Stranger to the Ground

The B-4 bag is heavy in the right hand. Dust on shined shoes. Hot air doesn’t cool as I move through it. Black rubber heels on dusty asphalt. Away, a lone jet trainer heads for the runway. Solo. I am a long way from Primary Flight School. A long way from the chug of a T-28’s butter-paddle propeller. And a long way still from the silver wings above the left breast pocket. Where are the hills? Where is the green? The cool air? In Primary Flight School. This is Texas. This is Basic.

“. . . program will require hard work . . .” says the wing commander.

“. . . and you’d best stay sharp in my squadron . . .” says the squadron commander.

“This is your barracks,” says the whitegloves. “There are T-33 pilot’s handbooks in every room. Learn the emergency procedures. All of them. You will be asked. Another whitegloves will be around later to answer questions.”

Questions.

“Inspections every Saturday?”

“Are the classes tough?”

“What is the airplane like?”

“When do we fly?”

A cold night in a white-collar bed. Cold twinkle of familiar stars through the window. Talk in the dark barracks.

“Just think, boy, jets at last!”

“So it’s tough. They’ll have to throw me out. I’ll never quit because it’s hard.”

“. . . airspeed down final with the gun bay doors open is one twenty plus fuel plus ten, right?”

“Let’s see, Johnny, is that ‘climb to twenty-five thousand and rock wings’? Twenty-five thousand feet! Man, we’re flying JETS!”

“Never thought I’d make it to Basic. We’ve come a long way from Preflight . . .”

Behind the quiet talk is the roar of night-flying turbines as the upper class learns, and the flash of landing lights bright for an instant on the wall opposite my open window.

Tenuous sleep. Upperclass voices by the window as they return in the night. “I never saw that before! He only had ninety-five percent and his tailpipe was bright red . . . really red!”

“. . . so then Mobile told me to climb in Sector One to thirty thousand feet. I couldn’t even find the field, let alone Sector One . . .”

My glowing Air Force watch says 0300. Strange dreams. The beautiful blonde looks up at me. She asks a question. “What’s your airspeed turning base leg with three hundred and fifty gallons of fuel on board?” A crowded and fantastically complex instrument panel, with a huge altimeter pointing to 30,000. Helmets with visors, red-topped ejection seats, instruments, instruments.

Sleep soaks away into the pillow and the night is still and dark. What do I do with a zero loadmeter reading? Battery off . . . no . . . battery on . . . nono . . . “activate electrical device” . . . Outside, the green beam and the split white beam of the beacon on the control tower go round and round and round.

But once again the days pass and I learn. I am concerned with ground schools and lectures; with first flights in the T-33; and after ten hours aloft with an instructor in the back seat, with flying it alone. Then with instruments and precise control of an airplane in any weather. With formation. With navigation.

It would all be a great deal of fun if I knew for certain that I would successfully finish Basic Training and wear at last the silver wings. But when instrument flying is new, it is difficult, and my class that numbered 112 in Preflight is now cut to 63. None have been killed in airplane crashes, none have bailed out or ejected from an airplane. For one reason or another, for academic or military or flying deficiencies, or sometimes just because he has had enough of the tightly-controlled routine, a cadet will pack his B-4 bag one evening and disappear into the giant that is the Air Force.

I had expected some not to finish the program, but I had expected them to fail in a violent sheet of flame or in a bright spinning cloud of fragments of a midair collision.

There are near-misses. I am flying as Lead in a four-ship flight of T-33’s. With 375 knots and a clear sky overhead, I press the control stick back to begin a loop. Our airplanes are just passing the vertical, noses high in the blue sky, when a sudden flash of blurred silver streaks across our path, and is gone. I finish the loop, wingmen faithfully watching only my airplane and working hard to stay in their positions, and twist in my seat to see the airplane that nearly took all four of us out of the sky. But it is gone as surely and as completely as if it had never been. There had not been time for reaction or fear or where did he come from. There had simply been a silver flash ahead of me in the sky. I think about it for a moment and begin another loop.

A few weeks later it happened to a lowerclass cadet, practicing acrobatics alone at 20,000 feet. “I was on top of a Cuban Eight, just starting down, when I felt a little thud. When I rolled out, I saw that my right tiptank was gone and that the end of the wing was pretty well shredded. I thought I’d better come back home.”