Stranger to the Ground

Ice. The intake guide vanes are icing, and the engine is not getting air. I see intake clogged in grey ice. Flash and FLASH the bolt is a brilliant snake of incandescent noon-white sun in the dark. I cannot see. Everything has gone red and I cannot even see the blurred panel. I feel the stick I feel the throttle I cannot see. I have suddenly a ship in the sky, and the storm is breaking it So quickly. This cannot last. Thunderstorms cannot hurt fighters. I am on my way to Chaumont. Important mission.

Slowly, through the bone-jarring shake of the storm, I can see again. The windscreen is caked wife grey ice and bright blue fire. I have never seen the fire so brightly blue. My wings are white. I am heavy with ice and I am falling and the worst part of a thunderstorm is at the lowest altitudes. I cannot take much more of this pounding. White wings, covered in shroud. Right glove grips the stick, for that is what has kept my airplane in the sky for six years. But tonight the airplane is very slow and does not respond, as if she were suddenly very tired and did not care to live. As if her engine had been shut down.

The storm is a wild horse of the desert that has suddenly discovered a monster on its back. It is in a frenzy to rid itself of me, and it strikes with shocks so fast they cannot be seen. I learn a new fact. The ejection seat is not always an escape. Bailout into the storm will be just as fatal as the meeting of earth and airplane, for in the churning air my parachute would be a tangled nylon rag. My airplane and I have been together for a long time, we will stay together now. The decision bolts the ejection seat to the cockpit floor, the Thunderstreak and I smash down through the jagged sky as a single dying soul. My arm is heavy on the stick, and tired. It will be good to rest. There is a roaring in my ears, and I feel the hard ground widening about me, falling up to me.

So this is the way it will end. With a violent shuddering of airplane and an unreadable instrument panel; with a smothered engine and heavy white wings. Again the feeling: I am not really ready to end the game. I have told myself that this day would come to meet me, as inevitably as the ground which rushes to meet me now, and yet I think, quickly, of a future lost. It cannot be helped. I am falling through a hard splintering storm with a control stick that is not a control stick. I am a chip in a hurricane a raindrop in a typhoon about to become one with the sea a mass of pieces-to-be a concern of air traffic controllers and air police and gendarmerie and coroners and accident investigators and statisticians and newspaper reporters and a board of officers and a theater commander and a wing commander and a squadron commander and a little circle of friends. I am a knight smashed from his square and thrown to the side of the chessboard.

Tomorrow morning there will be no storm and the sun will be shining on the quiet bits of metal that used to be Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five.

But at this instant there is a great heavy steel-bladed storm that is battering and crushing me down, out of the sky, and the thing that follows this instant is another just like it.

Altimeter is a blur, airspeed is a blur, vertical speed is a blur, attitude indicator is a quick-rocking blurred luminous line that does not respond to my orders. Any second now, as before, I am tense and waiting. There will be an impact, and blackness and quiet. Far in the back of my mind, behind the calm fear, is curiosity and a patient waiting. And a pride. I am a pilot. I would be a pilot again.

The terrier flings the rat free.