Stranger to the Ground

Well, I am waiting, death. The ground is very close, for the glow is bright and the roaring is loud. It will come quickly. Will I hear it or will everything just go black? I hold the stick back as hard as I dare—harder would stall the airplane, spin it again.

So this is what dying is like. You find yourself in a situation that has suddenly gone out of control, and you die. And there will be a pile of wreckage and someone will wonder why the pilot didn’t eject from his airplane. One must never stay with an uncontrolled airplane below 10,000 feet.

Why do you wait, death? I know I am certain I am convinced that I will hit the ground in a few thousandths of a second. I am tense for the impact. I am not really ready to the, but now that is just too bad. I am shocked and surprised and interested in meeting death. The waiting for the crash is unbearable.

And then I am suddenly alive again.

The airplane is climbing.

I am alive.

The altimeter sweeps through 6,000 feet in a swift rush of a climb. Speed brakes in. Full forward with the throttle. I am climbing. Wings level, airspeed a safe 350 knots, the glow is fading below. The accelerometer shows that I pulled seven and a half G’s in my recovery from the dive. I didn’t feel one of them, even though my G-suit was not plugged into its source of pressured air.

“Red lead, this is Two here; had a little difficulty, climbing back through 10,000 feet. . .”

“TEN THOUSAND FEET?”

“Roger, I’ll be up with you in a minute, we can rejoin over Toul TACAN.”

Odd. And I was so sure that I would be dead.

The flashes in the dark clouds north of Phalsbourg are more frequent and flicker now from behind my airplane as well as in front of it. They are good indicators of thunderstorm cells, and they do not exactly fit my definition of “scattered.” Directly ahead, on course, are three quick bright flashes in a row. Correct 30 degrees left. Alone. Time for twisted thoughts in the back of the mind. “You have to be crazy or just plain stupid to fly into a thunderstorm in an eighty-four F.” The words are my words, agreed and illustrated by other pilots who had circumstance force them to fly this airplane through an active storm cell.

The airplane, they say, goes almost completely out of control, and despite the soothing words of the flight handbook, the pilot is relying only on his airplane’s inertia to hurl it through and into smooth air beyond the storm.

But still I have no intention of penetrating one of the flickering monsters ahead. And I see that my words were wrong. I face the storms on my course now through a chain of logic that any pilot would have followed. The report called them “scattered,” not numerous or continuous. I flew on. There are at least four separate radar-equipped facilities below me capable of calling vectors through the worst cells. I fly on. A single-engine pilot does not predicate his action on what-shall-I-do-if-the-radio-goes-out. The risk of the mission is worth the result of delivering the heavy canvas sack in the gun bay.

Now, neither crazy nor stupid, I am at the last link of the chain: I dodge the storms by the swerving radiocompass needle and the flashes of lightning that I see from the cockpit. The TACAN is not in the least disturbed by my uneasy state of mind. The only thing that matters in the world of its transistorized brain is that we are 061 miles from Phalsbourg, slightly to the left of course. The radiocompass has gone wild, pointing left and right and ahead and behind. Its panic is disconcerting among the level-headed coolness of the other instruments, and my right glove moves its function switch to off. Gratefully accepting the sedative, the needle slows, and stops.

Flash to the left, alter course 10 degrees right. Flash behind the right wing, forget about it. Flash-FLASH directly brilliantly ahead and the instrument panel goes featureless and white. There is no dodging this one. Scattered.

The storm, in quick sudden hard cold fury, grips my airplane in its jaws and shakes it as a furious terrier shakes a rat. Right glove is tight on the stick. Instrument panel, shock-mounted, slams into blur. The tin horizon whips from an instant 30-degree left bank to an instant 60-degree right bank. That is not possible. A storm is only air.

Left glove, throttle full forward. My airplane, in slow motion, yaws dully to the left. Right rudder, hard. Like a crash landing on a deep-rutted rock trail. Yaw to the right. My airplane has been drugged, she will not respond. Vicious left rudder.

The power, where is the power? Left glove back, forward again, as far as it will go, as hard as it will go. A shimmering blurred line where the tachometer needle should be. Less than 90 percent rpm at full throttle.

I hear the airplane shaking. I cannot hear the engine. Stick and rudders are useless moving pieces of metal. I cannot control my airplane. But throttle, I need the throttle. What is wrong?