Stranger to the Ground

I like to fly airplanes, so I learn about them and I fly them. I think of my job in the same light that a bridge builder on the high steel thinks of his: it has its dangers, but it is still a good way to make a living. The danger is an interesting factor, for I do not know if my next flight will be an uneventful one or not. Every once in a long while I am called to step on the stage, under the spotlight, and cope with an unusual situation, or, at longer intervals, an emergency.

Unusual situations come in all sizes, from false alarms to full-fledged emergencies that involve my continued existence as a living member of a fighter squadron.

I lower my landing gear on the turn to final approach. The little green lights that indicate wheels locked in the down position are dark longer than they should be. The right main gear locks down, showing its light. The left main locks down. But the nosewheel light is dark. I wait a moment and sigh. The nosewheel is a bother, but not in the least is it an emergency. As soon as I see that it is not going to lock down, the cautious part of me thinks of the very worst that this could mean. It could mean at worst that the nosegear is still locked up in its wheel well; that I will not be able to lower it; that I will have to land on only two wheels.

There is no danger (oh, once long ago an ’84 cart-wheeled during a nosegear-up landing and the pilot was killed), even if that very worst thing happens. If the normal gear lowering system does not work after I try it a few times again; if the emergency gear lowering system, which blows the nosegear down with a high-pressure charge of compressed air, fails; if I cannot shake the wheel loose by bouncing the main gear against the runway . . . if all these fail, I still have no cause for concern (unless the airplane cartwheels). Fuel permitting, I will circle the field for a few minutes and the fire trucks will lay a long strip of white foam down the runway, a place for my airplane’s unwheeled nose to slide. And I will land.

Final approach is the same final approach that it has always been. The fence pulls by beneath the wheels as it always does, except that now it pulls beneath two landing gear instead of three, and with a gear warning horn loud in the cockpit and the red warning light brilliant in the clear plastic handle and the third green light dark and the word from the control tower is that the nosewheel still looks as if it is up and locked.

The biggest difference in the final approach is in the eye of the observer, and observers are many. When the square red fire trucks grind to the runway with their red beacons flashing, the line crews and returning pilots climb to stand on the swept silver wings of parked airplanes and watch to see what will happen. (Look at that, Johnny, turning final with no nosewheel. Heard about an eighty-four that cart-wheeled on the runway trying this same trick. Good luck, whoever you are, don’t forget to hold the nose off as long as you can.) It is interesting to them, and mildly annoying to me, for it is like being pushed on stage without having anything to perform. No flames, no eerie silence of a frozen engine, a practically nonexistent threat of spectacular destruction, no particular skill on display.

I simply land, and the twin plumes of blue rubber-smoke pout back from the main wheels as they touch the hard concrete. I slow through 100 knots on the landing roll, touching right rudder to put the narrow strip of foam between the wheels. Then, slowly and gently, the unwheeled nose of the airplane comes down.

At that moment before the metal of the nose touches the runway and I tilt unnaturally forward in my cockpit and the only sight in the windscreen is the fast-blurred strip of white foam, I am suddenly afraid. This is where my control ends and chance takes over. A gust of wind against the high rudder and I will surely cartwheel in a flying swirling cloud of brilliant orange flame and twisted metal; the airplane will tumble and I will be caught beneath it; the hot engine will explode when the cold foam sprays up the intake. The ground is hard and it is moving very fast and it is very close.

Throttle off, and the nose settles into the foam.

White. Instant white and the world outside is cut away and metal screams against concrete loudly and painfully and I grit my teeth and squint my eyes behind the visor and know in a surprised shock that my airplane is being hurt and she doesn’t deserve to be hurt and she is good and faithful and she is taking the force of a 90-knot slab of concrete and I can do nothing to ease her pain and I am not cart-wheeling and the scream will never end and I must have slid a thousand feet and I am still slammed hard forward into the shoulder harness and the world is white because the canopy is sprayed with foam and get that canopy open now, while I’m still sliding.