Stranger to the Ground

I belong to a group of men who fly alone. There is only one seat in the cockpit of a fighter airplane; there is no space allotted for another pilot to tune the radios in the weather or make the calls to air traffic control centers or to help with the emergency procedures or to call off the airspeed down final approach. There is no one else to break the solitude of a long crosscountry flight. There is no one else to make decisions. I do everything myself, from engine start to engine shutdown. In a war, I will face alone the missiles and the flak and the small-arms fire over the front lines. If I die, I will die alone.

Because of this, and because this is the only way that I would have it, I do not choose to spend my time with the multiengine pilots who live behind the lines of adventure. It is an arrogant attitude and unfair. The difference between one pilot in the cockpit and many on the flight deck should not be enough to cause them never to associate. But there is an impassable barrier between me and the man who prefers the life of low and slow.

I ventured, once, to break the barrier. I talked one evening to a pilot in a Guard squadron that had been forced to trade its F-86H’s for four-engine transports. If there ever was a common bond between single- and multiengine flying, I could see it through the eyes of this man. “How do you like multi after the Sabre?” I had asked, lights dancing on the pool beside the officers’ club.

I had picked the wrong pilot. He was new in the squadron, a transfer.

“I’ve never flown an eighty-six and I have no desire to fly one,” he said.

The word “eighty-six” sounded strange and foreign in his mouth, words not often said. I discovered that there had been a complete turnover of pilots in that squadron when its airplane changed from fighter-interceptor to heavy transport, and that my partner in conversation had a multiengine mind. The silver wings above his pocket were cast in the same mold that mine had been, but he lived in another world, behind a wall that has no gate. It has been months since that evening, and I have not since bothered to speak with a multiengine pilot.

Every so often a single-engine pilot is caught in a web of circumstance that transfers him from a fighter squadron into the ranks of multiengine pilots, that forces him to learn about torque pressure and overhead switch panels and propeller feathering procedures. I have known three of these. They fought furiously against the change, to no avail. For a short while they flew multiengine airplanes with their single-engine minds, but in less than a year all three had been released from active Air Force duty at their own request.

The program that switched fighter pilots into transports had once been quite active, affecting hundreds of single-engine pilots. Shortly after, perhaps by coincidence, I had read an article that deplored the loss of young Air Force pilots to civilian life. I would gladly have bet that some interesting statistics awaited the man who first probed the retention rate of fighter pilots forced to fly multiengine aircraft. The code of the Air Force is that any officer should be able to adapt to any position assigned him, but the code does not recognize the tremendous chasm between the background and attitude of single- and multiengine pilots.

The solitude that each fighter pilot knows when he is alone with his airplane is the quality that shows him that his airplane is actually a thing of life. Life exists in multiengine airplanes, too, but it is more difficult to find through the talk of crew on interphone and how are the passengers taking the rough air and crew chief can you pass me up a flight lunch. It is sacrilege to eat while you fly an airplane.

Solitude is that key that says that life is not confined to things that grow from the earth. The interdependence of pilot and airplane in flight shows that each cannot exist without the other, that we truly depend upon each other for our very existence. And we are confident in each other. One fighter squadron motto sums up the attitude of fighter pilots everywhere; We can beat any man in any land in any game that he can name for any amount that he can count.

In contrast, I read on the wall of Base Operations at a multiengine base: The difficult we approach with caution. The impossible we do not attempt. I could not believe it. I thought that it must have been someone’s idea of a joke for the day. But the sign was neatly lettered and a little grey, as if it had been there for a long while. It was joy to spin the dust of that runway from my wheels and to be out again in a sky designed for fighter pilots.