miss it now and I didn’t miss it the last two times we hauled this beast to the shop. There’s nothing wrong with it.”