Stranger to the Ground

“Canopy clear,” the instructor said. Sam pulled the can opy jettison lever. There was a sudden, sharp concussion, a cloud of blue smoke, and 200 pounds of curved and polished plexiglass shot 40 feet into the air and crashed to the concrete parking ramp. Sam’s flight that day was canceled.

Problems of this sort plague the Air Force. The human part of the man/airplane has just as many failures as the metal part, and they are more difficult to troubleshoot. A pilot will fly 1,500 hours in many kinds of airplanes, and is said to be experienced. On the landing from his 1,501st flight hour, he forgets to extend his landing gear and his airplane slides in a shower of sparks along the runway. To prevent gear-up landings there have been many inventions and many thousands of words and warnings written.

When a throttle is pulled back to less than minimum power needed to sustain flight, a warning horn blows in the cockpit and a red light flares in the landing gear lowering handle. This means “Lower the wheels!” But habit is a strong thing. One gets used to hearing the horn blowing for a moment before the wheels are lowered on each flight, and gradually it becomes like the waterfall that is not heard by the man who lives in its roar. There is a required call to make to the control tower as the pilot turns his airplane onto base leg in the landing pattern: “Chaumont Tower, Zero Five is turning base, gear down, pressure up, brakes checked.” But the call becomes habit, too. Sometimes it happens that a pilot is distracted during the moment that he normally spends moving the landing gear lever to the down position. When his attention is again fully directed to the job of landing his airplane, his wheels should be down and he assumes they are. He glances at the three lights that show landing gear position, and though not one of them glows the familiar green, though the light in the handle is shining red and the warning horn is blowing, he calls, “Chaumont Tower, Zero Five is turning base, gear down, pressure up, brakes checked.”

The inventors took over and tried to design the human error out of their airplanes. Some airspeed indicators have flags that cover the dial during a landing approach unless the wheels are down, on the theory that if the pilot cannot read his airspeed he will be shocked into action, which here involves lowering the gear. In the deadliest, most sophisticated interceptor in the air today, that carries atomic missiles and can kill an enemy bomber under solid weather conditions at altitudes to 70,000 feet, there is a landing gear warning horn that sounds like a high-speed playback of a wide-range piccolo duet. The inventors deduced that if this wild noise would not remind a plot to lower his landing gear, they were not going to bother with lights or covering the airspeed indicator or any other tricks; he would be beyond them all. When I see one of the big grey delta-wing interceptors in the landing pattern, I am forced to smile at the reedy tootling that I know the pilot is hearing from his gear warning horn.

Suddenly, in my dark cockpit, the thin luminous needle of the radiocompass swings wildly from its grip on the Spangdahlem radiobeacon and snaps me from my idle thoughts to the business of flying.

The needle should not move. When it begins to swing over Spangdahlem, it will first make very small leftright quivers on its card to warn me. The leftrights will become wider and wider and the needle will finally turn to point at the bottom of the dial, as it did passing Laon.

But the distance-measuring drum shows that I am still 40 miles from my first German checkpoint. The radiocompass has just warned me that it is a radiocompass like all the others. It was designed to point the way to centers of low-frequency radio activity, and there is no more powerful center of low-frequency radio activity than a fully-grown thunderstorm. For years I have heard the rule of thumb and applied it: stratus clouds mean stable air and smooth flying. In an aside to itself, the rule adds (except when there are thunderstorms hidden in the stratus).

Now, like a boxer pulling on his gloves before a fight, I reach to my left and push the switch marked pilot heat. On the right console is a switch with a placard windscreen defrost and my right glove flicks it to the on position, lighted in red by hidden bulbs. I check that the safety belt is as tight as I can pull it, and I cinch the shoulder harness straps a quarter of an inch tighter. I have no intention of deliberately flying into a thunderstorm tonight, but the padlocked canvas sack in the gun bay ahead of my boots reminds me that my mission is not a trifling one, and worth a calculated risk against the weather.