My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  “NOOOOO!” I cried in disbelief. For the first time that day, I was smiling.

  “It can’t be!” Matt exclaimed.

  We fully rocked out. I was head-banging and playing air guitar. He was drumming on the steering wheel as he drove. The person in the next car over was probably saying, “Look at those douche bags!” But it didn’t matter. We were in the zone.

  An hour and a half later our shoes were crunching across the airport parking lot as we walked hand in hand toward the Air Combat office. Along one side of the lot was a chain-link fence and through its empty wire diamonds I could see a runway and a small airfield full of prop planes. We entered the unassuming one-story building that could’ve been a chiropractor’s office in another life. An amiable receptionist at the front desk directed us to a room down the hallway. It was small and unadorned with two long tables and a few chairs. Standing at the front of the room in an army green flight suit was our instructor, a former U.S. Marine named Larry who wanted us to call him “Slick.” This was his call sign, or pilot nickname.

  “In addition to being an instructor, I’m also the company’s mechanic, so I’m usually covered in oil,” Slick explained. He shook our hands, and Matt asked where the restroom was and excused himself. The only other student in the room was a sweet-faced man wearing street clothes, sitting at one of the long tables where he was filling out paperwork and releases. The man looked up, his glasses reflecting the overhead light, and gave a little wave. “Hi, I’m Lenny.” This was my “enemy.”

  “Have a seat,” Slick offered. I sat at one of the tables. He smiled at me but said nothing.

  Matt returned from the bathroom, and Slick handed him some papers. “Just fill these out, initial right here, and sign the bottom.”

  Classic. I smirked and cleared my throat. “Actually I’m the one flying today.”

  He could barely conceal his surprise. “Oh! Okay, well, here you go.” He handed the sheets over to me.

  While I was signing my life away Slick asked Matt, “So did you buy this for her as a present?”

  “No, she bought it for herself.”

  Another expression of bemusement.

  “He’s just here for moral support,” I explained as Matt settled down with a book at the table behind me. Slick handed Lenny and me flight suits identical to his with American flag patches on the shoulder and long zippers up the middle spanning the neck to the nether regions.

  As we headed to changing rooms to disrobe, he called after us, “It gets hot in the plane so you’re going to want to wear only your underwear beneath these suits.” Ground school had begun.

  “Have either of you ever flown before?” Slick asked after we’d returned, suited up. I shook my head.

  “I fly a lot of gliders,” Lenny said, referring to the engineless planes that are towed up into the sky by another plane and then cut loose to sashay across the wind currents. “But they only go about sixty miles per hour.”

  “Today you’re going to be going two hundred and thirty miles per hour,” he said. “Here we fly Marchetti SF-260s, a plane used by several air forces around the world for fighter pilot training. These are the Ferraris of the sky. They’re light and easy to maneuver.”

  He continued: “You and the instructor will be sitting side by side. Your control sticks operate together like the pedals in a driver’s-ed car. When you’re moving your stick, your instructor’s stick will move as well, and vice versa. That way he can take over the controls at any time if you get into trouble.” I glanced back at Matt, eyes wide. He gave a reassuring smile. When I turned back, Slick was holding up some kind of canvas sack with straps. It looked like a backpack from the 1800s.

  “We’ve had over fifty thousand customers. We’ve never had a death, never had to use one of these parachutes,” he said. “But just in case there’s a fire in the cabin or a wing falls off . . .”

  It can do that? Just FALL OFF?

  “ . . . pull back the canopy and jump out of the plane. To open the chute, pull this D-ring right here.” I took note of the parachute knowing that I’d never have to use it, because if anything happened that necessitated getting out of the plane, I’d have long since gone into cardiac arrest.

  According to Slick, something else we wanted to watch out for was “buffeting.” “Buffeting is when you feel the plane start to shake and you hear a loud continuous sound like BAH-BAH-BAH-BAH-BAH.” He shook his fists in the air for emphasis. “It means that there’s too little air pressure going underneath the wings and too much air pressure going over the top of the wings. It also means that the plane is about to stall.” I moved my foot over next to Matt’s, and he rubbed his shoe against mine.

  Slick continued: “Now obviously when you’re in combat, you do whatever it takes to kill the enemy, but for our purposes we have some rules. First, three thousand feet is the ‘hard deck,’ meaning that if you go below that altitude you immediately forfeit the fight.”

  “Hi there!” We were interrupted by a man in his early sixties sticking his head into the room.

  “Lenny will be flying with me,” Slick said and then nodded at the other man, who was also wearing a flight suit. “Noelle, this is your instructor, call sign ‘Boom.’ ” Given my fear of crashing, I didn’t have a great deal of confidence in an instructor named Boom.

  After he ducked out, I raised my hand. “How do we keep from crashing into each other?”

  “That’s rule number two,” Slick said. “Head-on approaches are not allowed. You can only shoot your opponent from behind.” He took out two pencils, each with a tiny gray plastic plane perched on the end.

  “F/A-18s!” Matt exclaimed, setting down his sci-fi book. “I used to build models of those when I was a kid.”

  Slick nodded appreciatively. “This isn’t what you’ll be flying today, obviously, but they’ll do for demonstration purposes. Now the only time you’ll be facing each other is at the beginning of the dogfight.” He held up the planes, facing them toward each other, about ten inches apart. “You’ll fly toward each other, keeping your opponent on the left. As soon as you pass each other, we’ll say, ‘Fight’s on!’ Then you try to get behind the other plane and go in for the kill.” Using the pencil planes, Slick showed us some basic aerial maneuvers called “yo-yos” and “lead and lag.”

  “At some point you might do this with the plane,” Slick said, making one of the plastic planes do a backflip.

  Uh, you might do that with the plane, I thought to myself. My ass wasn’t doing anything remotely similar to that.

  He continued: “When you do, it’s important that you go full throttle. Because if you half-ass the backflip or lose your nerve halfway through, your aircraft will do this.” The plane in his hand suddenly dropped and started plummeting toward the ground nose-first.

  This was the point where I decided I wouldn’t be dogfighting. My plan was to get a few hundred feet off the ground, freak out, and demand to come down immediately. At the very most, I’d take over the controls and fly the plane straight for a few minutes and then ask Boom to take me back to the airport. A sense of peace came over me now that I’d chosen not to do this. Still, I felt bad for Lenny, who’d signed up expecting to have a dogfight with a fellow thrill seeker. Maybe after I was brought back down, Boom could go back up alone and show him a good time.

  “G-forces!” Slick boomed out. “G-force is the acceleration of an object relative to free fall. A negative g-force occurs when the plane is in a dive. Your body feels lighter than it really is. A positive g-force occurs when your plane is going up, multiplying the force of gravity and making your body feel heavier than it really is. Positive g-forces push blood away from your head toward your feet and can result in tunnel vision and loss of consciousness.” In a two-g maneuver, my 125-pound body would feel like I weigh 250 pounds, at three gs I would feel like 375 pounds, and so on. At six gs, or 750 pounds, I would black out, whi
ch would probably be for the best.

  The last thing he showed us was how to deploy the barf bag. Apparently, one out of ten customers vomited.

  “The record is seven bags,” Slick said proudly. “Guy went to a buffet lunch before he got here.”

  During the war, Eleanor lobbied strongly for starting a women’s flying division in the Army Air Force. She argued that if more women took on domestic aviation jobs, more male pilots could be released for combat. “This is not a time when women should be patient,” she wrote in 1942 in her newspaper column “My Day.” “We are in a war and we need to fight it with all our ability and every weapon possible. Women pilots, in this particular case, are a weapon waiting to be used.”

  She also rallied behind African American airmen. In 1941, Eleanor visited the Tuskegee flying school in Alabama. Over the Secret Service’s objections, the fifty-seven-year-old First Lady flew with a black pilot for more than an hour. The pilot, C. Alfred Anderson, later wrote in his memoir, “She told me, ‘I always heard Negroes couldn’t fly and I wondered if you’d mind taking me up.’ . . . When we came back, she said, ‘Well, you can fly all right.’ I’m positive that when she went home, she said, ‘Franklin, I flew with those boys down there, and you’re going to have to do something about it.’ ”

  There’s a fantastic photo of the two of them in the two-seater plane. Eleanor is in the backseat wearing a hat with flowers on it, grinning broadly. The youthful Anderson is in the front looking pleased but nervous. “Please, God, don’t let me kill this white lady,” his expression is saying. But her plan worked. The symbolic value of the white First Lady sitting behind a black pilot was immeasurable. According to Anderson, the Army Air Corps began training African Americans several days after Eleanor’s flight.

  Boom and I were sitting side by side in adjacent airplane seats. The cockpit was small, like the front seat of a car, but with a clear plastic canopy over the top like the cars on The Jetsons. I’d just received a brief tutorial on how to fly. My instructions were few—don’t touch anything but the control stick. It had a red button under my thumb, which I could press to talk to Boom on the headset attached to my helmet. Another red button let me talk on the radio to the other plane. There was a red trigger on the front, connected to the dashboard’s computer. If you got the enemy plane (known as a bogey), in your gunsight and pulled the trigger, white smoke would come out of the tail, indicating a “kill.” Otherwise, the control stick operated exactly as you’d imagine—push it forward and the plane went down, pull it back and the plane went up, move it right and the right side of the plane tilted toward the ground and vice versa on the left.

  The engine started with a succession of tdt-tdt-tdt-tdts and we were cruising down the runway. Charging. I was taking deep, calming breaths. We were up! I wasn’t scared at all, which was odd because this was my least favorite part of commercial flights since I knew that 80 percent of crashes occurred shortly after takeoff. Somehow this liftoff felt natural. The plane didn’t falter as it whirred over forest, sand, and then water, which blinked furiously under the unforgiving sunlight.

  “So how long have you been flying?” I asked Boom.

  “Spent twenty years in the navy. Flew attack missions in Vietnam. Then I went on to work for Pan-Am and a bunch of other places.”

  Did these military guys ever resent their guest pilots? I wondered. People who wanted the thrill of battle but would never enlist themselves. Then to have them walk away at the end, shaking their heads in a self-satisfied manner, saying, “That was fun, but I’d never do it for a living.” Like the tourists who came to New York, fumbled around, asked us directions and if we’d mind taking their photo, and then left declaring, “New York is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” (What a coincidence! I’d always thought. I don’t want you living here either!)

  “How did you get the call sign ‘Boom’?”

  “I never tell a story without a drink in my hand,” he winked.

  “I can respect that,” I said. “And, might I add, I’m glad you don’t have a drink in your hand.”

  He laughed. I liked this guy.

  “So do I get a call sign?” I asked.

  “Oh, you’ll get one. At the end of the day.”

  The plane faltered a bit and we dropped a few feet and then reared back up violently. My stomach seized.

  “That’s just the prop wash,” Boom said dismissively. Flying through another plane’s wake, known as the wash, caused turbulence. And as I knew from last night’s viewing of Top Gun, it was flying through Iceman’s jet wash that had caused Maverick’s flat spin and the demise of much-beloved Goose.

  “Will we be expecting any more of those?” I asked nervously, eyeing the portable life preserver Boom had clipped to my waist before takeoff “just in case.”

  “Naw, probably not,” he said, but he put some distance between our planes nonetheless. We’d been in the air for less than ten minutes when he said, “Okay, you have the plane.” He let go of his control stick, palms facing out in one of those “look, Ma, no hands!” gestures.

  “What?! Jesus!” The right wing started to drop, and I fumbled for my stick. I was filled with the same surprised indignation I’d felt when my dad taught me how to ride a bike. He’d been jogging along behind me, holding the back of my seat, and then without warning, he’d let go. “Stop it!” I’d shrieked. “Don’t let go!” But there had been little I could do because it had taken all my concentration not to crash the bike.

  “See? You’re doing great!” Boom said as I struggled to even us out. The control stick was so sensitive that pushing it a millimeter was enough to move the aircraft.

  When I was little, I liked to play on the seesaws at the neighborhood playground. Sometimes I’d stand in the middle of the seesaw, trying to balance both ends in the air at once. This was hard to do. I’d always end up putting too much weight on one foot, and when the seesaw started to drop on that side, I’d ease up and shift more weight to the other foot, and then that side would start to drop. This was what it was like trying to fly. I was trying to hold the control stick still, but the plane was somewhat cockeyed. So I nudged the stick slightly to the left. Too much! Back to the right again. The plane wobbled drunkenly. As I moved my control stick, I could see Boom’s stick move with it as though guided by an invisible hand.

  “Now we’re a little high,” Boom cautioned. “Push forward on the nose a bit.” I urged the stick forward and the plane lurched. I overcompensated by pulling the nose up too fast. Eventually I straightened out. There was no way I was going to be able to dogfight. It was time to break the news to Boom.

  “Um, I don’t think I’ll be able to, you know, do any tricks or go upside down or anything.”

  Boom waved this off. “Don’t worry. When you’re dogfighting, you’ll be so focused you won’t even notice when you’re upside down.”

  “Trust me, I’ll notice.”

  “Now I want you to get behind Lenny and practice getting him in your crosshairs. During the dogfight, he’s going to be flying all over the place, so you won’t look for him through your gunsight. Look for him out in the sky, maneuver the plane toward him, and then line him up in your crosshairs.”

  He added: “Always be looking for the bogey. Never lose sight of your enemy. You lose sight, you lose the fight.”

  I steered the plane over to Lenny’s, and squinting one eye, I positioned him inside my orange circle with a cross in the middle. “Should I pull the trigger?” I asked.

  “We’re not activated yet, but why the hell not? It’s emotionally satisfying.”

  I pulled the red trigger with my pointer finger, making pew, pew, pew! sounds. It was satisfying.

  “Okay, now I want you to do a barrel roll. You’re going to pull the control stick all the way to the left and keep going, flipping the plane over three hundred and sixty degrees.”

  Pan
ic surged through me. “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea!” My voice was uncharacteristically girlish and fluttery. “Really, I’m fine right here. Can we just hang out?”

  “To the left, now! Go! Go! Go!” he barked militarily, leaving me no choice.

  With a stream of expletives running through my head, I pulled the stick over until it was pressed against my left leg and could go no farther. We were turning. The flickering gray ocean beneath the plane was replaced by the steady seamless blue of the sky. I felt a pronounced, but not uncomfortable, pressure on my body. Then the water rotated back into view and we were right side up again.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Boom grinned.

  It . . . was, actually, I marveled. I couldn’t believe I’d just done that. Now I understood how commanders got their soldiers to charge into battle. The human instinct to please could be more powerful than our survival instinct.

  Boom had me hold the plane steady while we let Lenny practice getting me in his crosshairs.

  “Time to dogfight!” Boom announced.

  Oh no. There was no way out of this. Boom took the controls and steered me far away from Lenny and Slick’s plane. When we were a good distance apart, he turned the plane around so Lenny and I were facing each other. We were two gunslingers moving toward each other on the main street of a deserted town. As we closed in, I took great care to stay toward the right side.

  “Fight’s on!” Slick’s voice crackled over the radio.

  Fwoom! The planes passed, left wing to left wing. Instead of turning and engaging with Lenny, I kept going straight. Maybe I could just outrun him? I did have a head start. What this plane needs is a rearview mirror, I thought, looking over my shoulder to see how far behind he was. It was bizarre taking my eyes “off the road.” Then again, there was no one else up there that I could possibly crash into. Lenny was arching high across the sky, with obvious intentions to circle around behind me. Staring at the underbelly of his plane, wings jutting out like fins, I was reminded of scuba diving and how it felt to see a shark cruising overhead, knowing it was about to swoop down on me.