Stranger to the Ground, Page 2

  The sleeping silver silhouettes of the F-100’s of Wethersfield Air Base sweep by in the dark as I taxi, and I am engulfed in comfort. The endless crackle of light static in my earphones, the intimate weight of my helmet, the tremble of my airplane, rocking and slowly pitching as it rolls on hard tires and oil-filed struts over the bumps and ridges of the taxiway. Like an animal. Like a trusted and trusting eager heavy swift animal of prey, the airplane that I control from its birth to its sleep trundles toward the two-mile runway lulled by the murmur of the cold wind.

  The filtered voice of the tower operator shatters the serene static in the earphones. “Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, clearance received. Ready to copy?”

  My pencil springs from flight jacket sleeve to poise itself over the folded flight plan trapped in the jaws of the clipboard on my left leg. “Ready to copy.”

  “ATC clears; Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five to the Chaumont Airport . . .” I mark the words in scrawled shorthand. I have been cleared to fly the route I have planned. “. . . via direct Abbeville, direct Laon, direct Spangdahlem, direct Wiesbaden, direct Phalsbourg, direct Chaumont.” A route detoured before it begins; planned to avoid the mass of storms and severe weather that the forecaster has marked in red squares across the direct route to my home base. “Climb in radar control to flight level three three zero, contact Anglia control . . .” The clearance comes in through the earphones and out through the sharp point of the pencil; whom to contact and when and on which frequency, one hour and 29 minutes of flying pressed onto a four-inch square of penciled paper bathed in dim red light. I read the shorthand back to the tower operator, and tap the brakes to stop short of the runway.

  “Roger, Zero Five, readback is correct. Cleared for takeoff; no reported traffic in the local area.”

  Throttle forward again and the airplane swings into takeoff position on runway two eight. The concrete is wide and long. The painted white stripe along its center is held at one end by my nosewheel, at the invisible other end by the tough nylon webbing of the overrun barrier. A twin row of white edge lights converges in the black distance ahead, pointing the way. The throttle moves now, under my left glove, all the way forward; until the radium-caked tachometer needle covers the line marked 100 percent, until the tailpipe temperature is up by the short red arc on the dial that means 642 degrees centigrade, until each pointer on each dial of the red-soaked instrument panel agrees with what we are to do, until I say to myself, as I say every time, Here we go. I release the brakes.

  There is no instant rush of speed, no head forced against the headrest. I feel only a gentle push at my back. The stripe of the runway unrolls, lazily at first, beneath the nose-wheel. Crackling thunder twists and blasts and tumbles behind me, and, slowly, I see the runway lights begin to blur at the side of the concrete and the airspeed needle lifts to cover 50 knots, to cover 80 knots, to cover 120 knots (go-no-go speed checks OK) and between the two white rows of blur I see the barrier waiting in the darkness at the end of the runway and the control stick tilts easily back in my right glove and the airspeed needle is covering 160 knots and the nosewheel lifts from the concrete and the main wheels follow a half-second later and there is nothing in the world but me and an airplane alive and together and the cool wind lifts us to its heart and we are one with the wind and one with the dark sky and the stars ahead and the barrier is a forgotten dwindling blur behind and the wheels swing up to tuck themselves away in my seamless aluminum skin and the airspeed is up to one nine zero and flap lever forward and airspeed two two zero and I am in my element and I am flying. I am flying.

  The voice that I hear in the soft earphones is unlike my own. It is the voice of a man concerned only with business; a man speaking while he has yet many things to do. Still it is my thumb down on the microphone button and my words screened through the receiver in the tower. “Wethersfield Tower, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five departing on course, leaving your station and frequency.”

  My airplane climbs easily through the strange clear air over southern England, and my gloves, not content to accept idleness, move across the cockpit and complete the little tasks that have been assigned to them. The needles of my altimeter swing quickly through the 5,000-foot mark, and while my gloves work at the task of retracting the engine screens, pressurizing the drop tanks, loosing the D-ring lanyard from the ripcord, setting the pneumatic compressor into life, I notice suddenly that there is no moon. I had hoped for a moon.

  My eyes, at the command of the audience behind them, check once again that all the small-dialed engine instruments have pointers properly under their arcs of green paint on the glass. The right glove, conscientious, pushes the oxygen lever from 100 percent to normal, and sets the four white numbers of the departure control frequency in the four black windows of the command ultra-high frequency transmitter.

  The strange voice that is mine speaks to the radar control center guiding my departure. The voice is capable of doing the necessary talking, the gloves are capable of moving throttle and control stick to guide the slanting climb of my airplane into the night. Ahead of me, through the heavy angled glass of the windscreen, through a shrinking wall of clear air, is the weather. I can see that it hugs the ground at first, low and thin, as if uncertain that it is over the land that it has been assigned to cover.

  The three white hands of the altimeter swing through 10,000 feet, sending my right glove into another, shorter, series of menial tasks in the cockpit. It dials now the numbers 387 into the pie-slice of window on the radiocompass control panel. In the soft earphones are the faint Morse letters A-B: the Abbeville radiobeacon.

  Abbeville. Twenty years ago the Abbeville Boys, flying Messerschmitt 109’s with yellow-spiral spinners around their propeller-hub cannon were the best fighter pilots in the German Luftwaffe. Abbeville was the place to go when you were looking for a fight, and a place to avoid when you carried canvas sacks instead of machinegun bullets. Abbeville on one side of the Channel, Tangmere and Biggin Hill on the other. Messerschmitt on one side and Spitfire on the other. And a tangle of white contrails and lines of falling black smoke in the crystal air between.

  The only distance that lies between me and a yellow-nosed ME-109 is a little bend of the river called time. The wash of waves on the sands of Calais. The hush of wind across chessboard Europe. The spinning of one hourhand. Same air, same sea, same hourhand, same river of time. But the Messerschmitts are gone. And the magnificent Spitfires. Could my airplane tonight carry me not along the river, but across the bend of it, the world would look exactly as it looks tonight. And in this same air before them, in another block of old air, the Breguets and the Latés and One Lonely Ryan, coming in from the west, into the glare of searchlights over Le Bourget. And back across the confluences of the river, a host of Nieuports and Pfalzes and Fokkers and Sopwiths, of Farmans and Bleriots, of Wright Flyers, of Santos-Dumont dirigibles, of Montgolfiers, of hawks circling, circling. As men looked up from the ground. Into the sky just as it is tonight.

  The eternal sky, the dreaming man.

  The river flows.

  The eternal sky, the striving man.

  The river flows.

  The eternal sky, the conquering man.

  Tonight Tangmere and Biggin Hill are quiet lighted rectangles of concrete under the cloud that slips beneath my airplane, and the airport near Abbeville is dark. But there is still the crystal air and it whispers over my canopy and blasts into the gaping oval intake a gun’s length ahead of my boots.

  It is sad, to be suddenly a living part of what should belong to old memory and faded gun-camera films. My reason for being on the far shore of the Atlantic is to be always ready to mold new memories of the victory of Us against Them, and to squeeze the trigger that adds another few feet to history’s reel of gun-camera film. I am here to become a part of a War That Could Be, and this is the only place I belong if it changes into a War That Is.

  But rather than learning to hate, or even to be more uncaring about th
e enemy who threatens on the other side of the mythical iron curtain, I have learned in spite of myself that he might actually be a man, a human being. During my short months in Europe, I have lived with German pilots, with French pilots, Norwegian pilots, with pilots from Canada and from England. I have discovered, almost to my surprise, that Americans are not the only people in the world who fly airplanes for the sheer love of flying them. I have learned that airplane pilots speak the same language and understand the same unspoken words, whatever their country. They face the same headwinds and the same storms. And as the days pass without war, I find myself asking if a pilot, because of the political situation under which he lives, can possibly be a totally different man from all the pilots living in all the political systems across the earth.

  This man of mystery, this Russian pilot about whose life and thoughts I know so little, becomes in my mind a man not unlike myself, who is flying an airplane fitted with rockets and bombs and machine guns not because he loves destruction but because he loves his airplane, and the job of flying a capable, spirited airplane in any Air Force cannot be divorced from the job of killing when there is a war to be fought.

  I am growing to like this probable pilot of the enemy, the more so because he is an unknown and forbidden man, with no one to bear witness of the good in him, and so many at hand to condemn his evils.

  If war is declared here in Europe, I will never know the truth of the man who mounts the cockpit of a red-starred airplane. If war is declared, we are unleashed against each other, like starved wolves, to fight. A friend of mine, a true proven friend, neither imagined nor conjured out of possibilities, will fall to the guns of a Russian pilot. Somewhere an American will die under his bombs. In that instant I will be swallowed up in one of the thousand evils of war; I will have lost the host of unmet friends who are the Russian pilots. I will rejoice in their death, take pride in the destruction of their beautiful airplanes under my own rockets and my own guns. If I succumb to hate, I will myself become certainly and unavoidably a lesser man. In my pride I will be less worthy of pride. I will kill the enemy, and in so doing will bring my own death upon me. And I am sad.

  But this night no war has been declared. It seems, in the quiet days, almost as if our nations might learn to live with each other, and this night the eastern pilot of my imagining, more real than the specter he would become in wartime, is flying his own solitary airplane into his own capricious weather.

  My gloves are at work again, leveling the airplane at 33,000 feet. Throttle comes back under the left glove until the engine tachometer shows 94 percent rpm. The thumb of the right glove touches the trim button on the control stick once and again, quickly, forward. The eyes flick from instrument to instrument, and all is in order. Fuel flow is 2,500 pounds per hour. Mach needle is resting over .8, which means that my true airspeed is settling at 465 knots. The thin luminous needle of the radiocompass, over its many-numbered dial, pivots suddenly as the Abbeville radiobeacon passes beneath my airplane, under the black cloud. Eyes make a quick check of transmitter frequency, voice is ready with a position report to air traffic control, left thumb is down on the microphone button at 2200 hours, and the audience behind the eyes sees the first faint flash of lightning in the high opaque darkness ahead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “France Control, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Abbeville.” Empty static for a moment in the soft earphones, and I see, very clearly, a man in a large square room cluttered with teletypes and speakers and frequency dials and round grey radar screens. At an upholstered swivel chair, the man leans forward to his microphone, setting aside a glass of red wine.

  “Four Zero Five, France Control, go ahead.” The accent in his English is barely noticeable. That is rare. He reaches for a pencil, from a jar bristling with pencils.

  The microphone button is down again under my left thumb, and I hear again the sidetone, just as the man on the ground is hearing it. The engine in the sidetone is a quiet and businesslike roar, a waterfall of purposeful sound that is a background for my message. My words are filtered through the tubed body of the transmitter to become impersonal and faraway, the voice of someone I know only as a casual acquaintance. “France Control, Zero Five is over Alpha Bravo on the hour, flight level three three zero assigned instrument flight rules, estimating Lima Charlie at zero niner, Spangdahlem.” Good old France. The only country in Europe where you never say the name of a reporting point, but only its initials, with a little air of mystery as you do. The familiar pattern of the position report is rhythmic and poetic; it is a pattern of pure efficiency that is beautiful to speak. There are thousands of position reports spoken and heard every hour across the earth; they are as basic a part of instrument flying as the calls for landing information are a basic part of fair-weather flight. Position reports are part of a way of life.

  “Roger, Zero Five, on your position. Report Lima Charlie.” The pencil stops, the whine is lifted.

  With his last word, the man at France Control has ceased to exist. I am left, alone again with the night and the stars and the sounds of my airplane.

  In every other fighter airplane, cruise is a time of quiet and of smooth unvarying sound. The pilot hushes along on his tamed fall of sound and knows that all is well with his engine and his airplane. But not with this airplane, not with my F-84F. My airplane is a clown. Its engine sounds more like a poorly-tuned, poorly-muffled V-8 than a smoothly efficient dynamo spinning on pressure-oiled bearings. I was warned when I began to fly the Thunderstreak that if the engine ever stopped vibrating I would be in trouble. It is true. Strange sounds come from nowhere, linger for a while in the body of the airplane, then die away.

  Now, behind my left shoulder, a low whine begins. Intrigued by the new tone that my harlequin airplane has discovered, I listen attentively. The whine rises higher and higher, as if a tiny turbine was accelerating to tremendous speed. My left glove inches the throttle back an inch and the whine calms a fraction; throttle forward and it regains its spinning song. In another airplane the whine would be cause for serious and concerned interest; in my airplane it is cause for a slight smile under the green rubber oxygen mask. I had once thought that I had heard all the noises that it was possible for this airplane to make. After a moment, the whine dies away by itself.

  Thud. There is the smallest tremor in the throttle, and a sound as if a hard snowball had hit the side of the fuselage. In an F-100 or an F-104, in the new airplanes, the thud would bring a sudden stiffening of pilot and a quick re-check of the engine instruments. In another airplane the thud would likely mean that the engine has thrown a turbine blade, and that a host of unpleasant consequences are to follow. In my ’84 though, a thud is just one more sound in the kaleidoscope of sounds that the airplane offers to its pilot, another evidence of an unconforming personality hidden in the metal.

  My airplane has a great variety of individual quirks; so many that before we arrived in France it was necessary to arrange a little meeting with the control tower operators, to tell them about the airplane. The boom of the engine start could send the uninitiated scrambling for the fire alarm. When the engine is idling on the ground, turning a modest 46 percent of her available rpm, she hums. She hums not quietly to herself, but an amplified, penetrating, resonant distracting “MMMM” that makes the crew chiefs point painfully to their ears, reminding pilots to advance the power, to increase the rpm past the point of resonance. It is a very precise and human hum she makes, and there is no doubt over all the airbase that an F-84F is preparing to fly. Heard from a comfortable distance, the airplane is setting the note for the song of her higher thunder. Later, in the sky, there is usually no trace of her resonance, though the cockpit is filled with the other sounds of her engine.

  Every once in a while, though, I fly an airplane that hums in the air, and the cockpit is a finely engineered box of torture. Back on the throttle after takeoff, to cruise cross-country, to stay on a leader’s wing. MMM . . . Back a little more on the throttle. MMM . .
. The resonance ripples through me as if I were a metal servomotor bolted to the fuselage. I shake my head quickly. It is like trying to disperse a horde of hungry mosquitoes with a toss of the head. I open my eyes wide, close them, shake my head again. Futilely. Soon it is difficult to think of flying formation, of cruising, of navigation, of anything but the all-pervading hum that makes the airplane tremble as with a strange malady. Speed brakes out, halfway. Throttle open to 98 percent rpm. The hum subsides with the increased power, replaced by the tremble of air blasting against the speed brakes. To fly two hours in a badly humming airplane would reduce its pilot to a hollow-eyed automaton. I would not have believed that such a simple thing as sound and vibration could erode a man so quickly. When I wrote one airplane up for severe engine resonance, I discovered that it was most often caused by a loose tailpipe connection, allowing the eight-foot tube of stainless steel to rest lightly against the airframe like a tuning fork against a water glass. The perfect tool of a saboteur in wartime would be a wrench with which to loosen, ever so slightly, the tailpipe mounting bolts on enemy airplanes.

  Other things. The airplane has a hundred little jokes to play. A hundred little things that seem to indicate that Something Is Wrong, when nothing at all is amiss. Just before takeoff, during the engine runup on the runway, grey smoke floods into the cockpit, geysering from the air vents. Engine fire? A broken oil line in the engine compartment? No. The cockpit air temperature control is set too cold, and the moist outside air is turned to instant fog by the obedient cooling system. Press the temperature control to hot for a moment, and the smoke disappears. And the airplane chuckles to herself.

  The same moment, runup. Smoke, real oil smoke, streams from the fuselage, blasting down from a hidden orifice onto the runway, splashing up to wreathe the airplane in grey. Normal. Just the normal oil-mist from the pressure-lubricated bearings, venting overboard as designed.