Stranger to the Ground

  Books by Richard Bach

  ONE

  THE BRIDGE ACROSS FOREVER: A LOVE STORY

  A GIFT OF WINGS

  ILLUSIONS: THE ADVENTURES OF A RELUCTANT MESSIAH

  BIPLANE

  NOTHING BY CHANCE

  STRANGER TO THE GROUND

  JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL

  THERE’S NO SUCH PLACE AS FAR AWAY

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1963 by Richard Bach

  Copyright renewed © 1991 by Richard David Bach

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Scribner ebook edition June 2012

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  Designed by

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-9745-2 (ebook)

  To Don Slack

  And to a mountain in central

  France that stands 6,188 feet

  above sea level

  MAIN INSTRUMENT PANEL

  1. Landing Lights Switch

  2. Air Refueling Controls

  3. Radio Magnetic Indicator

  4. Airspeed and Mach Number Indicator

  5. Heading Indicator

  6. Engine Fire and Overheat Warning

  7. Canopy Open Indicator Light

  8. Oxygen Warning Light

  9. Attitude Indicator

  10. Accelerometer

  11. Dive and Roll Indicator

  12. Tachometer

  13. Oil Pressure Gage

  14. Mechanical Advantage Indicator Light

  15. Exhaust Gas Temperature Indicator

  16. Fuel System Warning Lights

  17. Fuel Quantity Indicator and Selector

  18. Vertical Velocity Indicator

  19. Fuel Flow Indicator

  20. Turn and Slip Indicator

  21. Course Indicator

  22. Clock

  23. Rudder Pedal Adjusting Knob

  24. Drag Chute Handle

  25. Remote Channel Indicator

  26. Utility Power Hydraulic Pressure Gage

  27. Altimeter

  28. Tacan Range Indicator

  29. Directional Indicator Control Panel

  LEFT CONSOLE

  1. Anti-G Valve

  2. Canopy Squib Test Panel

  3. Circuit Breaker Panel

  4. ATO Ready Switch

  5. Pilot Heat Switch

  6. Camera Control Panel

  7. Flight Control Panel

  8. Canopy Lock Lever

  9. Throttle Quadrant

  10. Rudder & Aileron Neutral Trim Indicator Lights

  11. Special Pylon Manual Release

  12. Console Lights Rheostat

  13. Fuel Shutoff Valves Switches

  14. Air Refueling Controls

  15. Fuel System Control

  16. Engine Screen Switch

  17. Canopy Manual Jettison Switch

  18. Spoilers Shutoff Switch

  19. Pneumatic Compressor Switch

  20. Pylon Jettison Switches

  RIGHT CONSOLE

  1. Interior & Exterior Lights Control Panel

  2. Batori Computer

  3. Cabin Temperature and Pressure Control

  4. Windshield Defroster Switch

  5. Defroster Control

  6. Canopy Dry Air Switch

  7. Side Air Outlet Shut-Off

  8. AC Fuse Box

  9. Cockpit Light

  10. Map Case

  11. Spare Fuses

  12. IFF SIF Control Panels

  13. Command Radio

  14. Standby Canopy Jettison Battery

  15. Tacan Control Panel

  16. Automatic Direction Finder Control Panel

  17. Circuit Breaker Panel

  18. Oxygen Regulator

  AUXILIARY INSTRUMENT PANELS

  1. Landing Gear Selector Handle

  2. Landing Gear Position Indicator Lights

  3. Emergency Landing Gear Release Switch

  4. ATO Ready Indicator Light

  5. ATO Ignition Button

  6. ATO Jettison Button

  7. Wing Flap Position Indicator

  8. Landing Gear Warning Test Button

  9. Air Start Switch

  10. Emergency Fuel Switch

  11. External Stores Jettison Button

  12. Generator Out Indicator Light

  13. Loadmeter

  14. Cabin Altimeter

  15. Engine Crank Switch

  16. Engine Rotor Test Switch

  17. Generator Switch

  18. Voltmeter

  19. Inverter Failure Warning Light

  20. Generator Switch

  21. Engine Starter Switch

  22. Instrument Power Switch

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Glossary of Terms Used in this Book

  INTRODUCTION

  Stranger to the Ground, above all else, is an insight into the character of a man whose great compulsion is to measure himself against storm and night and fear.

  On the surface it is the tale of a memorable mission of a young fighter pilot utilizing his skills in a lonely duel with death. Yet between the lines emerges the portrait of the airman as a breed, probing outward, but even more significantly, inward.

  To be written, this book had first to be flown! Whoever reads it will find himself locked in a cockpit with Dick Bach, not for a single flight but for a thousand preceding hours in which professional skills were polished to combat competency, and a philosophy of life was matured.

  It is rarely realized—and this may be as appropriate a place as any to point it out—that in the achievement of flight men have perhaps had to call more deeply on resources of heart and mind than in any previous reach of experience.

  There is nothing in man’s physical nature which prepares him for flight. Countless generations have rooted human instincts in earth-bound habits.

  Everything pertaining to flight has had to be invented—the aircraft; the instruments; the engines; the guidance systems; the communications; the airports—everything. And beyond this, men have had to meld myriad scientific discoveries into workable compromises, lending themselves in the process to unprecedented experiments.

  As I contemplate all this after a lifetime of intimate association with it, I marvel at the depth of man’s spiritual and intellectual resources more than at the altitudes and speeds of his flight.

  Our modern tri
umph in reaching toward the stars is as much an extension of the human spirit as it is a breakthrough in science. Science is the servant. Spirit is the master.

  This is the message of Stranger to the Ground, gleaming through the love of a pilot for his plane, the dedication of an officer to his country, the determination of a young man to pay his debt to freedom in combat with storm and night and fear.

  GILL ROBB WILSON

  CHAPTER ONE

  The wind tonight is from the west, down runway two eight. It pushes gently at my polka-dot scarf and makes the steel buckles of my parachute harness tinkle in the darkness. It is a cold wind, and because of it my takeoff roll will be shorter than usual and my airplane will climb more quickly than it usually does when it lifts into the sky.

  Two ground crewmen work together to lift a heavy padlocked canvas bag of Top Secret documents into the nose of the airplane. It sags awkwardly into space normally occupied by contoured ammunition cans, above four oiled black machine guns, and forward of the bomb release computers. Tonight I am not a fighter pilot. I am a courier for 39 pounds of paper that is of sudden urgent interest to my wing commander, and though the weather this night over Europe is already freakish and violent, I have been asked to move these pounds of paper from England into the heart of France.

  In the bright beam of my flashlight, the Form One, with its inked boxes and penciled initials, tells me that the airplane is ready, that it carries only minor shortcomings of which I already know: a dent in one drop tank, an inspection of the command radio antenna is due, the ATO* system is disconnected. It is hard to turn the thin pages of the Form One with gloves on, but the cold wind helps me turn them.

  Form signed, gun bay door locked over the mysterious canvas bag, I climb the narrow yellow ladder to my dark cockpit, like a high-booted mountain climber pulling himself to a peak from whose snows he can stand and look down upon the world. My peak is the small cockpit of a Republic F-84F Thunderstreak.

  The safety belt of the yellow-handled ejection seat is wide nylon web, heavy and olive-drab; into its explosive buckle fits the nylon harness from over my shoulders and the amber steel link that automatically opens my parachute if I should have to bail out tonight. I surround myself with the universal quiet metallic noises of a pilot joining himself to his airplane. The two straps to the seat cushion survival kit, after their usual struggle, are captured and clink softly to my parachute harness. The green oxygen mask fits into its regulator hose with a muffled rubbery snap. The steel D-ring lanyard clanks as it fastens to the curved bar of the parachute ripcord handle. The red-streamered ejection seat safety pin scrapes out of its hole drilled in the trigger of the right armrest and rustles in the darkness into the small pocket on the leg of my tight-laced G-suit. The elastic leg strap of my scratched aluminum kneeboard cinches around my left thigh, latching itself with a hollow clank. My hard white fiberglass crash helmet, dark-visored, gold-lettered 1/LT. BACH, fits stiffly down to cover my head, its soft sponge-rubber earphones waiting a long cold moment before they begin to warm against my ears. The chamois chinstrap snaps at the left side, microphone cable connects with its own frosty click into the aircraft radio cord, and at last the wind-chilled green rubber oxygen mask snugs over my nose and mouth, fitting with a tight click-click of the smooth chromed fastener at the right side of the helmet. When the little family of noises is still, by tubes and wires and snaps and buckles, my body is attached to the larger, sleeping body of my airplane.

  Outside, in the dark moving blanket of cold, a ghostly yellow auxiliary power unit roars into life, controlled by a man in a heavy issue parka who is hoping that I will be quick to start my engine and taxi away. Despite the parka, he is cold. The clatter and roar of the big gasoline engine under his hands settles a bit, and on its voltage dials, white needles spring into their green arcs.

  From the engine of the power unit, through the spinning generator, through the black rubber snake into the cold silver wing of my airplane, through the marked wires of the DC electrical system, the power explodes in my dark cockpit as six brilliant red and yellow warning lights, and as quick tremblings of a few instrument pointers.

  My leather gloves, stamped with the white wings and star of Air Force property, go through a familiar little act for the interested audience that watches from behind my eyes. From left to right around the cockpit they travel; checking left console circuit breakers in, gun heater switch off, engine screen switch extend, drop tank pressure switches off, speed break switch extend, throttle off, altimeter, drag chute handle, sight caging lever, radiocompass, TACAN, oxygen, generator, IFF, inverter selector. The gloves dance, the eyes watch. The right glove flourishes into the air at the end of its act and spins a little circle of information to the man waiting in the wind below: checks are finished, engine is starting in two seconds. Now it is throttle on, down with the glove, and starter switch to start.

  There is no time to take a breath or blink the eye. There is one tiny tenth-second hiss before concussion shatters icy air. Suddenly, instantly, air and sparks and Jet Propellant Four. My airplane is designed to start its engine with an explosion. It can be started in no other way. But the sound is a keg of black powder under the match, a cannon firing, the burst of a hand grenade. The man outside blinks, painfully.

  With the blast, as though with suddenly-opened eyes, my airplane is alive. Instantly awake. The thunderclap is gone as quickly as it came, replaced by a quiet rising whine that peaks quickly, very high, and slides back down the scale into nothingness. But before the whine is gone, deep inside the engine, combustion chambers have earned their name. The luminous white pointer of fee gage marked exhaust gas temperature pivots upward, lifting as thermocouples taste a swirling flood of yellow fire that twists from fourteen stainless steel chambers. The fire spins a turbine. The turbine spins a compressor. The compressor crushes fuel and air for the fire. Weak yellow flames change to businesslike blue torches held in their separate round offices, and the ghostly power unit is needed no more.

  Flourish with the right glove, finger pointing away; away the power, I’m on my own.

  Tailpipe temperature is settled and at home with 450 degrees of centigrade, tachometer steadies to note that the engine is turning at 45 percent of its possible rpm. The rush of air to the insatiable steel engine is a constant rasping scream at the oval intake, a chained banshee shrieking in the icy black air and the searing blue fire.

  Hydraulic pressure shows on a dial, under a pointer. Speed brake switch to retract, and the pressure pulls two great slabs of steel to disappear into the smooth sides of my airplane. Rainbow lights go dark as pressure rises in systems for fuel and oil. I have just been born, with the press of wind at my scarf. With the wind keening along the tall swept silver of my rudder. With the rush of wind to the torches of my engine.

  There is one light left on, stubbornly glowing over a placard marked canopy unlocked. My left glove moves a steel handle aft. With the right I reach high overhead to grasp the frame of the counterbalanced section of double-walled plexiglass. A gentle pull downward, and the smooth-hinged canopy settles over my little world. I move the handle forward in my left glove, I hear a muffled sound of latches engaging, I see the light wink out. The wind at my scarf is gone.

  I am held by my straps and my buckles and my wires in a deep pool of dim red light. In the pool is all that I must know about my airplane and my position and my altitude until I pull to throttle back to off, one hour and 29 minutes and 579 airway miles from Wethersfield Air Base, England.

  This base means nothing to me. When I landed it was a long runway in the sunset, a tower operator giving taxi directions, a stranger waiting for me in Operations with a heavy padlocked canvas bag. I was in a hurry when I arrived, I am in a hurry to leave. Wethersfield, with its hedges and its oak trees that I assume are part of all English towns, with its stone houses and mossed roofs and its people who watched the Battle of Britain cross the sky with black smoke, is to me Half Way. The sooner I leave Wethersfield a smudge
in the darkness behind, the sooner I can finish the letter to my wife and my daughter, the sooner I can settle into a lonely bed and mark another day gone from the calendar. The sooner I can take myself beyond the unknown that is the weather high over Europe.

  On the heavy black throttle under my left glove there is a microphone button, and I press it with my thumb. “Wethersfield Tower,” I say to the microphone buried in the snug green rubber of my oxygen mask. I hear my own voice in the earphones of my helmet, and know that in the high glass cube of the control tower the same voice and the same words are this moment speaking. “Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five; taxi information and standing by for ATC clearance.”

  It still sounds strange. Air Force Jet. Six months ago it was Air Guard Jet. It was one weekend a month, and fly when you have the spare time. It was the game of flying better than Air Force pilots and shooting straighter than Air Force pilots, with old airplanes and with a full-time civilian job. It was watching the clouds of tension mushroom over the world, and knowing for certain that if the country needed more firepower, my squadron would be a part of it. It was thirty-one pilots in the squadron knowing that fact, knowing that they could leave the squadron before the recall came; and it was the same thirty-one pilots, two months later, flying their worn airplanes without in-flight refueling, across the Atlantic into France. Air Force Jet.

  “Roger, Zero Five,” comes a new voice in the earphones. “Taxi runway two eight; wind is two seven zero degrees at one five knots, altimeter is two niner niner five, tower time is two one two five, clearance is on request. Type aircraft, please.”

  I twist the small knurled knob near the altimeter to set 29.95 in a red-lit window. The hands of the altimeter move slightly. My gloved thumb is down again on the microphone button. “Roger, tower, Zero Five is a Fox Eight Four, courier: returning to Chaumont Air Base, France.”

  Forward goes the thick black throttle and in the quickening roar of startled, very hot thunder, my Republic F-84F, slightly dented, slightly old-fashioned, governed by my left glove, begins to move. A touch of boot on left brake and the airplane turns. Back with the throttle to keep from blasting the man and his power unit with a 600-degree hurricane from the tailpipe. Tactical Air Navigation selector to transmit and receive.