Stranger to the Ground

Flying is safe, and flying a single-engine fighter plane is the safest of all flying. I would much rather fly from one place to another than drive it in that incredibly dangerous thing called an automobile. When I fly I depend upon my own skill, not subject to the variables of other drivers or blown tires at high speed or railroad crossing signs that are out of order at the wrong moments. After I learn my airplane, it is, with its emergency procedures and the waiting ejection seat, many times more safe than driving a car.

Four minutes to Wiesbaden. Smooth crosscheck. Smooth air. I relax and drift with the smoothness across the river of time.

When I was a boy I lived in a town that would last from now to now as I fly at 500 knots. I rode a bicycle, went to school, worked at odd jobs, spent a few hours at the airport watching the airplanes come and go. Fly one myself? Never. Too hard for me. Too complicated.

But the day came that I had behind me the typical history of a typical aviation cadet. I did not make straight A’s in my first college year and I thought that campus life was not the best road to education. For a reason that I still do not know I walked into a recruiting office and told the man behind the desk that I wanted to be an Air Force pilot. I did not know just what it was to be an Air Force pilot, but it had something to do with excitement and adventure, and I would have begun Life.

To my surprise, I passed the tests. I matched the little airplanes in the drawings to the ones in the photographs. I identified which terrain was actually shown in Map Two. I wrote that Gear K will rotate counterclockwise if Lever A is pushed forward. The doctors poked at me, discovered that I was breathing constantly, and all of a sudden I was offered the chance to become a United States Air Force Aviation Cadet. I took the chance.

I raised my right hand and discovered that my name was New Aviation Cadet Bach, Richard D.; A-D One Nine Five Six Three Three One Two. Sir.

For three months I got nothing but a life on the ground. I learned about marching and running and how to fire the 45-caliber pistol. Every once in a while I saw an airplane fly over my training base.

The other cadets came from a strangely similar background. Most of them had never been in an airplane, most of them had tried some form of higher education and did not succeed at it. They decided on Excitement and Adventure. They sweated in the Texas sun with me and they memorized the General Orders and Washington’s Address and the Aviation Cadet Honor Code. They were young enough to take the life without writing exposés or telling the squadron commander that they had had enough of this heavy-handed treatment from the upper class. In time we became the upper class and put a stripe or two on our shoulderboards and learned about being heavy-handed with the lower class. If they can’t take a little chewing out or a few minutes of silly games, they’ll never make good pilots.

LOOK HERE MISTER DO YOU THINK THIS JOKE’S A PROGRAM? ARE YOU SMILING, MISTER? ARE YOU SHOWING EMOTION? MAINTAIN EYE-TO-EYE CONTACT WITH ME, MISTER! DON’T YOU HAVE ANY CONTROL OVER YOURSELF? GOD HELP THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IF YOU EVER BECOME AN AIR FORCE PILOT!

And then, suddenly, Preflight Training was over and we were on our way to become the lower class at a base where we began to learn about airplanes, and where we first breathed the aluminum-rubber-paint-oil-parachute air of an airplane cockpit and where we began to get a tiny secret idea, shared in secret by every other cadet in the class, that an airplane is actually a living thing, that loves to fly.

I took the academics and I loved the flying and I bore the military inspections and the parades for six months. Then I left Primary Flight School to become part of the lower class in Basic Flight School, where I was introduced to the world of turbine and speed and spent my first day in Basic Single-Engine Flight School.

Everything is new fresh exciting imminent tangible. A sign: Cadet Club; rows of tarpapered barracks; close-cut brown grass; weedless sidewalks; hot sun; bright sun; blue sky, ceilingless and free above my polished hatbill and stripeless shoulderboards. A strange face above white-banded boards and a set of white gloves. “Fall in, gentlemen.”

A flight of four sun-burnished silver jet training planes whistle over the base. Jets. “Let’s expedite, gentlemen, fall in.”

In we fall. “Welcome back to the Air Force, gentlemen, this is Basic.” A pause. Distant crackle of full throttle and takeoff. “You tigers will get your stripes here. It’s not a lot of fun or a no-sweat program. If you can’t hack it, you’re out. So you were Cadet Group Commander in Primary; you let up, you slack the books, you’re out. Stay sharp and you’ll make it. LaiUFF, HAICE! Ho-ward, HAR!”