Stranger to the Ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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