Stranger to the Ground

by Richard Bach

  What was that? What did I say? Beautiful? That is a word for the weak and the sentimental and the dreamers. That is not a word for the pilots of 23,000 pounds of tailored destruction. That is not a word to be used by people who watch the ground disintegrate when they move their finger, or who are trained to kill the men of other countries whose Heaven is the same as their own. Beautiful. Love. Soft. Delicate. Peace. Stillness. Not words or thoughts for fighter pilots, trained to unemotion and coolness in emergency and strafe the troops on the road. The curse of sentimentality is a strong curse. But the meanings are always there, for I have not yet become a perfect machine.

  In the world of man/airplane, I live in an atmosphere of understatement. The wingman pulling a scarlet contrail in the sunset is kinda pretty. Flying fighters is a pretty good job. It was too bad about my roommate flying into his target.

  One learns the language, what is allowed to be said and what is not. I discovered, a few years ago, that I was not different from all the other pilots when I caught myself thinking that a wingman and his contrail in the last light of the sun is not a single thing but beautiful, or that I love my airplane, or that my country is a country for which I would gladly lay down my life. I am not different.

  I learn to say, “Single-engine flying is all right, I guess,” and any other pilot in the Air Force knows exactly that I am as proud to be a jet fighter pilot as anyone is proud of any job, anywhere. Yet nothing could be more repelling than the term “jet fighter pilot.” Jet. Words for movie posters and nonpilots. Jet means glamour and glory and the artifical chatter of a man who wishes he knew something of fighter airplanes. Jet is an embarrassing word. So I say single-engine, for the people I speak with know what I mean: that I have the chance to be off and alone with the clouds every once in a while, and if I want, I can fly faster than sound or knock a tank off its tracks or turn a roundhouse into a pile of bricks and hot steel under a cloud of black smoke. Flying jets is a mission for supermen and superheros dashing handsome movie actors. Flying single-engine is just a pretty good job.

  The white jagged fence of the Alps was not a fence to a Fox Eight Four, and we had ambled across them at altitude almost as uncaring as the gull that floats above the predators of the sea. Almost. The mountains, even under their tremendous blanket, were sharp, like great shards of splintered glass on a snowy desert. No place at all for an engine failure. Their spiny tops jutted above the stratus sea in the ancient way that led one pilot to call them “Islands in the Sky.” Hard rock islands above soft grey cotton sea. Silence on the radio. I flew wing silently, watching the islands drift below. Three words from the flight leader. “Rugged, aren’t they?”

  We have together been watching the islands. They are the most tortured masses of granite and pending avalanche in the world. Raw world upthrust. A virgin treacherous land of sliding snow and falling death. An adventure-world for the brave and the super-humans who climb because they are there. No place at all for a bewilderingly human thing called an airplane pilot and depending on a great many spinning steel parts to go on spinning in order that he might stay in the sky. That he loves.

  “Roj,” I say. What else was there to say? The mountains were rugged.

  It is always interesting. The ground moves below, the stars move overhead, the weather changes, and rarely, very rarely, one of the ten thousand parts that is the body of an airplane fails to operate properly. For a pilot, flying is never dangerous, for a man must be a little bit insane or under the press of duty to willingly remain in a position that he truly considers dangerous. Airplanes occasionally crash, pilots are occasionally killed, but flying is not dangerous, it is interesting.

  It would be nice, one day, to know which of my thoughts are mine alone and which of them are common to all the people who fly fighter airplanes.

  Some pilots speak their thoughts by long habit, some say nothing at all of them. Some wear masks of convention and imperturbability that are very obvious masks, some wear masks so convincing that I wonder if these people are not really imperturbable. The only thoughts that I know are my own. I can predict how I will control my own mask in any number of situations. In emergencies it will be forced into a nonchalant calm that is calculated to rouse admiration in the heart of anyone that hears my unruffled voice on the radio. That, for one, is not strictly my own device. I talked once with a test pilot who told me his way of manufacturing calm in emergencies. He counts to ten out loud in his oxygen mask before he presses the microphone button to talk to anyone. If the emergency is such that he does not have ten seconds to count, he is not interested in talking to anyone; he is in the process of bailing out. But in lesser emergencies, by the time he has counted to ten, his voice has accustomed itself to a background of emergency, and comes as smoothly over the radio as if he were giving a pilot report on the tops of some fair-weather cumulus clouds.

  There are other thoughts of which I do not speak. The destruction that I cause on the ground. It is not in strict accord with the Golden Rule to fly down an enemy convoy and tear its trucks to shreds with six rapid-fire heavy machine guns, or to drop flaming jellied gasoline on the men or to fire 24 high-explosive rockets into their tanks or to loft an atomic bomb into one of their cities. I do not talk about that. I rationalize it out for myself, until I hit upon a certain reasoning that allows me to do all these things without a qualm. A long while ago I found a solution that is logical and true and effective.

  The enemy is evil. He wants to put me into slavery and he wants to overrun my country, which I love very much. He wants to take away my freedom and tell me what to think and what to do and when to think and when to do it. If he wants to do this to his own people, who do not mind the treatment, that is all right with me. But he will not do that to me or to my wife or to my daughter or to my country. I will kill him before he does.

  So those legged dots streaming from the stalled convoy beneath my guns are not men with thoughts and feelings and loves like mine; they are evil and they mean to take my way of life from me. The tank is not manned by five frightened human beings who are praying their own special kind of prayers as I begin my dive and put the white dots of the gunsight pipper on the black rectangle that is their tank; they are evil and they mean to kill the people that I love.

  Thumb lightly on the rocket button, white dot on black rectangle, thumb down firmly. A light, barely audible swish-swish from under my wings and four trails of black smoke angle down to converge on the tank. Pull up. A little shudder as my airplane is passed by the shock waves of the rocket explosions. They are evil.

  I am ready for whatever mission I am assigned. But flying is not all the grim business of war and destruction and rationalized murder. In the development of man/machine, events do not always conform to plan, and flight shacks and ready rooms are scattered with magazines of the business of flying that point up the instances when man/machine did not function as he was designed.

  Last week I sat in a soft red imitation-leather armchair in the pilots’ lounge and read one of those well-thumbed magazines from cover to cover. And from it, I learned.

  A pair of seasoned pilots, I read, were flying from France to Spain in a two-seat Lockheed T-33 jet trainer. Half an hour from their destination, the pilot in the rear seat reached down to the switch that controls his seat height, and inadvertently pressed the release that fires a blast of high-pressure carbon dioxide to inflate the one-man rubber liferaft packed into his ejection seat cushion. The raft ballooned to fill the rear cockpit, smashing the hapless pilot tightly against his seat belt and shoulder harness.

  This had happened before with liferafts, and in the cockpits of the airplanes that carry them is a small sharp knife blade to use in just such emergencies. The rear-seat pilot reached the blade, and in a second the raft exploded in a dense burst of carbon dioxide and talcum powder.

  The front-seat pilot, carrying on the business of flying the airplane and unaware of the crisis behind him, heard the boom of the raft exploding and instantly his cockpit was fil
led with talcum powder, which he assumed to be smoke.

  When you hear an explosion and the cockpit fills with smoke, you do not hesitate, you immediately cut off the fuel to the engine. So the front-seat pilot slammed the throttle to off and the engine stopped.

  In the confusion, the pilot in back had disconnected his microphone cable, and assumed that the radio was dead. When he saw that the engine had flamed out, he pulled his ejection seat armrests up, squeezed the steel trigger and was blown from the airplane to parachute safely into a swamp. The other pilot stayed with the trainer and successfully crash-landed in an open field.

  It was a fantastic train of errors, and my laugh brought a question from across the room. But as I told what I had read, I tucked it away as a thing to remember when I flew again in either seat of the squadron T-33.

  When my class of cadets was going through flying training, just beginning our first rides in the T-33, our heads were filled with memorized normal procedures and emergency procedures until it was not an easy thing to keep them all straight. It was bound to happen to someone, and it happened to Sam Wood. On his very first morning in the new airplane, with the instructor strapped into the rear cockpit, Sam called, “Canopy clear?” warning the other man that a 200-pound canopy would be pressed hydraulically down on the rails an inch from his shoulders.

  “Canopy clear,” the instructor said. Sam pulled the can opy jettison lever. There was a sudden, sharp concussion, a cloud of blue smoke, and 200 pounds of curved and polished plexiglass shot 40 feet into the air and crashed to the concrete parking ramp. Sam’s flight that day was canceled.

  Problems of this sort plague the Air Force. The human part of the man/airplane has just as many failures as the metal part, and they are more difficult to troubleshoot. A pilot will fly 1,500 hours in many kinds of airplanes, and is said to be experienced. On the landing from his 1,501st flight hour, he forgets to extend his landing gear and his airplane slides in a shower of sparks along the runway. To prevent gear-up landings there have been many inventions and many thousands of words and warnings written.

  When a throttle is pulled back to less than minimum power needed to sustain flight, a warning horn blows in the cockpit and a red light flares in the landing gear lowering handle. This means “Lower the wheels!” But habit is a strong thing. One gets used to hearing the horn blowing for a moment before the wheels are lowered on each flight, and gradually it becomes like the waterfall that is not heard by the man who lives in its roar. There is a required call to make to the control tower as the pilot turns his airplane onto base leg in the landing pattern: “Chaumont Tower, Zero Five is turning base, gear down, pressure up, brakes checked.” But the call becomes habit, too. Sometimes it happens that a pilot is distracted during the moment that he normally spends moving the landing gear lever to the down position. When his attention is again fully directed to the job of landing his airplane, his wheels should be down and he assumes they are. He glances at the three lights that show landing gear position, and though not one of them glows the familiar green, though the light in the handle is shining red and the warning horn is blowing, he calls, “Chaumont Tower, Zero Five is turning base, gear down, pressure up, brakes checked.”

  The inventors took over and tried to design the human error out of their airplanes. Some airspeed indicators have flags that cover the dial during a landing approach unless the wheels are down, on the theory that if the pilot cannot read his airspeed he will be shocked into action, which here involves lowering the gear. In the deadliest, most sophisticated interceptor in the air today, that carries atomic missiles and can kill an enemy bomber under solid weather conditions at altitudes to 70,000 feet, there is a landing gear warning horn that sounds like a high-speed playback of a wide-range piccolo duet. The inventors deduced that if this wild noise would not remind a plot to lower his landing gear, they were not going to bother with lights or covering the airspeed indicator or any other tricks; he would be beyond them all. When I see one of the big grey delta-wing interceptors in the landing pattern, I am forced to smile at the reedy tootling that I know the pilot is hearing from his gear warning horn.

  Suddenly, in my dark cockpit, the thin luminous needle of the radiocompass swings wildly from its grip on the Spangdahlem radiobeacon and snaps me from my idle thoughts to the business of flying.

  The needle should not move. When it begins to swing over Spangdahlem, it will first make very small leftright quivers on its card to warn me. The leftrights will become wider and wider and the needle will finally turn to point at the bottom of the dial, as it did passing Laon.

  But the distance-measuring drum shows that I am still 40 miles from my first German checkpoint. The radiocompass has just warned me that it is a radiocompass like all the others. It was designed to point the way to centers of low-frequency radio activity, and there is no more powerful center of low-frequency radio activity than a fully-grown thunderstorm. For years I have heard the rule of thumb and applied it: stratus clouds mean stable air and smooth flying. In an aside to itself, the rule adds (except when there are thunderstorms hidden in the stratus).

  Now, like a boxer pulling on his gloves before a fight, I reach to my left and push the switch marked pilot heat. On the right console is a switch with a placard windscreen defrost and my right glove flicks it to the on position, lighted in red by hidden bulbs. I check that the safety belt is as tight as I can pull it, and I cinch the shoulder harness straps a quarter of an inch tighter. I have no intention of deliberately flying into a thunderstorm tonight, but the padlocked canvas sack in the gun bay ahead of my boots reminds me that my mission is not a trifling one, and worth a calculated risk against the weather.

  The radiocompass needle swings again, wildly. I look for the flicker of lightning, but the cloud is still and dark. I have met a little rough weather in my hours as a pilot, why should the contorted warning feel so different and so ominous and so final? I note my heading indicator needle steady on my course of 084 degrees, and, from habit, check it against the standby magnetic compass. The gyro-held needle is within a degree of the incorruptible mag compass. In a few minutes the cloud will reach up to swallow my airplane, and I shall be on instruments, and alone.

  It is a strange feeling to fly alone. So much of my flying is done in two- and four-ship formations that it takes time for the loneliness to wear from solo flight, and the minutes between Wethersfield and Chaumont Air Base are not that long a time. It is unnatural to be able to look in any direction that I wish, throughout an entire flight. The only comfortable position, the only natural position, is when I am looking 45 degrees to the left or 45 degrees to the right, and to see there the smooth streamlined mass of the lead airplane, to see the lead pilot in his white helmet and dark visor looking left and right and up and behind, clearing the flight from other airplanes in the sky and occasionally looking back for a long moment at my own airplane. I watch my leader more closely than any first violin watches his conductor, I climb when he climbs, turn when he turns, and watch for his hand signals.

  Formation flying is a quiet way to travel. Filling the air with radio chatter is not a professional way of accomplishing a mission, and in close formation, there is a hand signal to cover any command or request from the leader and the answer from his wingman.

  It would be easier, of course, for the leader to press his microphone button and say, “Gator flight: speed brakes . . . now,” than to lift his right glove from the stick, fly with his left for a second while he makes the thumb-and-fingers speed brake signal, put his right glove back on the stick while Gator Three passes the signal to Four, put his left glove on the throttle with thumb over sawtooth speed brake switch above the microphone button, then nod his helmet suddenly and sharply forward as he moves the switch under his thumb to extend. It is more complicated, but it is more professional, and to be professional is the goal of every man who wears the silver wings over his left breast pocket.

  It is professional to keep radio silence, to know all there is to k
now about an airplane, to hold a rock-solid position in any formation, to be calm in emergencies. Everything that is desirable about flying airplanes is “professional.” I joke with the other pilots about the extremes to which the word is carried, but it cannot really be overused, and I honor it in my heart.

  I work so hard to earn the title of a professional pilot that I come down from each close-formation flight wringing wet with sweat; even my gloves are wet after a flight, and dry into stiff wrinkled boards of leather before the next day’s mission. I have not yet met the pilot who can fly a good formation flight without stepping from his cockpit as though it was a swimming pool. Yet all that is required for a smooth, easy flight is to fly a loose formation. That, however, is not professional, and so far I am convinced that the man who lands from a formation flight in a dry flight suit is not a good wingman. I have not met that pilot and I probably never will, for if there is one point in which all single-engine pilots place their professionalism in open view, it is in formation flying.

  At the end of every mission, there is a three-mile initial approach to the landing pattern, in close echelon formation. In the 35 seconds that it takes to cover those three miles, from the moment that the flight leader presses his microphone button and says, “Gator Lead turning initial runway one niner, three out with four,” every pilot on the flight line and scores of other people on the base will be watching the formation. The flight will be framed for a moment in the window of the commander’s office, it will be in plain sight from the Base Exchange parking lot, visitors will watch it, veteran pilots will watch it. It is on display for three miles. For 35 seconds it is the showpiece of the entire base.

  I tell myself that I do not care if every general in the United States Air Force in Europe is watching my airplane, or if just a quail is looking up at me through the tall grass. The only thing that matters is the flight, the formation. Here is where I tuck it in. Every correction that I make will be traced in the grey smoke of my exhaust and will be one point off the ideal of four straight grey arrows with unmoving sweptsilver arrowheads. The smallest change means an immediate correction to keep the arrow straight.