Stranger to the Ground

CHAPTER THREE

“France Control, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Laon.” There is quiet static in the soft earphones. I wait. Perhaps my call went unnoticed.

“France Control, France Control, Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, how do you read on frequency three one seven point eight.” There is no answer.

It is not at all unusual for a radio to break down in flight, for radios are temperamental things. But it is never a comfortable feeling to fly at night above weather without some way of talking to the people on the ground. My glove moves to the right, to the frequency selector of the UHF command radio. I do not bother to watch it work, for it is simply changing a sliding square knob one click, from manual to preset. An indicator on the instrument panel juggles numbers in small windows, and finally decides to present the number 18, in small red-lit figures. In that one click I am aligned with a different set of people, away from the busy hub of the France Control Center to the quiet and pastoral surroundings of Calva Radar. I know that the stereotype is not a valid one, for radar stations are only smaller places than traffic control centers, and are often far more rushed and busy. Yet whenever I call a radar site, I feel a little more at ease, and imagine a small red brick building set in a field of brilliant green grass, with a cow grazing not far away.

“Calva Radar, Calva Radar, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, how do you read channel one eight.” There is perhaps one chance in three that the UHF will work on this frequency when it did not work on the frequency for France Control. The cow outside the brick building is asleep, a sculptured boulder in the dark of the grass. A light is in the window of the building, and a man’s shadow moves across the glass as he reaches for his microphone.

“. . . ero five . . . . d you . . . . . arbled . . . . . Calva?”

The UHF is definitely on its way out of commission. But even if it goes completely out, I am still cleared to maintain flight level 330 all the way to the Chaumont TACAN holding pattern. There are occasional moments like this when I wish that the airplane had just one more communication radio installed. But the F-84F was built for fighting, not for talking, and I must make do with what I have.

“Calva Radar, Four Zero Five unable to contact France Control, was Laon at one zero, flight level three three zero assigned instrument flight rules, estimating Spangdahlem at two eight, Wiesbaden.” A wild try. A shot in the dark. But at least the information was said, and I have made the required report. I hear Calva’s microphone button go down.

“. . . ive . . . ort . . . . . mly garb . . . . come up . . . point zero . . .”

Calva is suggesting another frequency, but by the time I can understand all of his message I will be too far away for it to matter. Trying to send a position report with a radio in this condition is like trying to shout a message across a deep and windy chasm; difficult and frustrating. I give my report once again to comply with the rules, click back to manual and forget the matter. Too bad. It would have been good to hear the latest weather report along my route, but simply getting my request understood would have been a major problem, to say nothing of receiving a reply. The weather is of only academic interest anyway, for there would have to be a pilot report of a squall line with severe turbulence and heavy icing to 40,000 feet before I would consider turning back.

I look back over my left shoulder as I turn to the heading that will take me to Spangdahlem.

I am pulling a contrail.

In a sweeping turn behind me, following like a narrow wake of a high-speed racing boat, is a twisting tunnel of glowing grey mist in the starlight that is the path that I have followed. Clearly and precisely in texts on atmospheric physics, contrails are explained by the men who spend their time with radio balloons and diagrams of the upper air.

Contrails are like fireflies. If I desire, I can find pages of explanation about them in books and in specialized magazines. But when I see one close at hand, it is alive and mystic and greyly luminous. Watching the con as I turn, I can see the rise and fall of it where I made small changes to keep my airplane at flight level 330. It looks like a very gentle roller-coaster, one for people who do not like excitement. That is where I have been. No air aside from the rolling tunnel of mist can say that it has felt my passage. If I desire, I can turn now and fly through exactly the same air that I flew before. And I am alone. As far as I can see, and that is a long distance about me, there is no other contrail in the sky. I am the only person in all the world to fly above the clouds in the hundreds of cubic miles that make the world of high altitude between Abbeville and Spangdahlem this evening. It is a solitary feeling.

But there is work to be done. Back to the coffee grinder. Squeak squeak to frequency 428. Volume up. Static. And no second thoughts, no mistaking this one. An S and a P and an A. A city with its thousands of people, with the cares and the joys that they share, people, with me. I am alone and six miles above their earth, and their city is not even a light grey glow in the black cloud. Their city is an S and a P and an A in the soft earphones. Their city is the needlepoint at the top of the dial.

The frequency selector knob of the TACAN set clicks under my right glove to channel 100, and after a moment of indecision, the modern, smoothworking mileage drum spins to show 110 miles to the Spangdahlem beacon. Except for the failure of the UHF radio, my flight has gone very smoothly. There is a faint flicker in the rising hills of cloud far ahead to my right, as if someone is having difficulty striking an arc with a gigantic welding rod. But distances at night are deceiving, and the flash of light could be over any one of four countries.

As a pilot, I have traveled and seen millions of square miles of land and cloud above land. As a recalled Guard pilot in Europe I have rolled my wheels on hundreds of miles of asphalt and concrete runways in seven countries. I can say that I have seen more of the continent than many people, yet Europe is a much different place for me than it is for them. It is a patterned country, broad and wide in the sunlight, wrinkled in the south by the Pyrenees and in the east by the Alps. It is a country over which someone has spilled a great sack of airports, and I seek these out.

France is not the France of travel posters. France is Etain Air Base and Chateauroux Air Base and Chaumont and Marville. It is the patchwork of Paris about its beloved river, a patchwork that flows like crystallized lava around the tictactoe runways of Orly Field and Le Bourget. France is the repetition of walking over the concrete to Base Operations and being aware, as I walk, of tiny villages outside the perimeter fence and hills everywhere.

Europe is a pitifully small place. From 37,000 feet above the Pyrenees I can see the cold Atlantic at Bordeaux and the shores of the French Riviera on the Mediterranean. I can see Barcelona, and in the haze, Madrid. In thirty minutes I can fly over England, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, and Germany. My squadron flies nonstop to North Africa in two and a half hours; it patrols the border between West and East in Germany; can fly to Copenhagen for the weekend. So this was a school for mankind. A small schoolyard.

But I rarely get first-hand, visual evidence of the postage stamp that is Europe, for much more often than not the land is covered by tremendous decks of cloud, seas of white and grey that stretch without a rift from horizon to horizon. It is the weather in Europe, as in the United States, that reminds me now and then that, although I can span continents in a single leap, I am not always so godlike as I feel. Some clouds in summer tower past my airplane to 50,000 feet, and some boil up and build faster than my airplane can climb. Much of the time I am correct in saying that mine is an over-the-weather airplane, but clouds are watch-keepers over arrogant men, they remind me, just often enough, of my actual size.

The swirling masses of white cumulus will some days harbor only the mildest of turbulence along my path. Another day I may penetrate the same type of cloud and come out of it grateful to the man who designed the crash helmet. Tight as safety belt and shoulder harness can be, it is still in the province of a few clouds to snap my helmet sharply against the canopy and flex the steelspar wings that I once swore could never be forced an inch.

I was once constantly wary of the hardest-looking clouds, but I have learned that, despite the snap of helmet on canopy, their turbulence is rarely strong enough to really damage a fighter airplane. Every once in a while I read of a multiengine airplane that lost its windshield or radome in the hail, or has taken a bolt or two of lightning, for these instances are duly reported and photographed in detail for the pilots’ magazines. There are a few airplanes that have taken off into bad weather, into thunderstorms, and have been found days later or weeks later scattered across a lonely stretch of earth. The reasons are unknown. The storm might have been unusually powerful; the pilot could have lost control; he could have been caught in a web of vertigo and dived from storm into ground. So, although my airplane has a six-layer bulletproof windscreen designed for worse than hail and an airframe stressed to withstand twice the force that would tear the wings from larger airplanes, I respect thunderstorms. I avoid them when I can; I grit my teeth and hold on to the control stick when I can’t. So far, I have been knocked about by a few small thunderstorms, but I have not seen them all.

There are procedures, of course. Tighten the safety belt and shoulder harness, pitot heat and defrosters on, cockpit lights to full bright, airspeed down to 275 knots, and try to hold the airplane level. In the vertical air currents of a thunderstorm, altimeters and vertical speed indicators and even airspeed indicators are practically useless. They lag and they lead and they flutter helplessly. Though the ’84F tends to yaw and roll a bit in turbulence, I must try to fly by the little airplane on a two-inch gyrostabilized horizon set ahead of me on the instrument panel: the attitude indicator. I fly to hold my attitude straight and level through the storm. So I am prepared. I always have been.

In the darkness of the French night, my airplane flies easily along the continuous stream of miles between Laon and Spangdahelm, through air as smooth as polished obsidian. I tilt my white helmet back against the red ejection seat headrest and look up from the thick dark layer of cloud to the deeper, bright layer of stars overhead, that have so long guided men across the earth. The constant, eternal stars. The reassuring stars. The useless stars. In an airplane like mine, built to work at its best through a pilot’s eyes and a pilot’s direction, the stars have become only interesting spots of light to look out upon when all is going well. The important stars are the ones that draw the luminous needles of the radiocompass and the TACAN. Stars are nice, but I navigate by the S and the P and the A.

Tactical fighter pilots have traditionally been on marginal terms with the thought of weather flying, and only by superhuman efforts has the Air Force brought them to accept the thought that nowadays even fighter airplanes must fly in weather. The official emphasis takes the form of motion pictures and ground schools and instrument schools and required minimum hours of instrument and hooded flight every six months. Each successive fighter airplane becomes more capable of operating in all-weather conditions, and today interceptor pilots in their big delta-wings can fly a complete interception and attack on an enemy airplane without ever seeing it except as a smoky dot of light on their attack radar screen.

Even the fighter-bomber, long at the mercy of the low cloud, is today capable of flying a low-level attack through the weather, using sophisticated radar systems in order to avoid the hard mountains and identify the target. Beyond the official emphasis and the pressure of regulations, tactical fighter pilots of the newest airplanes must learn all there is to know about weather flying simply to keep up with their airplane, to be able to use it as it was meant to be used. But weather is still an enemy. The cloud robs me of the horizon and I cannot see outside the cockpit. I am forced to depend completely on seven expressionless faces in glass that are my flight instruments. There is, in weather, no absolute up or down. There is only a row of instruments that say, this is up, this is down, this is the horizon. When so much of my flying is done in the clear world of air-to-ground gunnery, it is not easy to stake my life on the word of a two-inch circle of glass and radium paint, yet that is the only way to stay alive after my airplane sinks into cloud. The feel and the senses that hold the pipper steady on the tank are easily confused when the world outside is a faceless flow of grey.

After a turn, or after the harmless movement of tilting my head to look at the radio set as I change frequencies, those senses can become shocked and panic-stricken, can shout you’re diving to the left! although the gyro horizon is a calm and steady guide on the instrument panel. Caught in the contradiction, I have a choice: follow one voice or follow the other. Follow the sense that marks me expert in strafe and rocket and high-angle dive-bomb, or follow the little bit of tin and glass which someone has told me is the thing to trust.

I follow the tin, and a war is on. Vertigo has become so strong that I have had to lean my helmet almost to my shoulder in accord with its version of up and down. But still I fly the instruments. Keep the little tin airplane level in its glass you’re banking hard to the right keep the altimeter and vertical speed needles steady look out, you’re starting to dive . . . keep the turn needle straight up and the ball in the center of its curved glass tube you’re rolling! you’re upside down and you’re rolling! Keep crosschecking the instruments. One to the next to the next to the next.

The only common factor between combat flying and instrument flying is one of discipline. I do not break away from my leader to seek a target on my own; I do not break away from the constant clockwise crosscheck of the seven instruments on the black panel in front of me. The discipline of combat is usually the easier. There I am not alone, I can look out and see my leader and I can look up and back to see the second element of my flight, waiting to go in and fire on the enemy.

When the enemy is an unresisting grey fog, I must rely on the instruments and pretend that this is just another practice flight under the canvas instrument hood over the rear cockpit of a T-33 jet trainer, that I can lift the hood any time that I would like, and see a hundred miles of clear air in all directions. I am just not concerned with lifting the hood. Weather, despite the textbook familiarity that ground schools give and that experience reinforces, is still my greatest enemy. It is difficult to predict exactly, and worse, it is completely uncaring of the men and the machines that fly into it. It is completely uncaring.

“Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, France Control with an advisory.” Like a telephone ringing. My radio. There is not the slightest flaw in its operation. How can that be when only a minute ago . . . but it is working now and that is all that matters. Microphone button down. Professional voice.

“Roger, France; Four Zero Five, go.”

“Four Zero Five, Flight Service advised mutiengine aircraft reports severe turbulence, hail and heavy icing in vicinity of Phalsbourg. Also T-33 reported moderate turbulence at flight level three zero zero, light clear icing.”

Button down. What about that. Sounds as if there might be a thunderstorm or two in the stratus ahead. That was in the textbook, too. But still it is rare to have very large thunderstorms in France. “Roger, France, thank you for the advisory. What is the current weather at Chaumont?”

“Stand by one.”

I stand by, waiting while another man in a white shirt and loose tie riffles through his teletyped weather reports looking for the one out of hundreds that is coded LFQU. With one hand he sorts and moves the weather from the Continent over; he shuffles through rain and haze and fog and high cloud and winds and ice and blowing dust. He is at this moment touching the sheet of yellow paper that tells him, if he wants to read it, that Wheelus Air Base, Libya, has clear skies with visibilities to 20 miles and a 10-knot wind from the southwest. If he wants to know, a line on the paper tells him that Nouasseur, Morocco, is calling high broken cirrus, visibility 15 miles, wind west southwest at 15 knots. He thumbs through weather from Hamburg (measured 1,200-foot overcast, visibility three miles in rain showers, wind from the northwest at ten knots) from Wiesbaden Air Base (900-foot overcast, visibility two miles, wind from the south at seven knots), from Chaumont Air Base.

“Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Chaumont is calling a measured one thousand one hundred foot overcast, visibility four miles in rain, winds from the southwest at one zero gusting one seven.” The weather at Chaumont is neither good nor bad.

“Thank you very much, France.” The man clicks his microphone button in reply. He lets the thick sheaf of yellow paper pile upon itself again, covering with its weight the weather of hundreds of airports across the Continent. And cover the report from Phalsbourg Air Base (measured ceiling 200 feet, visibility one half mile in heavy rain showers, wind from the west at 25 gusting 35 knots. Cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-ground lightning all quadrants, one-half-inch hail).

I drift along above the slanting cloud as if reality were all a dream with fuzzy soft edges. The starlight falls and soaks into the upper few feet of the mist, and I relax in a deep pool of red light and look out at the cold idyllic world that I called, when I was a boy, Heaven.

I can tell that I am moving. I do not have to accept that with my intellect as the radiocompass needle swings from one beacon to the next and the mileage drum of the distance measuring equipment unrolls. I see smooth waves of cloud pull darkly silently by a few hundred feet beneath my airplane. A beautiful night to fly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am an inch too far from the leader; I think the stick to the left and recover the inch. I bounce in the rough afternoon air; I move it in on the leader so that I bounce in the same air that he does. Those 35 seconds require more concentrated attention than all the rest of the flight. During a preflight briefing, the leader can say, “. . . and on initial, let’s just hold a nice formation; don’t press it in so close that you feel uncomfortable . . .” but every pilot in the flight smiles to himself at the words and knows that when that half-minute comes, he will be just as uncomfortable as the other wingmen in the closest, smoothest formation that he can fly.

The tension in those seconds builds until I think that I cannot hold my airplane so close for one more second. But the second passes and so does another, with the green glass of my leader’s right navigation light inches from my canopy.

At last he breaks away in a burst of polished aluminum into the landing pattern, and I begin the count to three. I follow him through the pattern and I wait. My wheels throw back their long plumes of blue smoke on the hard runway and I wait. We taxi back to the flight line in formation and we shut down our engines and we fill out the forms and we wait. We walk back to the flight shack together, parachute buckles tinkling like little steel bells, waiting. Occasionally it comes. “Looked pretty good on initial today, Gator,” someone will say to the lead pilot.

“Thanks,” he will say.

I wonder in an unguarded moment if it is worth it. Is it worth the work and the sweat and sometimes the danger of extremely close formation flying just to look good in the approach? I measure risk against return, and have an answer before the question is finished and phrased. It is worth it. There are four-ship flights making approaches to this runway all day long, seven days a week. To fly one approach so well that it stands out in the eye of a man who watches hundreds of them is to fly an outstanding piece of formation. A professional formation. It is worth it.

If day formation is work, then night formation is sheer travail. But there is no more beautiful mission to be found in any Air Force.

Lead’s airplane melts away to join the black sky and I fly my number Three position on his steady green navigation light and the faint red glow that fills his cockpit and reflects dimly from his canopy. Without moon or starlight, I can see nothing whatsoever beyond his lights, and take the thought on slimmest faith that there is 10 tons of fighter plane a few feet from my cockpit. But I usually have the starlight.

I drift along on Lead’s wing with my engine practicing its balky V-8 imitation behind me and I watch the steady green light and the dim red glow and the faint faint silhouette of his airplane under the stars. At night the air is smooth. It is possible, at altitude and when Lead is not turning, to relax a little and compare the distant lights of a city to the nearer lights that are the stars around me. They are remarkably alike.

Distance and night filter out the smallest lights of the city, and altitude and thin clear air bring the smallest of stars into tiny untwinkling life. Without an undercast of cloud, it is very difficult to tell where sky ends and ground begins, and more than one pilot has died because the night was perfectly clear. There is no horizon aside from the ever-faithful one two inches long behind its disc of glass on the panel with its 23 comrades.

At night, from 35,000 feet, there is no fault in the world. There are no muddy rivers, no blackened forests, nothing except silver-grey perfection held in a light warm shower of starlight. I know that the white star painted on Lead’s fuselage is dulled with streaks of oil rubbed by dusty rags, but if I look very closely I can see a flawless five-pointed star in the light of the unpointed stars through which we move.

The Thunderstreak looks very much as it must have looked in the mind of the man who designed it before he got down to the mundane task of putting lines and numbers on paper. A minor work of art, unblemished by stenciled black letters that in day read fire ingress door and cradle pad and danger—ejection seat. It looks like one of the smooth little company models in grey plastic, without blemish or seam.

Lead dips his wing sharply to the right, blurring the green navigation light in a signal for Two to cross over and take the position that I now fly on Lead’s right wing. With Four floating slowly up and down in the darkness off my own right wing, I inch back my throttle and slide gently out to leave an ’84-size space for Two. His navigation lights change from bright flash to dim steady before he begins his crossover, for it is easier for me to fly on a steady light than a flashing one. Although this procedure came out of the death of pilots flying night formation on flashing lights, and is a required step before Two slides into position, I appreciate the thoughtfulness behind the action and the wisdom behind the rule.

Two moves slowly back eight feet, begins to move across behind the lead airplane. Half way to his new position, his airplane stops. Occasionally in a crossover an airplane will catch in the leader’s jetwash and require a little nudge on stick and rudder to break again into smooth air, but Two is deliberately pausing. He is looking straight ahead into the tailpipe of Lead’s engine.

It glows.

From a dark apple-red at the tip of it to a light luminous pink brighter than cockpit lights at their brightest, the tailpipe is alive and vibrant with light and heat. Tucked deep in the engine is the cherry-red turbine wheel, and Two is watching it spin.

Like the spokes of a quick-turning wagon wheel it spins, and every few seconds it strobes as he watches and appears to spin backwards. Two is saying to himself, again, “So that is how it works.” He is not thinking of flying his airplane or of crossing over or of the seven miles of cold black air between his airplane and the hills. He is watching a beautiful machine at work, and he pauses in Lead’s jet-wash. I can see the red of the glow reflected in his windscreen, and on his white helmet.

Lead’s voice comes softly in the tremendous quiet of the night. “Let’s move it across, Two.”

Two’s helmet turns suddenly and I see his face clearly for a moment in the red glow of the tailpipe. Then his airplane slides quickly across into the space that I have been holding for him. The glow disappears from his windscreen.

In all the night formation missions, it is only when I fly as Two that I have the chance to see an engine soaked in its mystical light. The only other time that I can see a fire in the fire-driven turbine engines is at the moment of engine start, when I happen to be in one airplane parked behind another as the pilot presses his start switch upward. Then it is a weak twisting yellow flame that strains between the turbine blades for ten or fifteen seconds before it is gone and the tailpipe is dark again.

Newer airplanes, with afterburners, vaunt their flame on every takeoff, trailing a row of diamond shock waves in their blast that can be seen even in a noon sun. But the secret spinning furnace of a Thunderstreak engine at night is a sight that not many people have a chance to see, almost a holy sight. I keep it in my memory and think of it on other nights, on the ground, when there is not so much beauty in the sky.

The time always comes to go back down to the runway that we left waiting in the dark, and in the work of a night formation descent there is little chance for thoughts of the grace and the humble beauty of my airplane. I fly the steady light and try to make it smooth for Four on my wing and concentrate on keeping my airplane where it belongs. But even then, in the harder and more intense business of flying 20,000 pounds of fighter a few feet from another precisely the same, one part of my thought goes on thinking the most unrelated things and eagerly presenting for my consideration the most unlikely subjects.

I move it in just a bit more on Two and pull back just a bit of power because he is turning toward me and keep just a little more back stick pressure to hold my airplane up at its lower airspeed and should I let my daughter have a pair of Siamese kittens. Steady burns the green navigation light in my eyes and I press forward with my left thumb to make certain that the speed brake switch is all the way forward and add another second of power here, just a half-percent and pull it back right away and do they really climb curtains like someone told me? There will be absolutely no cats if they climb curtains. Little forward on the stick, little right bank to move it out one foot they certainly are handsome cats, though. Blue eyes. Fuel in a quick glance is 1,300 pounds, no problem; wonder how Four is doing out there on my wing, shouldn’t be too difficult for him tonight, sometimes it’s better to fly Four at night anyway, you have more reference points to line on. Wonder if Gene Ivan is taking the train to Zurich this weekend. Five months I’ve been in Europe and I haven’t seen Zurich yet. Careful careful don’t slide in too close, take it easy move it out a foot or two. Where’s the runway? We should be coming up on the runway lights pretty soon now. Fly Two’s wing here as he levels out. No problem. Just stay on the same plane with his wings. Add a bit more power . . . now peg it there. Hold what you have. If he moves an inch, correct for it right away. This is initial approach. Tuck it in. There is probably not a soul watching, at night. Doesn’t matter. All we are is a bunch of navigation lights in the sky; move it in on Two’s wing. Smooth now, smooth now for Four. Pardon the bounce, Four.

“Checkmate Lead is on the break.” There goes Lead’s light breaking away into the pattern. Been flying on that little bulb all night long, it seems. Move it in a little more on Two. Hold it in there just another three seconds.

“Checkmate Two’s on the break.” There we go. No more strain. Just the count to three. Almost over, Four. Few minutes and we can hang ourselves up to dry. Microphone button down.

“Checkmate Three’s on the break.” Don’t care what kind of eyes they have, they don’t live in my house if they climb curtains. Gear down. Flaps down. Lead’s over the fence. Sometimes you can trick yourself into thinking that this is a pretty airplane. Button down. “Checkmate Three is turning base, three green, pressure and brakes.” Check the brakes just to make sure. Yep. Brakes are good. This airplane has good brakes. Look out for the jetwash in this still air. Better tack on another three knots down final in case it’s rough. There’s the fence. Hold the nose up and let it land. Wonder if all runways have fences at the end. Can’t think of any that don’t. Little jetwash. We’re down, little airplane. Nice job you did tonight. Drag chute handle out. Press the brakes once, lightly. Rollout is finished, a bit of brake to turn off the runway. Jettison the chute. Catch up with Lead and Two. Thanks for waiting, Lead. Pretty good flight. Pretty. If I have to be in the Air Force, wouldn’t trade this job for any other they could offer. Canopy open. Air is warm. Nice to be down. I am wringing wet.

Over Luxembourg now, the distance-measuring drum unrolls smoothly, as though it was geared directly to the secondhand of the aircraft clock. Twenty-eight miles to Spangdahlem. My airplane grazes the top of the cloud and I begin to make the transition to instrument flying. There is another few minutes, perhaps, before I will be submerged in the cloud, but it is good to settle down to the routine of a crosscheck before it is really necessary. Airspeed is 265 indicated, altitude is 33,070 feet, turn needle is centered, vertical speed shows a hundred-foot-per-minute climb, the little airplane of the attitude indicator is very slightly nose-high on its horizon, heading indicator shows 086 degrees. The stars are still bright and unconcerned overhead. One nice thing about being a star is that you never have to worry about thunderstorms.

The radiocompass needle twists again to the right, in agony. It reminds me that I must not be certain of the smoothest flying ahead. Perhaps the forecaster was not completely wrong, after all. A distant flicker of lightning glitters in the southeast, and the thin needle shudders, a terrified finger pointing to the light. I remember the first time I heard of that characteristic of the radiocompass. I had been astonished. Of all the worst things for a navigation radio to do! Fly the needle as I am supposed to fly it and I wind up in the center of the biggest thunderstorm within a hundred miles. Who would design navigation equipment that worked like that? And who would buy it?

Any company that builds low-frequency radios, I learned, is the answer to the first question. The United States Air Force is the answer to the second. At least they had the honesty to tell me of this little eccentricity before they turned me loose on my first instrument crosscountry flight. When I need it most, in the worst weather, the last thing to count on is the radiocompass. It is better to fly time-and-distance than to follow the thin needle. I am glad that the newcomer, the TACAN, is not perturbed by the lightning.

Perhaps it is well that I do not have a wingman tonight. If I did near the edge of a storm, he would not have an easy time holding his position. That is one thing that I have never tried: thunderstorm formation flying.

The closest thing to that was in the air show that the squadron flew shortly before the recall, on Armed Forces Day. Somehow you can count on that day to have the roughest air of the year.

Every airplane in the squadron was scheduled to fly; a single giant formation of six four-ship diamonds of Air Guard F-84F’s. I was surprised that there were so many people willing to drive bumper-to-bumper in the summer heat to watch, above the static displays, some old fighters flying.

Our airplanes are arranged in a long line in front of the bleachers erected for the day along the edge of the concrete parking ramp. I stand uncomfortably sunlit in front of my airplane at parade rest, watching the people waiting for the red flare that is the starting signal. If all those people go through the trouble of driving hot crowded miles to get here, why didn’t they join the Air Force and fly the airplane themselves? Of every thousand that are here, 970 would have no difficulty flying this airplane. But still they would rather watch.

A little -pop-, and the brilliant scarlet flare streaks from the Very pistol of an adjutant standing near the visiting general in front of the reviewing stand. The flare soars up in a long smoky arc, and I move quickly, as much to hide myself from the gaze of the crowd as to strap myself into my airplane in unison with 23 other pilots, in 23 other airplanes. As I set my boots in the rudder pedal wells, I glance at the long straight line of airplanes and pilots to my left. There are none to my right, for I fly airplane number 24, as the slot man in the last diamond formation.

I snap my parachute buckles and reach back for the shoulder harness, studiously avoiding the massive gaze of the many people. If they are so interested, why didn’t they learn to fly a long time ago?

The sweep secondhand of the aircraft clock is swinging up toward the 12, moving in accord with the secondhands of 23 other aircraft clocks. It is a sort of dance; a unison performance by all the pilots who make solo performances on their spare weekends. Battery on. Safety belt buckled, oxygen hoses attached. The secondhand touches the dot at the top of its dial. Starter switch to start. The concussion of my starter is a tiny part of the mass explosion of two dozen combustion starters. It is a rather loud sound, the engine start. The first rows of spectators shift backwards. But this is what they came to hear, the sound of these engines.

Behind us rises a solid bank of pure heat that ripples the trees on the horizon and slants up to lose itself in a pastel sky. The tachometer reaches 40 percent rpm, and I lift my white helmet from its comfortable resting place on the canopy bow, a foot from my head. Chin strap fastened (how many times have I heard of pilots losing their helmets when they bailed out with chin strap unfastened?), inverter selector to normal.

If the air were absolutely still today, I would even so be thoroughly buffeted by the jetwash of the 23 other airplanes ahead of me in flight. But the day is already a hot one, and the first airplane in the formation, the squadron commander’s, will itself be stiffly jolted after takeoff into the boiling air of a July noon. In the air I will depend upon my flight leader to avoid the jetwash by flying beneath the level of the other airplanes, but there is no escaping the jetwash that will swirl across the runway as I take off on Baker Blue Three’s wing, after all the other airplanes have rolled down the mile and a half of white concrete on this still day. After the squadron commander’s takeoff, and because of the jetwash from his airplane and his wingman’s, each successive takeoff roll will be just a little longer in the hot rough air that has been spun through rows of combustion chambers and stainless steel turbine blades. My takeoff roll will be the longest of all, and I will be working hard to stay properly on Three’s wing in the turbulence of the airy whirlpools. But that is my job today, and I will do it.

To my left, far down the long line of airplanes, the squadron commander pushes his throttle ahead and begins to roll forward. “Falcon formation, check in,” he calls on 24 radios, in 48 soft earphones, “Able Red Leader here.”

“Able Red Two,” his wingman calls.

“Three.”

“Four.”

A long succession of filtered voices and microphone buttons pressed. Throttle comes forward in cockpit after cockpit, fighter after fighter pivots to the left and swings to follow the polished airplane of the squadron commander. My flight leader takes his turn. “Baker Blue Leader,” he calls, rolling forward. His name is Cal Whipple.

“Two.” Gene Ivan.

“Three.” Allen Dexter.

I press my microphone button, at last. “Four.” And it is quiet. There is no one left after the slot man of the sixth flight.

The long line of airplanes rolls briskly along the taxiway to runway three zero, and the first airplane taxies well down the runway to leave room for his multitude of wingmen. The great formation moves quickly to fill the space behind him, for there is no time allowed for unnecessary taxi time. Twenty-four airplanes on the runway at once, a rare sight. I press my microphone button as I roll to a stop in position by Baker Blue Three’s wing, and have a private little talk with the squadron commander. “Baker Blue Four is in.”

When he hears from me, the man in the polished airplane, with the little cloth oak leaves on the shoulders of his flight suit, pushes his throttle forward and calls, “Falcon formation, run it up.”

It is not really necessary for all 24 airplanes to turn their engines up to 100 percent rpm at the same moment, but it does make an impressive noise, and that is what the people in the stands would like to hear this day. Two dozen throttles go full forward against their stops.

Even with canopy locked and a helmet and earphones about my head, the roar is loud. The sky darkens a little and through the massive thunder that shakes the wooden bleachers, the people watch a great cloud of exhaust smoke rise from the end of the runway, above the shining pickets that are the tall swept stabilizers of Falcon formation. I jolt and rock on my wheels in the blast from the other airplanes, and notice that, as I expected, my engine is not turning up its normal 100 percent. For just a second it did, but as the heat and pressured roar of the other airplanes swept back to cover my air intake, the engine speed fell off to a little less than 98 percent rpm. That is a good indicator that the air outside my small conditioned cockpit is warm.

“Able Red Leader is rolling.” The two forwardmost pickets separate and pull slowly away from the forest of pickets, and Falcon formation comes to life. Five seconds by the sweep secondhand and Able Red Three is rolling to follow, Four at his wing.

I sit high in my cockpit and watch, far ahead, the first of the formation lift from the runway.

The first airplanes break from the ground as if weary of it and glad to be back home in the air. Their exhaust trails are dark as I look down the length of them, and I wonder with a smile if I will have to go on instruments through the smoke of the other airplanes by the time I begin to roll with Baker Blue Three.

Two by two by two they roll. Eight; ten; twelve . . . I wait, watching my rpm down to 97 percent now at full throttle, hoping that I can stay with Three on the roll and break ground with him as I should. We have the same problem, so there should be no difficulty other than a very long takeoff roll.

I look over toward Three, ready to nod OK at him. He is watching the other airplanes take off, and does not look back. He is watching them go . . . sixteen; eighteen; twenty . . .

The runway is nearly empty in front of us, under a low cloud of grey smoke. The overrun barrier at the other end of the concrete is not even visible in the swirl of heat. But except for a little bit of sudden wing-rocking, the earlier flights get away from the ground without difficulty, though they clear the barrier by a narrower and narrower margin.

. . . twenty-two. Three looks back to me at last and I nod my OK. Baker Blue Lead and Two are five seconds down the concrete when Three touches his helmet back to the red ejection seat headrest, nods sharply forward, and we become the last of Falcon formation to release brakes. Left rudder, right rudder. I can feel the turbulence over the runway on my stabilizer, through the rudder pedals. It is taking a long time to gain airspeed and I am glad that we have the full length of the runway for our takeoff roll. Three rocks up and down slightly as his airplane moves heavily over the ripples in the concrete. I follow as if I were a shining aluminum shadow in three dimensions, bouncing when he bounces, sweeping ahead with him, slowly gaining airspeed. Blue Lead and Two must be lifting off by now, though I do not move my eyes from Three to check. They have either lifted off by now or they are in the barrier. It is at this moment one of the longest takeoff rolls I have seen in the F-84F, passing the 7,500-foot mark. The weight of Three’s airplane just now finishes the change from wheels to swept wings, and we ease together into the air. A highly improbable bit of physics, this trusting 12 tons to thin air; but it has worked before and it should today.

Three is looking ahead and for once I am glad that I must watch his airplane so closely. The barrier is reaching to snag our wheels, and it is only a hundred feet away. Three climbs suddenly away from the ground and I follow, pulling harder on the control stick than I should have to, forcing my airplane to climb before it is ready to fly.

The helmet in the cockpit a few feet away nods once, sharply, and without looking, I reach forward and move the landing gear lever to up. There is the flash of the barrier going beneath us, in the same second that I touched the gear handle. We had ten feet to spare. It is good, I think, that I was not number twenty-six in this formation.

The landing gear tucks itself quickly up and out of the way, and the background behind Three changes from one of smooth concrete to rough blurred brush-covered ground; we are very definitely committed to fly. The turbulence, surprisingly enough, was only a passing shock, for our takeoff is longer and lower than any other, and we fly beneath the heaviest whirlpools in the air.

A low and gentle turn to the right to join on Blue Leader and Two as quickly as possible. But the turn is not my worry, for I am just a sandbagger, loafing along on Three’s wing while he does all the juggling and angling and cutting off to make a smooth joinup. The worry of the long takeoff roll is left behind with the barrier, and now, takeoff accomplished, I feel as if I sat relaxed in the softest armchair in the pilots’ lounge.

The familiar routine of a formation flight settles down upon me; I can hold it a little loose here over the trees and away from the crowd. There will be plenty of work ahead to fly the slot during the passes over the base.

There in the corner of my eye drifts Blue Leader and Two, closing nicely above and back to Three’s left wing. Around them are the silver flashes and silhouettes that make the mass of swept metal called Falcon formation, juggling itself into the positions drawn out on green blackboards still chalked and standing in the briefing room. The wrinkles in the monster formation have been worked out in a practice flight, and the practice is paying off now as the finger-fours form into diamonds and the diamonds form into vees and the vees become the invincible juggernaut of Falcon formation.

I slide across into the slot between Two and Three, directly behind Baker Blue Leader, and move my airplane forward until Lead’s tailpipe is a gaping black hole ten feet ahead of my windscreen and I can feel the buffet of his jetwash in my rudder pedals. Now I forget about Three and fly a close trail formation on Lead, touching the control stick back every once in a while to keep the buffet on the rudder pedals.

“Falcon formation, go channel nine.”

Blue Lead yaws his airplane slightly back and forth, and with the other five diamonds in the sky, the four-ship diamond that is Baker Blue flight spreads itself for a moment while its pilots click their radio channel selectors to 9 and make the required cockpit check after takeoff.

I push the switches aft of the throttle quadrant, and the drop tanks under my wings begin feeding their fuel to the main fuselage tank and to the engine. Oxygen pressure is 70 psi, the blinker blinks as I breathe, engine instruments are in the green. I leave the engine screens extended, the parachute lanyard hooked to the ripcord handle. My airplane is ready for its airshow.

In this formation there are probably some airplanes that are not operating just as they should, but unless the difficulties are serious ones, the pilots keep their troubles to themselves and call the cockpit check OK. Today it would be too embarrassing to return to the field and shoot a forced landing pattern on the high stage before an audience so large.

“Baker Blue Lead is good.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

I press the button. “Four.”

Normally the check would have been a longer one, with each pilot calling his oxygen condition and quantity and whether or not his drop tanks were feeding properly, but with so many airplanes aloft the check alone would take minutes. It was agreed in the briefing room to make the check as usual, but to reply only with flight call sign.

Six lead airplanes rock their wings after my call and the six diamonds close again to show formation. I do not often have the chance to fly as slot man in diamond, and I tuck my airplane in close under Lead’s tailpipe to make it look from the ground as if I had flown there all my life. The way to tell if a slot man has been flying his position well is to look at his vertical stabilizer as he lands. The blacker his stabilizer and rudder with Lead’s exhaust, the better the formation he has been flying.

I move up for a moment into the position that I will hold during our passes across the base. When I feel that it is correct, the black gaping hole of Lead’s tailpipe is a shimmering inky disc six feet forward of my windscreen and a foot above the level of my canopy. My vertical stabilizer is solid in his jetwash, and I ease the weight of my boots from the rudder pedals to avoid the uncomfortable vibration in them. If it were possible to move my boots completely off the pedals, I would, but the slanting tunnels that lead down to them offer no resting-place, and I must live with the vibration that means that the stabilizer is blackening in burnt JP-4. I can hear it, a dull heavy constant rumble of twisted forced air beating against the rudder. The airplane does not fly easily in this, and it is not enjoyable to fly with the tail, like a great dorsal fin, forced into the stream of heat from Baker Blue Lead’s turbine. But that is the position that I must fly to make Baker Blue flight a close and perfect diamond, and the people who will watch are not interested in my problems. I move the throttle back an inch and ahead again, touch the control stick forward, sliding away and down into a looser, easier formation.

Two and Three are using the time that Falcon formation spends in its wide turn to check their own positions. The air is rough, and their airplanes shudder and jolt as they move in to overlap their wings behind Lead’s. To fly a tight formation, they must close on the leader until their wings are fitted in the violent wake of Lead’s wing. Although that air is not so rough as the heat that blasts my rudder, it is more difficult to fly, for it is an unbalanced force, and a changing one. At 350 knots the air is as solid as sheet steel, and I can see the ailerons near their wingtips move quickly up and down as they fight to hold smoothly in formation. During normal formation flying, their wings would be just outside the river of air washing back from their leader’s wing, and they could fly that position for a long time with the normal working and coaxing and correcting. But this is a show, and for a show we work.

Two and Three are apparently satisfied that they will be able to hold a good position for the passes across the base, for they slide out into normal formation almost simultaneously. Still they watch nothing but Baker Blue Lead, and still they bounce and jar in the rough air. Every few seconds the flight slams across an invisible whirlwind twisting up from a plowed field, and the impact of it is a solid thing that blurs my vision for an instant and makes me grateful for my shoulder harness.

This is summer on an air base: not blazing sun and crowded pool and melting ice cream, but the jarring slam of rough air when I want to tuck my airplane into close formation.

The wide circle is completed, and Falcon formation begins to descend to its 500-foot flyby altitude.

“Close it up, Falcon,” comes the voice of the man who is Able Red Leader. We close it up, and I lift my airplane to push the rudder again into Lead’s tumbling jetwash. I glance at my altimeter when the formation is level and three miles from the crowd by the runway. One quick glance: 400 feet above the ground. The leading vee of diamonds is at 500 feet and we are stacked 100 feet beneath it. As a slot man, altitude is none of my business, but I am curious.

Now, in these last three miles to the base, we are being watched by the American people. They are interested in knowing just how well the part-time Air Force can fly its airplanes.

The diamonds of Falcon formation are hard and glittering in the sun, and even from the center of Baker Blue flight the formation looks close and good. I think again the old axiom of bouncing in the same air with the leader, and I am not alone with the thought. Two and Three have placed their wings unnervingly close to Lead’s smooth fuselage, and we take the ridges of the air as a close formation of bobsleds would take the ridges of hardpacked snow. Slam. Four helmets jerk, four sets of stiff wings flex the slightest bit. My rudder is full in Lead’s jetwash and the pedals are chattering heavily. This rumble of hard jetwash must be loud even to the people standing by the bleachers on the flight line. Hold it smooth. Hold it steady. Hold it close.

But the people on the concrete do not even begin to hear the rumble that makes my rudder pedals dance. They see from the north a little cloud of grey smoke on the horizon. It stretches to become a quiver of grey arrows in flight, shot at once from a single bow. There is no sound.

The arrows grow, and the people on the ground talk to each other in the quiet air as they watch. The arrowheads slice the air at 400 knots, but from the ground they seem to be suspended in cold clear honey.

Then, as the silent flight reaches the end of the runway a quarter-mile from the bleachers and even the visiting general is smiling to himself behind his issue sunglasses, the honey becomes only air and the 400 knots is the ground-shaking blast of 24 sudden detonations of high explosive. The people wince happily in the burst of sound and watch the diamonds whip together through the sky in unyielding immovable grace. In that moment the people on the ground are led to believe that Air Guard airplanes are not left to rust unused in the sun, and this is what we are trying to tell them.

In one fading dopplered roar we flick past the stands and are to the people a line of dwindling dots, pulling two dozen streamers of tenuous grey as we go. Our sound is gone as quickly as it came, and the ground is quiet again.

But still, after we pass the crowd, we fly formation. Baker Blue flight and Falcon formation are just as present about me as they have been all morning. The brief roar that swept the people is to me unchanged and constant. The only change in Falcon formation after it crosses the field is that the diamonds loosen a few feet out and back, and the bobsleds take the ridges a tenth-second apart rather than in the same instant.

During the turn to the second pass across the base, I slide with Baker Blue Lead to form a new pattern in which our diamond is the corner of a giant block of airplanes. Regardless of the position that we fly, the rough sky beats at our airplanes and the jetwash thunders over my vertical stabilizer. I think of the landing that is ahead, hoping that a light breeze has begun across the runway, to clear the jet-wash out of the way by the time my airplane slides down final approach to land.

Maybe they don’t want to be pilots.

Where did that come from? Of course they want to be pilots. Yet they watch from the ground instead of flying wing in Baker Blue flight. The only reason that they are not flying today instead of watching is that they do not know what they are missing. What better work is there than flying airplanes? If flying was the full-time employment of an Air Force pilot, I would have become a career officer when the chance was offered me.

We force our airplanes close again, fly the second pass, re-form into a final design and bring it through the rocky air above the field. Then, from a huge circle out of sight of the runway, flight after flight separates from the formation, diamonds changing to echelon right, and the echelons fly a long straight approach across the hard uneven air into the landing pattern.

It is work, it is uncomfortable. The needle that measures G has been knocked to the number 4. But in the moments that the people watch this part of their standby Air Force, and were glad for it, the flight was worthwhile. Able Red Leader has completed another little part of his job.

That was months ago. These days, in Europe, our formation is not for show but for the business of fighting. A four-ship flight is loose and comfortable when it is not being watched, and the pilots merely concentrate on their position, rather than devote their every thought and smallest action to show flying. At altitude we wait for the left-right yaw of the lead airplane, and spread out even more, into tactical formation. Three and Four climb together a thousand feet above Lead and Two; each wingman sliding to a loose angled trailing position from which he can watch the sky around as well as the airplane that he protects. In tactical formation and the practice of air combat, responsibility is sharply defined: wingman clears leader, high element clears low element, leaders look for targets.

Flying at the contrail altitudes, this is easy. Any con other than our own four are bogies. During a war, when they are identified, they become either bogies to be watched or bandits to be judged and occasionally, attacked. “Occasionally” because our airplane was not designed to engage enemy fighters at altitude and destroy them. That is the job of the F-104’s and the Canadian Mark Sixes and the French Mystères. Our Thunderstreak is an air-to-ground attack airplane built to carry bombs and rockets and napalm against the enemy as he moves on the earth. We attack enemy airplanes only when they are easy targets: the transports and the low-speed bombers and the propeller-driven, fighters. It is not fair and not sporting to attack only a weaker enemy, but we are not a match for the latest enemy airplanes built specifically to engage other fighters.

But we practice air combat against the day when we are engaged over our target by enemy fighters. If hours of practice suffice only to allow us a successful escape from a more powerful fighter, they will have been worthwhile. And the practice is interesting.

There they are. Two ’84F’s at ten o’clock low, in a long circling climb into the contrail level, coming up like goldfish to food on the surface. At 30,000 feet the bogie lead element begins to pull a con. The high element is nowhere in sight.

I am Dynamite Four, and I watch them from my high perch. It is slow motion. Turns at altitude are wide and gentle, for too much bank and G will stall the airplane in the thin air and I will lose my most precious commodity: airspeed. Airspeed is golden in combat. There are books filled with rules, but one of the most important is Keep Your Mach Up. With speed I can outmaneuver the enemy. I can dive upon him from above, track him for a moment in my gunsight, fire, pull up and away, prepare another attack. Without airspeed I cannot even climb, and drift at altitude like a helpless duck in a pond.

I call the bogies to Three, my element leader, and look around for the others. After the first enemy airplanes are seen, it is the leader’s responsibility to watch them and plan an attack. I look out for other airplanes and keep my leader clear. When I am a wingman, it is not my job to shoot down enemy airplanes. It is my job to protect the man who is doing the shooting. I turn with Three, shifting back and forth across his tail, watching, watching.

And there they are. From above the con level, from five o’clock high, come a pair of swept dots. Turning in on our tail. I press the microphone button. “Dynamite Three, bogies at five high.”

Three continues his turn to cover Dynamite Lead during his attack on the bogie lead element in their climb. The decoys. “Watch ’em,” he calls.

I watch, twisted in my seat with the top of my helmet touching the canopy as I look. The two are counting on surprise, and are only this moment, with plenty of airspeed, beginning to pull cons. I wait for them, watching them close on us, begin to track us. They are F-84’s. We can outfly them. They don’t have a chance.

“Dynamite Three, break right!” For once the wingman orders the leader, and Three twists into a steep bank and pulls all the backpressure that he can without stalling the airflow over his wings. I follow, seeking to stay on the inside of his turn, and watching the attackers. They are going too fast to follow our turn, and they begin to overshoot and slide to the outside of it. They are not unwise, though, for immediately they pull back up, converting their airspeed into altitude for another pass. But they have lost the surprise that they had counted on, and with full throttle we are gaining airspeed. The fight is on.

A fight in the air proceeds like the scurrying of minnows about a falling crumb of bread. It starts at high altitudes, crossing and recrossing the sky with bands of grey contrail, and slowly moves lower and lower. Every turn means a little more altitude lost. Lower altitudes mean that airplanes can turn more tightly, gain speed more quickly, pull more G before they stall. Around and around the fight goes, through the tactics and the language of air combat: scissors, defensive splits, yo-yos and “Break right, Three!”

I do not even squeeze my trigger. I watch for other airplanes, and after Three rivets his attention on one enemy airplane, I am the only eyes in the element that watch for danger. Three is totally absorbed in his attack, depending on me to clear him of enemy planes. If I wanted to kill him in combat, I would simply stop looking around.

In air combat more than at any other time, I am the thinking brain for a living machine. There is no time to keep my head in the cockpit or to watch gages or to look for switches. I move the control stick and the throttle and the rudder pedals unconsciously. I want to be there, and I am there. The ground does not even exist until the last minutes of a fight that was allowed to get too low. I fly and fight in a block of space. The ideal game of three-dimension chess, across which moves are made with reckless abandon.

In two-ship combat there is only one factor to consider: the enemy airplane. I seek only to stay on his tail, to track him with the pipper in the gunsight and pull the trigger that takes closeups of his tailpipe. If he should be on my tail, there are no holds barred. I do everything that I can to keep him from tracking me in his gunsight, and to begin to track him. I can do maneuvers in air combat that I could never repeat if I tried.

I saw an airplane tumble once, end over end. For one shocked moment the fighter was actually moving backwards and smoke was streaming from both ends of the airplane. Later on, on the ground, we deduced that the pilot had forced his aircraft into a wild variation of a snap roll, which is simply not done in heavy fighter airplanes. But the maneuver certainly got the enemy off his tail.

As more airplanes enter the fight, it becomes complicated. I must consider that this airplane is friend and that airplane is enemy, and that I must watch my rolls to the left because there are two airplanes in a fight there and I would fly right through the middle of them. Midair collisions are rare, but they are always a possibility when one applies too much abandon in many-ship air combat flights.

John Larkin was hit in the air by a Sabre that saw him too late to turn. “I didn’t know what had happened,” he told me. “But my airplane was tumbling and it didn’t take long to figure that I had been hit. I pulled the seat handle and squeezed the trigger and the next thing I remember, I was in the middle of a little cloud of airplane pieces, just separating from the seat.

“I was at a pretty good altitude, about thirty-five thousand, so I free-fell down to where I could begin to see color on the ground. Just when I reached for my ripcord, the automatic release pulled it for me and I had a good chute. I watched the tail of my airplane spin down by me and saw it crash in the hills. A couple of minutes later I was down myself and thinking about all the paperwork I was going to have to fill out.”

There had been a great amount of paperwork, and the thought of it makes me doubly careful when I fly air combat, even today. In a war, without the paperwork, I will be a little more free in my fighting.

When it spirals down to altitudes where dodging hills enters the tactic, a fight is broken off by mutual consent, as boxers hold their fists when an opponent is in the ropes. In the real war, of course, it goes on down to the ground, and I pick up all the pointers I can on methods to scrape an enemy into a hillside. It could all be important someday.

The wide luminous needle of the TACAN swings serenely as I pass over Spangdahlem at 2218, and one more leg of the flight is complete.

As if it recognized that Spangdahlem is a checkpoint and time for things to be happening, the thick dark cloud puts an end to its toying and abruptly lifts to swallow my airplane in blackness. For a second it is uncomfortable, and I sit tall in my seat to see over the top of the cloud. But the second quickly passes and I am on instruments.

For just a moment, though, I look up through the top of my canopy. Above, the last bright star fades and the sky above is as dark and faceless as it is about me. The stars are gone, and I am indeed on instruments.