Stranger to the Ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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