Stranger to the Ground

CHAPTER SIX

The people on the ground who operate the air traffic control system are very important people, but not indispensable. The system, although it is a good one, is not an indispensable system. Airplanes were flying long before the first sign of air traffic control appeared, they will go on flying if it all suddenly disappears.

When the rules of the air were set down, there was a very wise man present who knew that cogs will slip now and then, and that the system had best be flexible. I am still in command of my airplane, and I will put it where I think that it is best for it to go, system or no system. Now I have decided that I would rather not engage another thunder storm. I climb away from my assigned altitude of 33,000 feet to seek the clear air and smooth flying above the clouds. I am passing through altitudes that might have been assigned to other airplanes, and there is the possibility of midair collision.

Yet the chance of my colliding with another airplane is almost nonexistent. I am off course; in order to collide with me, another airplane would have to be precisely as far off course as I am.

Though I have not talked to a ground station for a long while, I have not been forgotten; I am a flight plan written on a strip of paper at all the stations along my route. Other airplanes will be told of my course and my estimated times over those stations.

I am a quarter-inch dot on the radar screens, and controllers will vector other airplanes around me.

The primary reason that I will not collide with any other airplane is that my Thunderstreak is 43 feet 3 inches long, its wingspan is 33 feet 6 inches, and it flies in a block of air that is a thousand cubic miles of empty space. And so I climb.

My approach time to Chaumont will be held open for a half hour past my estimated time of arrival. I dial the familiar channel 55 on the TACAN and listen to the identifier. Chaumont. I never would have thought that a little French village could be so like Home. Bearing is 239 degrees, distance is 093 miles. Phalsbourg is drifting behind me to the left. I should have reported over the French border and over Phalsbourg. But the cog is slipping.

Thirty-eight thousand feet on the altimeter and still no top to the cloud. The blue fire is gone. Fuel is down to 2,700 pounds, and at this weight a practical ceiling for my plane will be about 43,000 feet. It is rare to have clouds in Europe that top at more than 40,000 feet, and I am not concerned. My interest is directed only over the instruments in front of me. There is now, without a radio, no other world.

The old pilots tell of days when it was “needle-ball and alcohol” through the weather: a turn-and-bank indicator and a magnetic compass their only aid in the cloud. But this is a modern age, and tonight I fly by the seven instruments in the center of the panel, and have my navigation solved second by second in the two dials of the TACAN.

If the inverter that changes the generator’s DC power to AC were to fail, my gyro instruments, attitude indicator and heading indicator would slowly run down into uselessness. But the ’84F is an American airplane, and therefore has safety systems for the safety systems. In this instance, the safety factor is called the alternate instrument inverter, waiting to drive the gyros should the engine-driven generator or the main inverter fail. Should both inverters fail, I am moved back through the years to fly a fighter airplane by needle-ball and alcohol.

There is a light tremble through my airplane as I climb through 40,000 feet, and the wings begin to rock. There has been no lightning. I scan the windscreen, looking for ice. I cannot carry much ice and continue to climb. The windscreen is clear.

With no sound and with no warning, like the magician’s silk from above the hawk, the cloud is gone. In one instant I am checking for ice, in the next I am looking through the glass, as through a narrow gothic arch in steel, at two hundred miles of crystal air, floored 20,000 feet below by unruffled cloud. It is vertigo, as if I had run over a hidden cliff and discovered myself in thin air. Right glove tightens on the stick.

I have flown from a sheer wall of cloud, and it tumbles away toward the earth like the mountains south of Strasbourg tumble away to the valley of the Rhine. The giant wall swings in wide arc to my left and right, and it flickers here and there with its storms.

I am an invisible speck of dust sifting on a tiny breath of air.

A hundred and fifty miles behind me to the north, the wall becomes the smooth gentle-rising slope that I entered long ago. But this is helpless knowledge, for I can see in the starlight that the only real thing in all the world is the awesome mass of cloud around my 43-foot airplane. There is no ground, there is no steady glow of lighted city through the floor of the mist. There is not one other flashing navigation light from horizon to horizon. I am alone, with one thousand stars for company.

I rest my helmet against the ejection seat headrest and look out again at the sky. The sky is not blue or purple or merely black. It is a deep meadow of powdered carbon, a bed for the stars. Around me.

Back with the throttle, to make the engine quiet. Right glove reaches to the three knobs that control the red light of the cockpit, and my own little red world fades into the meadow.

The dust mote settles gently back toward 33,000 feet, and its voice is the barest whisper in the dimension of the night.

I am one man. Tonight, perhaps, I am Man, alive and looking out over my planet toward my galaxy, crystallizing in myself, for a span of seconds, the centuries of looking out from this little earth that Man has done.

We have much in common, we men.

Tonight I, who love my airplane with all its moods and hardships and joys, am looking out upon the stars. And tonight, 20 minutes to the east, there is another pilot, another man who loves his airplane, looking out at these same stars. These symbols.

My airplane is painted with a white star, his with a red star. It is dark, and paint is hard to see. In his cockpit is the same family of flight instruments and engine instruments and radio control panels that is in my cockpit. In his airplane as in mine, when the stick is pressed to the left, the airplane banks to the left.

I know, unquestioningly, that I would like the man in that cockpit. We could talk through the long night of the airplanes that we have known and the times that we were afraid and the places that we have been. We would laugh over the half-witted things that we did when we were new in the air. We have shared many things, he and I, too many things to be ordered into our airplanes to kill each other.

I went through flying training at a base near Dallas, he went through it at a base near Stalingrad. My flight instructors shouted at me in English, his at him in Russian. But the blue fire trickles once in a while across his windscreen as it does across mine, and ice builds and breaks over his wings as it does mine. And somewhere in his cockpit is a control panel or a circuit breaker panel or a single switch that he has almost to stand on his head to reach. Perhaps at this moment his daughter is considering whether or not to accept a pair of Siamese kittens. Look out for your curtains, friend.

I wish that I could warn him about the kittens.

Fifty miles from Chaumont. Fifty miles and Through the Looking-Glass of cloud and rain and Hi there, ace, how’d the crosscountry go? Fifty miles is a very long way.

I have a not-working radio, above the clouds. Not a great problem, but enough of one so that I force my attention from the peaceful meadow of black to the task of putting my airplane back on the earth. Throttle forward at 33,000 feet, and again the rumble and whines and squeaks and moans from my comic in spinning steel.

No radio. I can fly on to the west, looking for a hole in the clouds, descend, fly back to Chaumont and land. A very poor plan for the fuel that remains in my tanks and for the vagaries of French weather.

I can fly a triangular pattern to the left, with one-minute legs. After a few patterns, a radar site will notice my path and its direction, vector an interceptor to me, and I will fly a letdown and instrument approach as his wingman. A drastic plan, but one to remember as a last-ditch, last-resort action.

I can fly a letdown at Chaumont as I had planned, hoping that the weather is not so bad that I need a Ground Controlled Approach in order to find the runway. At last report the weather was not so bad. If I do not break out of the weather at the TACAN low-approach minimum altitude, I will climb back on top and try a penetration at my alternate, Etain Air Base, ten minutes to the north. I have just enough fuel for this plan, and I shall follow it. For interest’s sake, I will try my radio once more when I am directly over Chaumont. One can never tell about UHF radios.

Forty miles. Five minutes. To home. But months still to a home where there is a wife and daughter and where the people in the towns speak English.

The bulletin board in the Chaumont pilots’ quarters is a mass of newspaper clippings from that older Home. On the board are charges and countercharges concerning the wisdom of recalling the Guard without a war to make it necessary. There are letters to the editors from wives and families and employers, asking questions and offering answers. The newspapers tell of poor conditions into which we were forced, of our trials and our difficulties, of the state of our morale. The picture they paint is a bleak one, but our lot is not really so bleak.

I left an interesting civilian job, flying small airplanes and writing for an aviation magazine, and was ordered back into the Air Force. It was disrupting, of course. But then I have never before been needed by the country to which I owe so much. I would be happier in the freedom of my old life, but my country has come fearfully close to war. The recall was not convenient for me or for my family, but it was a wise plan of action. The recall showed that Air Guard pilots were not merely sportsmen at government expense; a feeling that I sometimes harbored, guiltily, after pleasant weekends spent flying military airplanes, at $80 per weekend.

My squadron crossed the Atlantic in three hops. It made the crossing without air refueling, without proper air navigation stations covering the route, without an incident. We landed at Chaumont Air Base one month after we were called to active duty, flying whenever ceilings were higher than 500 feet.

The multiengine pilots in their tremendous airplanes brought hundreds of tons of support equipment and parts and supplies. We listened to briefings from NATO pilots about the strange new world of European air traffic control. Ammunition specialists emptied boxcars of 50-caliber machinegun bullets and racks of olive-drab, yellow-striped high-explosive bombs and long aluminum tanks of napalm and rack on rack of slim unpainted rockets. We were assigned areas of battle and we met with the army that we were to support. We held practice alerts that began as chaos, progressed through orderly confusion, and became, finally, quick and efficient.

Though the complaints are made and duly printed, though the crisis that called us has subsided, we accomplished the task set for us. We arrived in France with all our pilots and all our airplanes. Today the Alert pilots play bridge and chess and pingpong near the red telephone.

Not all without cost, of course. To date, our readiness has cost Don Slack, pilot, and the flags are still at halfmast.

For us who fly the ’84F, the mobilization is one long weekend of Air Guard duty. In town the people speak a different language, and there are sentries and rolls of barbed wire surrounding the flight line, but we fly with the same friends (except one) and the same airplanes (except one) that we have always flown with, and the life is not cause for complaint (except one). We fly, and the sky of France is much the same as the sky of home. Wind and rain and sun and stars. It is its own kind of home, the sky, and for the brief hours of my flight I do not miss the other home across the sea. I do miss Don Slack.

The stars glow steadily in the darkness of their meadow, part of my world. I think, for a moment, of all that has been said of the enchantment of this cathedral of air. A million words, written and spoken and turned to photograph, in which people who fly risk the curse of sentiment, that deadly curse, to tell of what they have seen. The enchantment does not lend itself to paper and ink or to syllables, or even to sensitized film, but the people’s risk of the curse is itself witness to the sight and the mood that awaits the man who travels the high land. Cloud and star and bow of color are just so many words to be laid carefully in a shallow grave of corrasable bond. The sky, in the end, can only be called an interesting place. My beloved sky.

The wide needle of the TACAN wobbles, the distance-measuring drum turns through 006, and it is time to put my set of plans into action.

I begin the left turn into the holding pattern, and my right glove half-turns the cockpit light rheostats, soaking itself in soft red. The IFF dial goes to Mode Three, Code 70. I should now be an identified and expected dot on the radar screen of Chaumont Radar. Thumb down very hard on microphone button, throttle back, speed breaks out and the rumble of shattering air as they extend from the side of the plane. “Chaumont Approach Control, Jet Four Zero Five, high station on the TACAN, requesting latest Chaumont weather.” There is a sidetone. A good sign. But there is no reply.

Fly along the pattern, recheck defrosters and pitot heat on, a quick review of the penetration: heading 047 degrees outbound from the holding pattern, left descending turn to heading 197 degrees, level at 3,500 feet and in to the 12-mile gate.

I level now at 20,000 feet, power at 85 percent rpm and ready in my mind for the letdown.

“. . . measured nine hundred feet overcast, visibility five miles in light rain, altimeter two niner eight five.”

I have never had a more capricious radio. Hard down on the plastic button. “Chaumont Approach, Zero Five leaving flight level Two Zero Zero present time, requesting GCA frequency.” Stick forward, nose down, and I am through 19,000 feet, through 18,000 feet, through 17,000 feet, with airspeed smooth at 350 knots.

“. . . ive, your radar frequency will be three four four point six, local channel one five.”

“Roj, Approach, leaving your frequency.” In the left bank of the turn, I click the channel selector to one five. And back to the instruments. Look out for vertigo. “He went into the weather in a bank, and he came out of it upside down.” But not me and not tonight; I have come through worse than vertigo, and I have been warned. “Chaumont Radar, Jet Four Zero Five, how do you read on three four four point six.” A pause, and time to doubt the errant radio.

“Read you five square, Zero Five, how do you read Radar?” So the radio becomes better as I descend. Interesting.

“Five by.”

“Roger, Zero Five, we have you in positive radar contact one eight miles north of Chaumont. Continue your left turn to heading one three five degrees, level at two thousand five hundred feet. This will be a precision approach to runway one niner; length eight thousand fifty feet, width one hundred fifty feet, touchdown elevation one thousand seventy five feet. If you lose communication with Radar for any one minute in the pattern or any thirty seconds on final approach . . .”

I am gratefully absorbed in familiar detail. Continue the turn, let the nose down a little more to speed the descent, recheck engine screens retracted and pneumatic compressor off and oxygen 100 percent and engine instruments in the green and hook again the lanyard to the D-ring of the parachute ripcord. My little world rushes obediently down as I direct it. Concentrating on my instruments, I do not notice when I again enter the cloud.

The voice continues, directing me through the black with the assurance of a voice that has done this many times. The man behind the voice is an enlisted man, to whom I speak only on official business. But now I give myself and my airplane wholly to his voice and rank is a pompous thing. Microphone button down.

“Zero Five is level . . .” No sidetone. I am not transmitting. Microphone button down hard and rocking in its little mount under the left thumb. “Zero Five is level, two thousand five hundred feet, steady one three five degrees.” Flaps down. Airspeed slows through 220 knots. Left glove on the clear plastic wheel-shaped handle of the landing gear lever. A mechanical movement: pull the handle out a quarter-inch and push it down six inches. At the instant that the lever slams down into its slot, the tall hard wheels of my airplane break from their hidden wells and press down, shuddering, into the rush of cloud. Three bright green lights flare at the left of the instrument panel. Speed brake switch forward.

“Zero Five has three green, pressure and brakes.” Tap the brakes.

“Roger, Zero Five, you are now one zero miles from touchdown, recheck your gear, the tower has cleared you for a full-stop landing. Turn heading one seven five, stand by this frequency for final controller.” Inside the rain-spattered red-checkered Ground Control Approach van at the side of Chaumont’s only runway, the search controller looks across to his companion, framed dimly in the green light of his own radar screen. “He’s all yours, Tommy.” Tommy nods.

“Jet Zero Five, this is your final controller, how do you read?” He already knows that I can hear him very well. The procedure is part of a time-honored ritual.

“Zero Five reads you five by.” And I say with him to myself his next words, the lines assigned to him in the script for his role as GCA Final Approach Controller.

“Roger, Zero Five,” we say. “You need not acknowledge any further transmissions, however there will be periodic transmission breaks on final approach which will be identified.” Fuel aboard shows just under 2,000 pounds on the big tank gage. At my airplane’s present weight, I should fly down final approach at 165 knots. “Repeat the tower has cleared you for a full-stop . . .”

When I am under the direction of a good GCA operator, I might just as well be on the ramp and shutting down my engine, for my landing is absolutely certain.

“. . . you are thirty seconds from the glide path, correcting left to right on the centerline. Turn heading one eight zero. One eight zero. Transmission break.” He lifts his foot from the microphone pedal on the floor under his screen, giving me a few seconds to speak. I have nothing to say to fill his silence, and his foot comes down again. “One eight zero is bringing you out on centerline, drifting slightly from left to right. Ten seconds to glide path. Turn one seven niner. One seven niner . . .” That is a little compliment for me. One-degree corrections are very small, very precise, and require smooth aircraft control from the pilot. I hear one-degree corrections only in still air, only when I am flying well. A smile under the oxygen mask. He should have seen me thirty minutes ago.

“On glide path, begin descent. Suggest an initial rate of descent of seven hundred fifty feet per minute for your aircraft . . .” What could be simpler than flying a GCA through the weather to the runway? There are the cross-barred pointers of the Instrument Landing System to accomplish the same job, but the ILS is not human. Technically, an ILS approach is more consistently accurate than a GCA, but I would much rather work with a good man behind a good radar, in any weather. Speed brakes out with left thumb aft on sawtooth switch. I lower the nose, visualizing as I do the long slide of the invisible glide slope in front of me. The rate of climb needle points on the down side of its scale to 1,000 feet per minute, then moves back to 800 feet per minute.

“Rolled out nicely on glide path . . . on centerline . . . drifting now slightly left of centerline, turn heading one eight three degrees, one eight three. On glide path . . .” Airspeed is 170 knots, back on the throttle for a second, then up again. Airspeed 168. Back again and up again. 165.

“Going five feet low on glide path, adjust your rate of descent slightly . . . on centerline . . . transmission break.” I think the stick back a little, think it very slightly forward again.

“Up and on glide path, resume normal rate of descent. On centerline . . . on glide path . . . on centerline . . . an excellent rate of descent . . .” Sometimes, I would bet, a GCA operator runs out of things to say. But he is required to give continuous direction to aircraft on final approach. What a boring life he must lead. But bored or not, I am very glad to hear him.

“On glide path . . . doing a nice job of it, lieutenant . . . on centerline . . . tower reports breaking action good . . .” How does he know that I am a lieutenant? I could be a major or a colonel out in the night weather to check on the standardization of GCA operators. But I am not, I am just a man happy to be through a storm and grateful to hear again a voice on my long-silent radio.

“. . . you are two miles from touchdown, on glide path, going ten feet left of centerline, turn right heading one eight four degrees . . . one eight four. On glide path correcting back to centerline . . . one eight four . . . a mile and a half from touchdown . . .”

I look up, and realize suddenly that I have been out of the cloud for seconds. The red and green and twin white rows of runway lights stretch directly ahead. Back a fraction on the throttle, slowing down.

“. . . one mile from touchdown, going ten feet low on the glide path . . .” Here it comes. I know it, the final controller knows it. I drop below the glide path when I have the runway in sight. If I were to stay completely under his direction, I would touch down some 600 feet down the runway, and that is 600 feet I can well use. It takes normal landing distance and 2,000 feet more to stop my airplane if the drag chute fails on a wet runway. And regardless of drag chute, regardless of airplane, I learned as a cadet to recite the three most useless things to a pilot: Runway behind you, altitude above you, and a tenth of a second ago.

Though I listen offhandedly to the GCA operator’s voice, I fly now by only one instrument: the runway. Landing lights on. Left glove reaches ahead and touches a switch down to make two powerful columns of white light pivot from beneath my wings, turning forward to make a bright path in the droplets of rain.

“. . . one quarter mile from touchdown, you are going thirty feet below the glide path, bring your aircraft up . . .” I wish that he would be quiet now. I need his voice in the weather, but I do not need him to tell me how to land my airplane when I can see the runway. The columns of light are speeding over white concrete now, redlights, greenlights flash below.

“. . . thirty-five feet below glide path, you are too low for a safe approach, bring your aircraft up . . .”

Quiet, GCA. You should have more sense than to go to pieces when I begin the flareout. Either I am happy with a touchdown on the first few hundred feet of runway or you are happy with my airplane landing 600 feet along a wet runway. Stick back, throttle to idle, stick back, a bit of left aileron . . . I feel for the runway with my sensitive wheels. Down another foot, another few inches. Come on, runway.

Hard rubber on hard concrete. Not as smooth a touchdown as I wanted but not bad stick forward let the nose-wheel down squeak of 14-inch wheel taking its share of 19,000 pounds of airplane right glove on yellow drag chute handle and a quick short pull. Glove waits on handle ready to jettison the chute if it weathervanes and pulls me suddenly toward the edge of the runway. I am thrown gently forward in my shoulder harness by the silent pouf of a 16-foot ring-slot parachute billowing from the tail. Speed brakes in, flaps up, boots carefully off the brakes. The drag chute will stop me almost before I am ready to stop. I must turn off the runway before I may jettison the chute; if I stop too soon and have to taxi to the turnoff with this great blossom of nylon behind me, I would need almost full power to move at more than two miles per hour. It is an effective drag chute.

We roll smoothly to the end of the runway, and even without braking I must add a burst of throttle to turn off at the end. Boot on left pedal and we turn. Drag chute handle twisted and pulled again, as I look back over my shoulder. The white blossom is suddenly gone and my airplane rolls more easily along the taxiway.

Left glove pulls the canopy lock handle aft, right glove grips the frame and swings the roof of my little world up and out of the way, overhead. Rain pelts lightly on my face above the green rubber mask. It is cool rain, and familiar, and I am glad to feel it. Landing lights off and retracted taxi light on, ejection seat safety pin from the G-suit pocket and into its hold in the armrest, UHF radio to tower frequency.

“Chaumont Tower, Jet Four Zero Five is clear the active runway, taxi to the squadron hangar.”

“Cleared taxi via the parallel taxiway, Zero Five. We had no late estimate on your time of arrival at Chaumont. Did you have difficulties enroute?”

Tower feels chatty this evening. “A little radio trouble. tower.”

“Read you five square now, Zero Five.”

“Roj.”

Right glove presses the shiny fastener at the side of my mask as I glide between the rows of blue taxiway lights, pushed by the soft sigh of engine at 50 percent rpm. Cool rain on my face. We trundle together in a right turn, my airplane and I, up a gentle hill, and follow after the green letters of a Follow Me truck that appears suddenly out of the darkness.

Above this dark rain and above the clouds of its birth is a world that belongs only to pilots. Tonight it belonged, for a moment, only to me and to my airplane, and across the breadth of it to the east, to another pilot and another airplane. We shared the sky tonight, and perhaps even now he is tasting the cool raindrops as he taxies by a runway that is as much a target in my intelligence folders as Chaumont Air Base is a target in his.

And I understand, in the rain, that although tonight there has been only he and I in our airplanes, tomorrow it will be some other one of Us and some other one of Them. When my little scene is played and I am once again back in the United States and a pilot of the New Jersey Air National Guard, there will still be someone flying the European night in a white-starred airplane and one in a red-starred one. Only the faces in the cockpits change.

Share work, share dedication, share danger, share triumph, share fear, share joy, share love, and you forge a bond that is not subject to change. I’ll leave Europe for America, He’ll leave Europe for Russia. The faces change, the bond is always there.

Hard on the right brake, swing around into the concrete pad of a parking revetment, nose pointing out toward the taxiway and the runway beyond. Taxi light off, check that the ground crew from the Follow Me truck slide the chocks in front of the tall wheels.

May you have the sense and the guidance to stay out of thunderstorms, distant friend.

Throttle back swiftly to off. The faithful spinning buffoon in steel dies with a long fading airy sigh, pressing the last of its heat, a shimmering black wave, into the night. Sleep well.

A slap on the side of the fuselage. “Run-down!” the crew chief calls, and I check my watch. It took 61 seconds for the turbine and the compressor to stop their sigh. Important information, for a maintenance man, and I enter the time in the Form One.

Inverter off, fuel off, UHF radio off, and at last, battery off. There is one last heavy click in the night as the battery switch goes to off under my glove, and my airplane is utterly and completely still.

In the beam of my issue flashlight, I write in the form that the UHF radio transmitter and receiver operate erratically above 20,000 feet. There is no space in which to enter the fact that the Air Force is lucky to have this airplane back at all. I log 45 minutes of night weather, one hour of night, one TACAN penetration, one GCA, one drag chute landing. I sign the form, unsnap the safety belt and shoulder harness and survival kit and G-suit and oxygen hose and microphone cable and soft chinstrap.

A blue Air Force station wagon arrives, splashing light on my nosewheel, and the sack from above the guns is handed down.

I lay my white helmet on the canopy bow in front of me and climb stiffly down the yellow ladder from the lonely little world that I love. I sign a paper, the station wagon leaves me in the dark. Helmet in hand, scarf pressed again by the wind, I am back on the ground of my air base in France, with a thousand other civilians in uniform, and with 31 . . . no, with 30 . . . other pilots.

My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.