Stranger to the Ground

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.

In flight, after an hour of low-level. Fuel suddenly streams from the leader’s airplane, flying back like a great white banner of distress. Broken fuel lines? An indicator of turbine blades spinning from the redhot wheel and an engine coming to pieces? Imminent fire and a burst of scarlet in the sky? No. Quite normal, this streamer of fuel. As the drop tanks feed the last of their fuel, and as the internal tanks join to feed their own fuel, there is for a moment too much JP-4 in the main fuel tank, and it overflows, as designed, harmlessly overboard. The airplane chuckles with an old joke.

Takeoff. Heavy laden at low airspeed, close to the ground, bailout a marginal thing before the flaps are up, and a brilliant yellow light flares on the instrument panel. Suddenly. I see it from the corner of my eye, and I am stunned. For a half-second. And the yellow light, all by itself, goes out. Not the yellow overheat-warning light I saw at that critical moment when fire could be disaster, but the mechanical advantage shift light, telling me, when I have recovered my composure, that the stabilator hydraulic system is going about its task as its destiny demands, changing the response of the flight controls as the landing gear locks up. And the airplane chuckles.

But once in a very long while the turbine buckets do break free and slice redhot through the fuel lines, the fire warning light really does come on with flame at its sensors, the cockpit does fill with smoke. Once in a while. And an airplane screams.

Tonight I cruise. The steady play of whines and thuds and rumbles and squeals, and through it all the luminous needles at 95 percent rpm and 540 degrees tailpipe temperature, and 265 knots indicated airspeed. Cruise is the long radium hands of the altimeter drifting slowly back and forth across the 33,000-foot mark and other shorter needles captured by arcs of green paint on their glass dials. There are 24 round dials on the panel in front of me in the red light. The fact is empty and unimpressive, although I feel, vaguely, as if it should be startling. Perhaps if I counted the switches and handles and selectors . . .

At one time I would have been impressed by the 24 dials, but tonight they are few and I know them well. There is a circular computer on the clipboard strapped to my leg that tells me the indicated airspeed of 265 knots is actually moving my airplane over the land between Abbeville and Laon at a speed of 465 knots, 535 miles per hour. Which is not really fast, but for an old Guard airplane it is not really slow, either.

Cruise. Hours neatly shortened and diced into sections of time spent flying between city and city, radiobeacon and radiobeacon, between one swing of the radiocompass needle and the next. I carry my world with me as I fly, and outside is the familiar, indifferent Other World of fifty-five below zero and stars and black cloud and a long fall to the hills.

From the light static in the earphones comes a quick and hurried voice: “Evreux Tower radio check Guard channel; one-two-three-four-five-four-three-two-one Evreux Tower out.”

There is someone else in the world at this moment. There is a tower operator six miles below me, dwindling at 465 knots, who is this second setting his microphone back in its cradle, glancing at his runway held in a net of dim white lights and surrounded by blue taxiway lights that lead to a parking ramp. From his tower he can look down on to tall rhythmic triangles that are the vertical stabilizers of his base’s transport airplanes parked. At this moment he is beginning a lonely stretch of duty; his radio check was as much to break the silence as it was to check to emergency transmitter. But now he is assured that the radio works and he settles down to wait the night through. He is not aware that I have passed over his head. To know, he would have to step out to the catwalk around his tower and listen carefully and look up through the last hole in the clouds, toward the stars. He would hear, if his night was a quiet one, the tiny dim thunder of the engine that carries me and my airplane through the sky. If he carried his binoculars, and if he watched at precisely the right moment, he would see the flashing dots of red and green and amber that are my navigation lights, and the white of my fuselage light. And he would walk back into his tower in the first drops of rain and wait for to coming of the dawn.

I remember that I wondered, once, what flying a fighter airplane would feel like. And now I know. It feels just the same as it feels to drive an automobile along the roads of France. Just the same. Take a small passenger sedan to 33,000 feet. Close the walls around the driver’s seat, cut away the roof and cap the space with plexiglass. Steer with a control stick and raider pedals instead of with a wheel. Put 24 gages on the instrument panel. Wear a sage-green set of many-pocketed coveralls and a tight-laced zippered G-suit and a white crash helmet with a dark plexiglass visor and a soft green rubber oxygen mask and a pair of high-topped black jump boots with white shroud-line laces and a pistol in a leather shoulder holster and a heavy green flight jacket with a place for four pencils on the left sleeve and sew your squadron emblem and your name on the jacket and paint your name on the helmet and slip into a parachute and connect the survival kit and the oxygen and the microphone and the automatic parachute lanyard and strap yourself with shoulder harness and safety belt into a seat wife yellow handles and a trigger and fly along above the hills to cover eight miles a minute and look down at the growing wall of cloud at your right and watch the needles and pointers that tell you where you are, how high you are and how fast you are moving. Flying a fighter airplane is just the same as driving an automobile along the roads of France.

My airplane and I have been in the air now for 31 minutes since we left the runway at Wethersfield Air Base. We have been together for 415 flying hours since we first met in the Air National Guard. Fighter pilots are not in the cockpits of their airplanes a tenth as long as transport pilots are on the flight decks of theirs. Flights in single-engine airplanes rarely last longer than two hours, and new airplanes replace old models every three or four years, even in the Guard. But the ’84 and I have flown together for a reasonably long time, as fighter pilots and their airplanes go. We have gotten to know each other. My airplane comes alive under my gloved touch, and in return for her life she gives me the response and performance that is her love.

I want to fly high, above the cloud, and she willingly draws her own streamer of tunneled and twisting grey behind us. From the ground the tunnel of grey is a contrail of brilliant white, and the world can see, in the slash across the blue, that we are flying very high.

I want to fly low. In a roar, flash, a sweptwing blur we streak across the wooded valleys. We rustle the treetops in the pressure of our passing and the world is a sheetblur in the windscreen with one point fixed: straight ahead, the horizon.

We enjoy our life together.

Every once in a while as an idle hour catches me thinking of the life I lead, I ask why the passion for speed and for low-level flying. For, as an old instructor told me, you can do anything you want in an airplane without the slightest danger, until you try to do it near the ground. It is the contact with the ground, with that depressingly solid other world, that kills pilots. So why do we fly low and fast occasionally just for the fun of it? Why the barrel rolls off the deck after a pass on the army tanks in the war games? Why the magnetism of the bridge, the silent patient dare that every bridge makes to every pilot, challenging him to fly beneath it and come away alive?

I enjoy the color and the taste of life a very great deal. Although death is an interesting sort of thing on the path ahead, I am content to let it find me where it will rather than hasting to meet it or deliberately searching it out. So I ask myself, why the rolls, the lower-than-necessary passes at high speed? Because it is fun, the answer says, throwing up a screen that it hopes will be accepted as self-sufficient. Because it is fun. There. No pilot will deny that. But like a child experimenting with words, I ask, why is it fun? Because you like to show off. Aha. The answer begins to be seen, slipping into a doorway a half-second too late to escape my attention. And why do I like to show off? The answer is caught in a crossfire of brilliant spotlights. Because I am free. Because my spirit is not shackled by a 180-pound body. Because I have powers, when I am with my airplane, that only the gods have. Because I do not have to read about 500 knots or see it in a motion picture from a drone airplane or imagine what it would feel like. In my freedom I can live 500 knots—the blur of the trees the brief flash of the tank beneath me the feel of the stick in my right hand and the throttle in my left the smell of green rubber and cold oxygen the filtered voice from the forward air controller, “Nice show, Checkmate!” Because I can tell the men on the ground that truth that I discovered a long time ago: Man is not confined to walk the earth and be subject to its codes. Man is a free creature, with dominion over his surroundings, over the proud earth that was master for so long. And this freedom is so intense that it brings a smile that will not cede its place to mature, dignified impassiveness. For, as the answer said in part, freedom is fun.

She is responsive, my airplane. She does not care that she drinks fuel at low level as a fall drinks water. She does not care that the insects of the forest are snapped into sudden flecks of eternity on her windscreen. She flies at the tops of the trees because that is where I want to fly, because she is a sensitive and responsive airplane. Because I have moved a gloved hand to give her life. Because I paint her a name on the forward fuselage. Because I call her “she.” Because I love her.

My love for this airplane is not born of beauty, for a Thunderstreak is not a beautiful airplane. My love is born of a respect for quality of performance. My airplane, in the life that I bring to her, expects that I fly her properly and well. She will forgive me the moments that make it necessary to force her where she would not smoothly go, if there are reasons for the moments. But if I continually force her to fly as she was not meant to fly, overspeed and overtemperature, with sudden bursts of throttle, with hard instant changes of flight controls, she will one day, coldly and dispassionately, kill me.

I respect her, and she in turn respects me. Yet I have never said, “We landed” or “We tore the target to pieces”; it is always “I landed,” “I knocked out that tank.” Without my airplane I am nothing, yet I claim the credit. What I say, though, is not egocentric at all.

I step into the cockpit of my airplane. With shoulder harness and wide safety belt I strap myself to my airplane (I strap on my wings and my speed and my power) I snap the oxygen hose to my mask (I can breathe at altitudes where the air is very thin) I fit the radio cable to the black wire that comes from the back of my fitted helmet (I can hear frequencies that are unheard by others; I can speak to scores of isolated people with special duties) I flick the gun switch to guns (I can cut a six-ton truck in half with a squeeze of my finger I can flip a 30-ton tank on its back with the faint pressure of my thumb on the rocket button) I rest one hand on the throttle, one on the contoured, button-studded grip of the control stick (I can fly).

The swept aluminum wings are my wings, the hard black wheels are my wheels that I feel beneath me, the fuel in the tanks is my fuel which I drink and through which I live. I am no longer man, I am man/airplane; my airplane is no longer merely Republic F-84F Thunderstreak, but airplane/man. The two are one, the one is the “I” that stops the tank holding the infantry in its foxholes, that strikes the enemy man/airplane out of the blind sky. The I that carries the wing commander’s documents from England to France.

Sometimes I stand on the ground or lie back on a soft couch and wonder how it is possible for me to become wide awake and a part of an airplane, to climb into that fantastically complex cockpit and go through all the procedures and do all the alert thinking that is necessary to fly in formation with other airplanes or around a gunnery pattern for score or to put a cluster of rockets on a target. This thought has stuck with me for long minutes, while I zip the legs of my G-suit, while I slide into my mae west, while I strap myself into the little cockpit. It is a dull lethargy that says, “How can I do everything right?” and wants only to withdraw into itself and forget about the responsibility of flying a high-performance airplane through a precise pattern. But one of the strange features of the game is that as soon as my finger presses the starter switch to start, the lethargy vanishes. In that moment I am ready for whatever the mission will require. I am alert and thinking about what has to be done and knowing just how it must be done and taking the flight one step at a time and taking each step surely and correctly and firmly. The feeling of trying to accomplish the impossible disappears with the touch of the switch to my glove and does not reappear until I am again off guard and un-alert and resting before the next flight. I wonder if this is common, this draining of aggressiveness before a flight. I have never asked another pilot about it, I have never heard another pilot speak of it. But as long as the touch of the switch is an instant cure, I am not concerned.

Switch pressed, in the airplane, I asked how I ever found the thought that flying single-engine airplanes is a complicated job. I cannot answer. It just seemed as if that should be, before I start the engine, and long ago, before I understood the 24 dials and the switches and the handles and the selectors. After I sit in one little space for 415 hours I come to know it rather well, and what I don’t know about it at the end of that time is not of great importance. Where did the thought of complication begin?

At the air shows, friends who do not fly climb the yellow ladder to my airplane and say, “How complicated it all is!” Do they really mean what they are saying? A good question. I think back, before the day I knew an aileron from a stabilator. Did I once consider airplanes complicated? I think back. A shocking answer. Terribly complicated. Even after I had begun to fly, each new airplane, each larger airplane, looked more complicated than the one I flew before. But a simple thing like knowing the purpose of everything in a cockpit dissolves the word “complicated” and makes it sound foreign when someone uses it to describe my airplane.

This dim red panel in front of me now, what is complex about it? Or the consoles at the left and right? Or the buttons on the stick grip? Child’s play.

It was a shattering disillusion, the day I landed from my first flight in the F-84. The Thunderstreak was considered then the best airplane in the Air Force for air-to-ground warfare. It could deliver more high explosive on target than any other tactical fighter airplane flying. I was hurt and disillusioned, because I had just gone through fifteen months of marching and studying and flying and Hit One, Mister, to prepare for an airplane that my wife could walk out to and fly any day of the week. I could settle her in the cockpit, put the harness over her shoulders and buckle the seat belt about her and tell her that the throttle is for fast and slow, the stick is for up and down and left and right, and there’s the handle that brings the wheels up and down. Oh, and by the way, sweetheart, a hundred and sixty knots down final approach.

There goes the feeling that some magic day I would wake to find myself a superman. My wife, who had spent the last fifteen months taking letters in shorthand, could step into that little cockpit and take it through the speed of sound; could drop, if she wanted, an atomic bomb.

Divorced from my airplane I am an ordinary man, and a useless one—a trainer without a horse, a sculptor without marble, a priest without a god. Without an airplane I am a lonely consumer of hamburgers, the fellow in line at a cash register, shopping cart laden with oranges and cereal and quarts of milk. A brown-haired fellow who is struggling against pitiless odds to master the guitar.

But as “The Speckled Roan” falls to the persistence of an inner man striving with chords of E and A minor and B7, so I become more than ordinary when the inner man strives with the material that he loves, which, for me, has a wingspan of 37 feet 6 inches, a height of 13 feet 7 inches. The trainer, the sculptor, the priest and I. We all share a preference for string beans, and distaste for creamed corn. But in each one of us, as in each of all humanity, lives the inner man, who lives only for the spirit of his work.

I am not a superman, but flying is still an interesting way to make a living, and I bury the thought of changing into a steel butterfly and stay the same mortal I have always been.

There is no doubt that the pilots portrayed in the motion pictures are supermen. It is the camera that makes them. On a screen, in a camera’s eye, one sees from without the airplane, looking into the cockpit from over the gunports in the nose. There, the roar of the guns fills the echoing theater and the sparkling orange flames from the guns are three feet long and the pilot is fearless and intense with handsome narrowed eyes. He flies with visor up, so one can see his eyes in the sunlight.

It is this view that makes to superman, the daring air-man, the hero, the fearless defender of the nation. From the other side, from alone inside the cockpit, it is a different picture. No one is watching, no one is listening, and a pilot flies in the sun with his visor down.

I do not see gunports or orange flames. I squeeze the red trigger on the stick grip and hold the white dot of the gunsight on the target and I hear a distant sort of pop-pop-pop and smell gunpowder in my oxygen mask. I certainly do not feel like a very daring airman, for this is my job and I do it in the best way that I can, in the way that hundreds of other tactical fighter pilots are doing it every day. My airplane is not a roaring silver flash across the screen, it is still and unmoving about me while the ground does the blurring and the engine-roar is a vibrating constant behind my seat.

I am not doing anything out of the ordinary. Everyone in a theater audience understands that this gage shows how much utility hydraulic pressure the engine-driven pumps are producing; they know perfectly well that this knob selects the number of the rocket that will fire when I press the button on top of the stick grip; that the second button on the grip is a radar roger button and that it is disconnected because it is never used; that the button that drops the external fuel tanks has a tall guard around it because too many pilots were pressing it by mistake. The audience knows all this. Yet it is still interesting to watch the airplanes in the motion pictures.

The ease of flying is a thing that is never mentioned in the motion pictures or on the recruiting posters. Flying a high-performance military airplane is exacting and difficult, men, but maybe, if you take our training, you will become a different person, with supernatural power to guide the metal monster in the sky. Give it a try, men, your country needs fine-honed men of steel.

Perhaps that is the best approach. Perhaps if the recruiting posters said, “Anyone walking down this street, from that ten-year-old with his schoolbooks to that little old grandmother in the black cotton dress, is able to fly an F-84F jet fighter airplane,” they wouldn’t attract exactly the kind of initiate that looks best on a recruiting poster. But just for fun, the Air Force should train a ten-year-old and a grandmother to fly quick aileron rolls over airshows to prove that the tactical fighter pilot is not necessarily the mechanical man that he is so often painted.

There is little to do. I have another six minutes before the wide needle of the TACAN will swing on its card to say that the little French city of Laon has been pulled by beneath me. I drag my tiny cone of thunder behind me for the benefit of the hills and the cows and perhaps a lonely peasant on a lonely walk through the cloudy night.

A flight like tonight’s is rare. Normally, when I fit myself into the cockpit of this airplane, there is much to be done, for my job is one of being continually ready to fight. Each day of the week, regardless of weather or holidays or flying schedule, one small group of pilots wakes earlier than all the others. They are the Alert pilots. They awaken and they report to the flight line well before the hour that is Target Sunrise. And each day of each week a small group of airplanes are set aside to wait on the Alert pad, power units waiting by their wing. The airplanes, of course, are armed for war.

After the innocuous flying of the Air National Guard, it is chilling at first to spend the dawn checking the attachment of thousands of pounds of olive-drab explosive under my wings. The Alert procedure sometimes seems an impossible game. But the explosive is real.

The day wears on. We spend an hour studying the target that we already know very well. The landmarks about it, the conical hill, the mine in the hillside, the junction of highway and railroad, are as familiar to us as the hundred-arch viaduct that leads to Chaumont. We have in our minds, as well as on the maps stamped SECRET, the times and distances and headings to the target, and the altitudes we will fly. We know that our target will be as well-defended as anyone’s, that there will be a massive wall of flak to penetrate and the delicate deadly fingers of missiles to avoid. Oddly enough, the flak does not really bother us. It does not make a bit of difference whether the target is defended from every housetop or not at all . . . if it is necessary to strike it, we shall go along our memorized route and strike it. If we are caught by the screen of fire, it will be one of those unfortunate happenings of war.

The siren blows, like a rough hand jerking sleep away. My room is dark. For more than a second, in the quick ebb of sleep, I know that I must hurry, but I cannot think of where I must go. Then the second is past and my mind is clear.

The Alert siren.

Hurry.

Into the flight suit, into the zippered black jump boots, into the winter flying jacket. A hurried toss of scarf about throat, leave the door swinging closed and open again on my tousled room and join the rush of other Alert pilots in a dash down the wooden stairs and into the waiting Alert truck. The square wooden buildings of Chaumont Air Base are not yet even silhouettes against the east.

There is a husky comment in the darkness of the rattling truck: “Sleep well, America, your National Guard is awake tonight.”

The truck takes us to the airplanes that wait in the dark. The maintenance Alert crew has beaten us to the airplanes, and the APU’s are roaring into steely life. I climb the ladder that is chipped lemon in the daytime and invisible in the night, a feel of aluminum rungs more than a ladder-being. “Power!” the lights blaze in the cockpit, undimmed by the little night-shields that close off most of their light for flying in the dark. The light from them shows me the parachute straps and the safety belt ends and the belt release lanyard and the G-suit and oxygen hoses and the microphone cables. Helmet on, oxygen mask on (how can rubber get so icy cold?), radio on. Night-shields down on the warning lights, twist the rheostats that fill the cockpit with a bloody glow. “Hawk Able Two,” I say to the microphone, and if my flight leader has been faster strapping in than I, he will know that I am ready to go.

“Roj, Two.” He is fast, my flight leader.

I do not know whether this is a real-thing alert or another practice. I assume it is another practice. Now I tend to the finer points of getting ready to go; checking circuit breakers in, bomb switches set in safe positions, gunsight properly set for the delivery that we will use.

“Hawk Able Four.”

“Roj, Four.”

Check the battle damage switches all down where they should be. Turn the navigation lights on to bright flash. We will turn them to dim as we approach the target.

“Hawk Able Three.” Three was awake too late last night.

“Roj, Three. Parsnip, Hawk Able flight is ready to go with four.”

In the combat operations center, the time is checked as we call in. We checked in well before the maximum time allowed, and this is good.

“Hawk Able, Parsnip here. This is a practice alert. Maintain cockpit alert until further notified.”

“Roj.”

So much meaning can be packed into three letters. Hawk Able Leader didn’t just acknowledge the notice, he told the combat operations center that this is a ridiculous dumb stupid game to be played by grown men and good grief you guys it is THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING and you had just better have orders from high headquarters to call this thing at this hour or you will not be getting much sleep tomorrow night.

“Sorry,” says Parsnip, into the silence. They must have had the orders from high headquarters.

So I close the canopy and lock it against the eternal cold wind and I settle in the red light to wait.

I have waited fifteen minutes in the cockpit for the alert to be canceled. I have waited three hours for it. After the three-hour wait, I had climbed stiffly down from the cockpit with the perfect torture for recalcitrant prisoners of war. You take them and strap them by safety belt and shoulder harness to a soft, comfortable armchair. Then you walk away and leave them there. For the incorrigible prisoners, the real troublemakers, you put their feet into tunnels, sort of like rudder-pedal tunnels in a single-engine airplane, and put a control stick in the way so that they don’t have room to move either foot into a different position. In a very few hours the prisoners will become docile, tractable, eager to mend their ways.

The sun isn’t up yet. We wait in our cockpits. I drift idly in the great dark river of soft-flowing time. Nothing happens. The secondhand on my watch moves around. I begin to notice things; as something to do. I hear a quiet tik . . . tik . . . tik . . . very regular, slow, metronomic. Tik . . . tik . . . tik . . . And the answer comes. My navigation lights. Without the engine running and with the canopy closed to keep out the rustle of the wind, I can hear the opening and the closing of the relays that control the flashing of the lights on wingtip and tail. Interesting. Never would have thought that I could hear the lights going on and off.

Outside is the efficient high-speed pokpokpok of the APU. What a truly efficient thing that power unit is. It will stand there all night and through all tomorrow if it has to, pumping a constant stream of electricity to power the radio and keep the cockpit bathed in scarlet light.

My airplane rocks slightly. I think someone has climbed to the wing and wants to talk to me, but there is no one there. The wind, that gentle cold wind, rocks this massive hard airplane. Every once in a while, and faintly, the wind moves the airplane on its landing gear struts. Thirty feet to my right the airplane of Hawk Able Leader waits, lights on, tikking silently to itself. The bloodlight of the cockpit reflects from the foamwhite enameled helmet of the pilot just as it would reflect if we were cruising now at 30,000 feet. Canopy is closed and locked, the air inside the cockpit is still and cold, and I wish that someone would invent a way to pipe warm air into the cockpit of an airplane that waits in the cold of a very early day. I can feel my warmth being absorbed in the cold metal of the instrument panel and the ejection seat and canopy rails and rudder-pedal tunnels. If I could only be warm and move around a bit and have someone to talk to, sitting cockpit alert would not be too bad a thing.

I have made a discovery. This is what Lonely is. When you are walled up where no one can come inside and talk to you or play a game of cards or chess with you or share a joke about the time over Stuttgart when Number Three mistook the Moselle River for the Rhine and . . . Insulated from the outside. A track that I know is a noisy line truck that clatters and squeaks and needs a new muffler glides noiselessly by on the road in front of my revetment. The locked canopy seals away the sound of its passing. It seals me in with my thoughts. Nothing to read, no moving things to watch, just a quiet cockpit and the tik of the nav lights and the pok of the APU and my very own thoughts.

I sit in an airplane that is mine. The commanders of Wing and Squadron have given it to me without question, trusting utterly in my ability to control it and guide it as they want it guided. They are depending on me to hit the target. I remember a line from the base newspaper that I read during a gigantic war game of a few weeks ago: “Yesterday the Wing saw action while it flew in support of the Army. . . .” The Wing did not see any such action. It was me that saw that action, arcing low and fast with simulated ordnance across the troops on the tanks, trying to streak low enough to make the troops jump into the mud but not low enough to take the whip antenna off the tanks.

Not the Wing making them jump.

Me.

Egoistical? Yes. But then the Wing did not take the chance of misjudging and driving its 12 tons of airplane into the side of a 50-ton armored tank. So this is me sitting Alert, in my airplane, and if it were a real Alert, it would be me who came back or did not come back from the flak and the missiles over the target. They trust me. That seems odd, that anyone should trust anyone else with so much. They give me an airplane without question and without thinking twice about it. The number of the airplane comes up by my name on the scheduling board and I go out and fly it or sit in its cockpit and be ready to fly it. It is just a number on the board. But when I sit in it I have a chance to see what a remarkably involved, what an intricately fashioned thing it is, and what power the commanders have given me by putting that number next to my name.

The crew chief, heavy-jacketed, steel-helmeted, appears abruptly on the aluminum ladder and knocks politely on the plexiglass. I open the canopy, grudging the loss of my pocket of still air, however slightly heated, to the cold wind, and pull one side of my helmet away from my ear so I can hear him. Red light paints his face.

“D’ymind if we climb in the truck and wait . . . be out of the wind a little bit if it’s OK with you. Flash your taxi light if you need . . .”

“OK.” And I resolve to discipline my thought and go over again the headings and the times and the distances and the altitudes to my target. And the great dark river of time moves slowly on.

As I sometimes have long moments for thought on the ground, so every once in a while there is a long cross-country flight that allows a moment to think and be alone with the sky and my airplane. And I smile. Alone with the airplane that has been called “the unforgiving F-84.”

I have been waiting to fly the airplane that is unforgiving. There must be such an airplane somewhere that is so very critical that it must be flown exactly by the book or crash, for the word “unforgiving” appears often in the magazines racked in the pilots’ lounges. But just when I think that the next type of airplane I am to fly has such high performance that it will be unforgiving, I learn to fly it. I learn its ways and its personality, and suddenly it is a forgiving airplane like all the others. It might be a little more critical on its airspeeds as I fly it down final approach to land, but as our acquaintance grows I discover that it has tolerances to either side of the best airspeed and that it will not spin into the ground if I am one knot too slow turning to the runway.

There is always a warning of danger, and only if a pilot fails to heed his airplane’s warning will it go ahead and kill him.

The red fire-warning light comes on after takeoff. It could mean many things: a short circuit in the fire-warning system; too steep a climb at too low an airspeed; a hole in a combustion chamber wall; an engine on fire. Some airplanes have so much difficulty with false fire warnings that their pilots practically disregard them, assuming that the warning circuit has gone bad again. But the F-84F is not one of these; when the light comes on, the airplane is usually on fire. But still I have time to check it—to pull the throttle back, to climb to minimum ejection altitude, to drop the external stores, to check the tailpipe temperature and tachometer and fuel flow, to ask my wingman if he wouldn’t mind taking a little look for smoke from my fuselage. If I am on fire, I have a few seconds to point the airplane away from the houses and bail out. I have never heard of an airplane that exploded without warning.

Jet airplanes are unforgiving in one common respect: they burn great quantities of fuel, and when the fuel is gone the engine stops running. Full tanks in a four-engine propeller-driven transport airplane can keep it in the air for 18 hours nonstop. Twin-engine cargo airplanes often have enough fuel aboard for eight hours of flying when they take off on a two-hour flight. But when I take off on an hour-forty-minute mission, I have enough fuel in the tanks of my ’84F to last through two hours of flying. I do not have to concern myself with long minutes of circling in the air after the mission while other airplanes take off and land.

Occasionally I fly into the landing pattern with 300 pounds of JP-4 in the tanks, or enough for six minutes of flying at high power. If I was seven minutes from the runway with 300 pounds of fuel, I would not make it home with the engine running. If I was ten minutes from the runway, my wheels would never roll on that concrete again. If an airplane is disabled on the runway after I enter the landing pattern with six minutes of fuel, there had better be a fast tow truck waiting to pull it out of the way, or a second runway ready to be used. I will be coming to earth, in an airplane or in a parachute, within the next few minutes.

With the engine stopped, my airplane does not sink like a streamlined brick or a rock or a block of lead. It glides smoothly down, quietly down, as an airplane is designed to glide. I plan a deadstick pattern so that my wheels should touch half way down the runway, and I hold the landing gear retracted until I am certain that I am within gliding range of the field. Then, on final approach, with the runway long and white in the windscreen, it is gear down and flap down and speed brakes out and emergency hydraulic pump on.

Though it is a hidden point of pride to have shut down the engine after a flight with 200 pounds of fuel remaining, tactical fighter pilots rarely give the required minimum fuel notice to the tower when they have less than 800 pounds remaining. The red low-level warning light may be blazing on the instrument panel near a fuel gage needle swinging down through 400 pounds, but unless it looks as if he will be delayed in his landing, the pilot does not call minimum fuel. He has pride in his ability to fly his airplane, and an unimportant thing like eight minutes of fuel remaining is not worthy of his concern.

A transport pilot once cut me out of the landing pattern by calling minimum fuel, receiving a priority clearance to land immediately. I had a full ten minutes of JP-4 in my main fuselage tank, so didn’t mind giving way to the big airplane that needed to land so quickly. A week later I learned that the minimum fuel level set for that transport was thirty minutes of flying time; my engine could have flamed out three times over in the minutes before his fuel would have been really critical.

I respect the fact that my airplane burns fuel and that each flight ends without a great deal of fuel remaining, but it is a point of pride that I do this every day and that when I become concerned with the amount of fuel in my tanks, it is something that deserves concern.

It is a little, more than a little, like playing hooky from life, this airplane-flying business. I fly over the cities of France and Germany at ten o’clock in the morning and think of all the people down there who are working for a living while I pull my contrail free and effortlessly above them. It makes me feel guilty. I fly at 30,000 feet, doing what I enjoy doing more than anything else in all the world, and they are down there in the heat and probably not feeling godlike at all. That is their way. They could all have been fighter pilots if they had wished.

My neighbors in the United States used to look upon me a little condescendingly, waiting for me to grow out of the joy of flying airplanes, waiting for me to see the light and come to my senses and be practical and settle down and leave the Air Guard and spend my weekends at home. It has been difficult for them to believe that I will be flying so long as the Guard needs men in its airplanes, so long as there is an Air Force across the ocean that is training for war. So long as I think that my country is a pretty good place to live and should have the chance to go on being a pretty good place.

The cockpits of the little silver dots in front of the long white contrails are not manned only by the young and impractical. There is many an old fighter pilot still there; pilots who flew the Jugs and Mustangs and Spitfires and Messerschmitts of a long-ago war. Even the Sabre pilots and the Hog pilots of Korea are well-enough experienced to be called “old pilots,” and they are the flight commanders and the squadron commanders of the operational American squadrons in Europe today. But the percentage changes a little every day, and for the most part the line pilots of NATO fighter squadrons have not been personally involved in a hot war.

There is a subtle feeling that this is not good; that the front-line pilots are not as experienced as they should be. But the only difference that exists is that the pilots since Korea do not wear combat ribbons on their dress uniforms. Instead of firing on convoys filled with enemy troops, they fire on dummy convoys or make mock firing passes on NATO convoys in war games a few miles from the barbed-wire fence between East and West. And they spend hours on the gunnery ranges.

Our range is a small gathering of trees and grass and dust in the north of France, and in that gathering are set eight panels of canvas, each painted with a large black circle and set upright on a square frame. The panels stand in the sun and they wait.

I am one of the four fighter airplanes called Ricochet flight, and we come across the range on a spacing pass in close formation, echelon left. We fly a hundred feet above the dry earth, and each of the pilots of Ricochet flight is concentrating. Richochet Lead is concentrating on making this last turn smoothly, on holding his airspeed at 365 knots, on climbing a little to keep from scraping Ricochet Four into the next hill, on judging the point where he will break up and away from the other airplanes to establish a gunnery pattern for them to follow.

Ricochet Two is concentrating on flying as smoothly as he can, to give Three and Four the least amount of difficulty in flying their formation.

Ricochet Three flies watching only Lead and Two, intent on flying smoothly smoothly so that Four can stay in close to fly his position well.

And as Ricochet Four I think of staying in formation and of nothing else, so that the flight will look good to the range officer in his spotting tower. I am acutely conscious that every other airplane in the flight is doing his best to make the flying easy for me, and to thank them for their consideration I must fly so smoothly that the credit will be theirs. Each airplane flies lower than Ricochet Lead, and Four flies closer to the ground than any of them. But to take even a half second to glance at the ground is to be a poor wingman. A wingman has complete total unwavering unquestioning faith in his leader. If Ricochet Lead flies too low now, if he doesn’t pull the formation up a little to clear the hill, my airplane will be a sudden flying cloud of dirt and metal fragments and orange streamers of flame. But I trust the man who is flying as Ricochet Lead, and he inches the formation up to clear the hill and my airplane clears it as though it were a valley; I fly the position that I am supposed to fly and I trust the Leader.

As Ricochet Four, I am stacked back and down to the left so that I can see up across the formation and line the white helmets of the other three pilots. That is all I should see and all I care to see: three helmets in three airplanes in one straight line. No matter what the formation does, I will stay with it in my position, keeping the three white helmets lined on each other. The formation climbs, it dives, it banks hard away from me, it banks toward me; my life is dedicated to do whatever is necessary with the throttle and the control stick and the rudder pedals and the trim button to stay in position and keep the helmets in line.

We are over the target panels and the radio comes to life.

“Ricochet Lead breaking right.” The familiar voice that I know well; the voice, the words, the man, his family, his problems, his ambitions; is this instant the sudden flash of a swept silver wing pitching up and away to begin a pattern of gunnery practice, to develop a skill in a special brand of destruction. And I have only two helmets to line.

When Lead pitches away, Ricochet Two becomes the formation leader. His helmet flicks forward from watching the first airplane to look straight ahead, and he begins to count. One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-break! With his own sudden flash of smooth metal wing, Ricochet Two disappears, and I have the luxuriously simple task of flying formation on only one airplane. Whose pilot is now looking straight ahead. One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-break! The flash of wing happens to Three, only a few feet from my own wing, and I fly alone.

My head locks forward with Three’s break, and I count. One-thousand-one isn’t it a pretty day out today there are just a few clouds for a change and the targets will be easy to see. It is good to relax after that formation. Did a good job, though, Two and Three held it in well one-thousand-two good to have smooth air this morning. I won’t have to worry about bouncing around too much when I put the pipper on the target. Today will be a good day for high scores. Let’s see; sight is set and caged, I’ll check the gun switch later with the other switches what a lonely place for someone to have to bail out. Bet there’s no village for ten miles around one-thousand-break!

In my right glove the control stick slams hard to the right and back and the horizon twists out of sight. My G-suit inflates with hard air, pressing tightly into my legs and stomach. My helmet is heavy, but with a familiar heaviness that is not uncomfortable. The green hills pivot beneath me and I scan the brilliant blue sky to my right for the other airplanes in the pattern.

There they are. Ricochet Lead is a little swept dot two miles away turning onto base leg, almost ready to begin his first firing run. Two is a larger dot and level, following Lead by half a mile. Three is just now turning to follow Two; he is climbing and a thousand feet above me. And away down there is the clearing of the gunnery range and the tiny specks that are the strafing panels in the sun. I have all the time in the world.

Gun switch, beneath its red plastic guard, goes forward under my left glove to guns, sight is uncaged and set to zero angle of depression. The gunfire circuit breaker is pushed down under my right index finger. I twist the thick black throttle with my left glove to bring the computed range for the gunsight down to 1,000 feet. And my grip on the control stick changes.

With the gun switch off and the gunfire circuit breaker out, I fly formation holding the grip naturally, right index finger resting lightly on the red trigger at the front of the contoured plastic. Now, with guns ready to fire, the finger points straight ahead toward the instrument panel in an awkward but necessary position that keeps glove from touching trigger. The glove will stay off the trigger until I swing my airplane in a diving turn that brings the white dot on the sight reflector glass over the black dot painted on the strafing panel.

It is time to put the finishing touches on my attitude. I tell the audience behind my eyes that today I am going to shoot better than anyone else in this flight, that I will put at least 70 percent of my bullets into the black of the target, with the other 30 percent left to be scattered in the white cloth. I run through a picture of a good strafing attack in my mind; I see the black dot growing larger under the white dot of the gunsight, I see the sight-dot stay smoothly in the black, I feel the right index finger beginning to squeeze on the red trigger, I see the white now fully inside the black, I hear the muffled harmless sound of the guns firing their 50-caliber copperclad, and I see the powdered dust billow from behind the square of the target. A good pass.

But caution. Careful during the last seconds of the firing run; don’t become too concerned with putting a long burst into the cloth, I remember for a moment, as I always do before the first gunnery run of the day, the roommate of cadet days who let his enthusiasm fly his airplane a second too long, until his airplane and its target came sharply together on the ground. That is not a good way to die.

Power to 96 percent on the base leg, airspeed up to 300 knots, watch Three go in on his target.

“Ricochet Three’s in, white and hot.” And down he goes, a twisting silhouette of an ’84F.

It is interesting to watch a firing pass from the air. There is no sound from the attacking airplane as it glides swiftly toward its target. Then, abruptly, grey smoke breaks noiselessly from the gunports at the nose of his airplane, streaming back to trace the angle of his dive in a thin smoky line. The dust of the ground begins to spray the air as the airplane breaks away, and a thick brown cloud of it billows at the base of the target when he is gone and climbing.

Now the only untouched target is target number four.

The warning panel on the ground by the spotting tower is turned red side down, white side up; the range is clear and safe for my pass. I note this, and fly along the base leg of the pattern, at right angle to my target. It is a mile away on the ground to my right. It drifts slowly back. It is at one o’clock low. It is at one-thirty low. I recheck the gun switch to guns. It is at two o’clock low and slam the stick whips to the right under my hand and my airplane rolls like a terrified animal and the sky goes grey with the G of the turn and the G-suit inflates to press me in a hard vise of trapped air. Beneath the canopy is pivoting blurred ground moving. It is the beginning of a good firing pass. The microphone button is down under my left thumb, “Ricochet Four is in, white and hot.”

White and hot. The target is clear and the guns are ready to fire. Airspeed is up to 360 knots in the dive, and my wings roll level again. In the windscreen is a tiny square of white cloth with the speck of a black dot painted. I wait. The white dot called the pipper, the dot that shows on the windscreen where my bullets will converge, bounces in lazy slow bounces as it recovers from the sharp turn that began the pass. It settles down, and I touch the control stick back very gently in the dive so the pipper ambles up to cover the square of the target. And the target changes swiftly, as I wait, to become all things. It is an enemy tank waiting in ambush for the infantry; it is an antiaircraft gun that has let its camouflage slip; it is a black and puffing locomotive moving enemy supplies along a narrow-gage track. It is an ammunition dump a fortified bunker a truck towing a cannon a barge in the river an armored car and it is a white square of cloth with a black spot painted. It waits, I wait, and all of a sudden it grows. The spot becomes a disc, and the white pipper has been waiting for that. My finger squeezes slowly down on the red trigger. A gun camera starts as the trigger is half closed. Guns fire when the trigger is all the way down.

Like a rivet gun finishing a last-minute sheet metal job on the nose of the airplane, the guns sound; there is no ear-splitting roar and thunder and confusion in the cockpit. Just a little detached tututut while beneath my boots hot brass shell casings shower down into steel containers. I smell powder smoke in my oxgyen mask and idly wonder how it can find its way into a cabin that is supposed to be sealed and pressurized.

In ultra-slow motion I watch the target on the ground; it is serene and quiet, for the bullets have not yet arrived. The bullets are on the way, somewhere in the air between the blackening gunports on the nose of my airplane and the pulverized dust on the range. I once thought of bullets as being such fast things, and now I wait impatiently for them to touch the ground and verify my gunsight. Finger is off the trigger; a one-second burst is a long burst of fire. And there is the dust.

The ground comes apart and begins throwing itself into the air. A few feet short of the target the dust flies, but this means that many bullets will have found their way to the meeting point shown by the white dot in the center of the gunsight. The dust is still flying into the air as my right glove pulls back on the many-buttoned stick and my airplane climbs in the pattern. As my airplane and its shadow flick across the square of canvas, the bullets that are able to tear a concrete highway to impassible crushed rock still whip the air and rain on the ground. “Ricochet Four is off.”

I bank to the right in the pattern and look back over my shoulder at the target. It is quiet now, and the cloud of dust is thinning in the wind and moving to the left, covering Three’s target with a tenuous cloud of brown.

“Ricochet Lead is in.”

I fired low that time, short of the target. There goes my 100 percent score. I must move the pipper up a little next time; place it on top of the disc of black. I smile at the thought. It is not very often that the air is smooth enough to let me think of placing the pipper inches high or inches low on the black spot of the target. I am normally doing very good to keep the pipper somewhere on the square of the strafing panel. But today is a good day for gunnery. Let the tanks beware the days of calm.

“Ricochet Two is in.”

“Lead is off.”

I watch Two, and in the curved plexiglass of the canopy I see myself reflected as I watch; a Martian if I ever saw one. Hard white helmet, smooth-curved glare visor down and looking like a prop for a Man in Space feature, green oxygen mask covering all the face that the visor does not cover, oxygen hose leading down out of sight. No indication that there is a living thinking creature behind the hardware. The reflection watches Ricochet Two.

There it is, the grey wisp from the gunports in the nose. The target is still and waiting as though it will stand a year before seeing a sign of motion. Then, suddenly, the thick fountain of dust. To the left of the panel a twig on the ground jumps into startled life and leaps into the air. End over end, slowly it turns, shifting after its first instant into the familiar slow motion of things caught in the swift rain of machinegun bullets. It twists two full turns above the fountain and sinks gracefully back beneath the thick cloud of it. The concrete highway is torn to rock and the twig survives. That should carry a moral.

“Two is off.” Smoke disappears from gunports. The airplane turns its oval nose to the sky and streaks away from the target.

“Three is in.”

What is the moral of the twig? I think about it and I turn sharply into the base leg of the pattern, rechecking the gunsight, right index finger pointing forward at the altimeter. What is the moral of the twig?

The wisp of smoke trails from the gunports of the smooth aluminum nose of Ricochet Three, and I watch his pass.

There is no moral. If the target was a pile of twigs, the hail of copper and lead would turn it into a scattered blanket of splinters. This was a lucky twig. If you are a lucky twig, you can survive anything.

“Three is off.”

The safety panel is white, the gun switch is at guns, and slam the stick whips to the right under my glove and my airplane rolls like a terrified animal to the right and the sky goes grey with the G of the turn and the G-suit inflates to press me in a hard vise of trapped air.

I have never been so rushed, when I fly my airplane, that I do not think. Even in the gunnery pattern, when the airspeed needle is covering 370 knots and the airplane is a few feet from the ground, the thinking goes on. When events happen in split seconds, it is not the thinking that changes, but the event. Events fall obediently into slow motion when there is a need for more thought.

As I fly tonight, navigating with the TACAN locked firmly onto the Laon transmitter, there is plenty of time for thought, and obligingly, events telescope themselves so that seven minutes will pass in the moment between the haunted land of Abbeville and the TACAN transmitter at Laon, France. I do not pass time as I fly, time passes me.

The hills slip away. There is a solid layer of black cloud from the ground to within a thousand feet of my airplane. The ground is buried, but in my chariot of steel and aluminum and plexiglass I am carried above, and the stars are bright.

In the red light, on the windowed face of the radiocompass, are four selector knobs, one switch, and one coffee-grinder tuning crank. I turn the crank. It is as old-fashioned in the cockpit of a fighter plane as would be a hand-wound telephone in an atomic research center. If it was much more quiet and if I wore no helmet, perhaps I could hear the crank squeak as it turned. I turn the handle, imagining the squeaks, until the frequency needle comes to rest over the number 344, the frequency of the Laon radio-beacon.

Turn up the volume. Listen. Crank the handle a little to the left, a little to the right. Static static crank dih-dih. Pause. Static. Listen for L-C. Dah-dih-dah-dih. . . . Dih-dah-dih-dih. . . . That is it. My right glove turns the selector from antenna to compass, while the left has the unnatural task of holding the control stick grip. The slim luminous green radiocompass needle spins majestically from the bottom of its dial to the top—a crosscheck on the TACAN—Laon radiobeacon is ahead. A little adjustment with the crank, an eighth of an inch, and the radiocompass is locked strong on Laon. Turn down the volume.

The Laon radiobeacon is a solitary place. It stands alone with the trees and the cold hills in the morning and the trees and the warm hills in the afternoon, sending its L-C into the air whether there is a pilot in the sky to hear it or whether there is nothing in the sky but a lone raven. But it is faithful and ever there. If the raven had a radiocompass, he could find his way unerringly to the tower that broadcasts the L-C. Every once in a long while a maintenance crew will go to the beacon and its tower and check its voltages and perform some routine tube-changing. Then they will leave the tower standing alone again and jounce back the rough road the way they came.

At this moment the steel of the tower is cold in the night and the raven is asleep in his stony home on a hillside. The coded letters, though, are awake and moving and alive, and I am glad, for the navigation is working out well.

The wide TACAN needle shares the same dial with the radiocompass needle, and they work together now to tell me that Laon is passing beneath my airplane. The radiocompass needle is the most active of the two. It twitches and quivers with stiff electronic life, like some deep sea life dredged and placed on a microscope slide. It jerks to the left and right; it quavers at the top of the dial, swinging in wider and wider arcs. Then, in one decisive movement, it swings all the way around, clockwise, and points to the bottom of the dial. The Laon radiobeacon has passed behind. The TACAN needle swings lazily five or six times around the dial and finally agrees with its more nervous companion. I am definitely past Laon.

That part of my thought that paid serious attention to navigation classes guides my glove to tilt the stick to the left, and the crowd of instruments in the center of the panel swings into an awareness of the seriousness of my action. Heading indicator moves on tiny oiled bearings to the left, turn needle leans to the left a quarter of an inch. The miniature airplane on the attitude indicator banks to the left against its luminous horizon line. Airspeed needle moves down a knot, altimeter and vertical speed needles drop for just a second, until I see their conspiracy and add the thought of back pressure through the right glove. The errant pair rise again into line.

Once again, the routine. Ready with the position report, thumb down on microphone button.

Though the cloud is almost at my flight level, and very dark, it looks as if the forecaster has once again gone astray, for I have not seen a flash of lightning since over the Channel. Whatever severe weather is afoot tonight over France is keeping itself well hidden. I am not concerned. In fifty minutes I shall be landing, with my precious sack of documents, at Chaumont.