Stranger to the Ground

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.