Stranger to the Ground

The air is instantly smooth, and soft as layered smoke. Altimeter three thousand feet airspeed one-ninety knots vertical speed four thousand feet per minute down attitude indicator steep right bank heading indicator one seven zero degrees tachometer eighty-three percent rpm at full throttle. Level the white wings. Air is warm. Thudthudthud from the engine as ice tears from guide vanes and splinters into compressor blades. Wide slabs of ice rip from the wings. Half the windscreen is suddenly clear. Faint blue fire on the glass. Power is taking hold: 90 percent on the tachometer . . . thud . . . 91 percent . . . thudthud . . . 96 percent. Air speed coming up through 240 knots, left turn, climb. Five hundred feet per minute, 700 feet per minute altimeter showing 3,000 feet and climbing I am 50 degrees off course and I don’t care attitude indicator showing steady left climbing turn I’m alive the oil pressure is good utility and power hydraulic pressure are good I don’t believe it voltmeter and loadmeter showing normal control stick is smooth and steady how strange it is to be alive windscreen is clear thud 99 percent rpm tailpipe temperature is in the green. Flash-FLASH look out to the left look out! Hard turn right I’ll never make it through another storm tonight forget the flight plan go north of Phalsbourg 15,000 feet 320 knots flash to the left and behind, faint.

And strangely, the words of an old pilot’s song: “. . . for I, am, too young, to die . . .” It is a good feeling, this being alive. Something I haven’t appreciated. I have learned again.

Rpm is up to 100 percent. I am climbing, and 20,000 feet is below flash 21,000 feet is below. Blue fire washes across the windscreen as if it did not know that a windscreen is just a collection of broken bits of glass.

What a ridiculous thought. A windscreen is a windscreen, a solid piece of six-ply plate glass, for keeping out the wind and the rain and the ice and a place to look through and a place to shine the gunsight. I will be looking through windscreens for a long time to come.

Why didn’t I bail out? Because the seat was bolted to the cockpit floor. No. Because I decided not to bail out into the storm. I should have bailed out. I definitely should have left the airplane. Better to take my chances with a rough descent in a torn chute than certain death in a crash. I should have dropped the external tanks, at least. Would have made the airplane lighter and easier to control. Now, at 32,000 feet, I think of dropping the tanks. Quick thinking.

Flash.

I flew out of the storm, and that is what I wanted to do. I am glad now that I did not drop the tanks; there would have been reports to write and reasons to give. When I walk away from my airplane tonight I will have only one comment to make on the Form One: UHF transmitter and receiver failed during flight. I will be the only person to know that the United States Air Force in Europe came within a few seconds of losing an airplane.

Flashflash. Ahead.

I have had enough storm-flying for one night. Throttle to 100 percent and climb. I will fly over the weather for the rest of the way home; there will be one cog slipping tonight in the European Air Traffic Control System, above the weather near Phalsbourg. The cog has earned it.

CHAPTER SIX

The people on the ground who operate the air traffic control system are very important people, but not indispensable. The system, although it is a good one, is not an indispensable system. Airplanes were flying long before the first sign of air traffic control appeared, they will go on flying if it all suddenly disappears.

When the rules of the air were set down, there was a very wise man present who knew that cogs will slip now and then, and that the system had best be flexible. I am still in command of my airplane, and I will put it where I think that it is best for it to go, system or no system. Now I have decided that I would rather not engage another thunder storm. I climb away from my assigned altitude of 33,000 feet to seek the clear air and smooth flying above the clouds. I am passing through altitudes that might have been assigned to other airplanes, and there is the possibility of midair collision.

Yet the chance of my colliding with another airplane is almost nonexistent. I am off course; in order to collide with me, another airplane would have to be precisely as far off course as I am.

Though I have not talked to a ground station for a long while, I have not been forgotten; I am a flight plan written on a strip of paper at all the stations along my route. Other airplanes will be told of my course and my estimated times over those stations.

I am a quarter-inch dot on the radar screens, and controllers will vector other airplanes around me.