Stranger to the Ground

The foam-covered sheet of plexiglass lifts as I pull the unlock lever, as smoothly as if nothing was the least unusual and there is the world again, blue sky and white runway sliding to a stop and grass at the side of the concrete and visor up and oxygen mask unsnapped and it is very quiet. The air is fresh and smooth and green and I am alive. Battery off and fuel off. As quiet as I have ever heard. My airplane is hurt and I love her very much. She didn’t somersault or cartwheel or flip on her back to burn and I owe my life to her.

The advancing roar of firetruck engines and soon we’ll be surrounded by the square monsters and by talking people and Say, why couldn’t you get the nosewheel down and That landing was a pretty good one boy and You should have seen the foam spray when your nose hit. But before the people come, I sit quietly in the cockpit for a second that seems a long time and tell my airplane that I love her and that I will not forget that she did not trap me beneath her or explode on the runway and that she took the pain while I walk away without a scratch and that a secret that I will keep between us is that I love her more than I would tell to anyone who asks.

I will someday tell that secret to another pilot, when he and I happen to be walking back from a night formation flight and the breeze is cool and the stars are as bright as they can get when you walk on the ground. I will say in the quiet, “Our airplane is a pretty good airplane.” He will be quiet a second longer than he should be quiet and he will say, “It is.” He will know what I have said. He will know that I love our airplane not because she is like a living thing, but because she truly is a living thing and so very many people think that she is just a block of aluminum and glass and bolts and wire. But I know and my friend will know and that is all that must be said.

Though it had its moment of fear and though it opened the door of understanding a little wider, the nosegear failure is an incident, not an emergency. I have had a few incidents in the hours that I have spent in the little cockpit, but so far I have never experienced a real emergency or been forced to make the decision to pull the yellow ejection seat handles, squeeze the red trigger, and say a quick farewell to a dying airplane. Yet that sort of thing is what the newspapers would have me believe happens every day in the Air Force.

At first, I was ready for it. When the engine sounded rough during those first hours alone, I thought of the ejection seat. When a tailpipe overheat light came on for the first time in my career, I thought of the ejection seat. When I was nearly out of fuel and lost in the weather, I thought of it. But the part of my mind that is concerned with caution can cry wolf only so many times before I see through its little game and realize that I could easily fly through my entire career without being called upon to blast away from an airplane into a cold sky. But still it is good to know that a 37-millimeter cannon shell is waiting just aft of the seat, waiting for the moment that I squeeze the trigger.

If I ever collide with another airplane in the air, the seat is waiting to throw me clear. If I lose all hydraulic pressure to the flight controls, it is waiting. If I am spinning and have not begun to recover as the ground nears, the seat is waiting. It is an advantage that conventional aircraft and transport pilots do not have, and I feel a little sorry for them at their dangerous job.

Even without passengers to think about, if they are hit in the air by another airplane, transport pilots do not have a chance to crawl back to the trap door on the floor of the flight deck and bail out. They can only sit in their seats and fight the useless controls of a wing that is not there and spin down until their airplane stops against the ground.

But not the single-engine pilot. Climbing or diving or inverted or spinning or coming to pieces, his airplane is rarely the place that he dies. There is a narrow margin near the ground where even the ejection seat is a game of chance, and I am in that margin for five seconds after the end of the runway has passed beneath me. After that five seconds I have accelerated to a speed that allows a climb to a safe ejection altitude; before that five seconds I can put my airplane back down on the runway and engage the nylon webbing and steel cable of the overrun barrier. When I engage that barrier, even at 150 knots, I drag a steel cable and the cable drags a long length of anchor chain and no airplane in the world can run on forever with tons of massive chain trailing behind it. The five seconds are the critical ones. Even before I retract the flaps after takeoff, I can eject if the engine explodes. And no engine explodes without warning.