Stranger to the Ground

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.