I look back over my left shoulder as I turn to the heading that will take me to Spangdahlem.
I am pulling a contrail.
In a sweeping turn behind me, following like a narrow wake of a high-speed racing boat, is a twisting tunnel of glowing grey mist in the starlight that is the path that I have followed. Clearly and precisely in texts on atmospheric physics, contrails are explained by the men who spend their time with radio balloons and diagrams of the upper air.
Contrails are like fireflies. If I desire, I can find pages of explanation about them in books and in specialized magazines. But when I see one close at hand, it is alive and mystic and greyly luminous. Watching the con as I turn, I can see the rise and fall of it where I made small changes to keep my airplane at flight level 330. It looks like a very gentle roller-coaster, one for people who do not like excitement. That is where I have been. No air aside from the rolling tunnel of mist can say that it has felt my passage. If I desire, I can turn now and fly through exactly the same air that I flew before. And I am alone. As far as I can see, and that is a long distance about me, there is no other contrail in the sky. I am the only person in all the world to fly above the clouds in the hundreds of cubic miles that make the world of high altitude between Abbeville and Spangdahlem this evening. It is a solitary feeling.
But there is work to be done. Back to the coffee grinder. Squeak squeak to frequency 428. Volume up. Static. And no second thoughts, no mistaking this one. An S and a P and an A. A city with its thousands of people, with the cares and the joys that they share, people, with me. I am alone and six miles above their earth, and their city is not even a light grey glow in the black cloud. Their city is an S and a P and an A in the soft earphones. Their city is the needlepoint at the top of the dial.
The frequency selector knob of the TACAN set clicks under my right glove to channel 100, and after a moment of indecision, the modern, smoothworking mileage drum spins to show 110 miles to the Spangdahlem beacon. Except for the failure of the UHF radio, my flight has gone very smoothly. There is a faint flicker in the rising hills of cloud far ahead to my right, as if someone is having difficulty striking an arc with a gigantic welding rod. But distances at night are deceiving, and the flash of light could be over any one of four countries.
As a pilot, I have traveled and seen millions of square miles of land and cloud above land. As a recalled Guard pilot in Europe I have rolled my wheels on hundreds of miles of asphalt and concrete runways in seven countries. I can say that I have seen more of the continent than many people, yet Europe is a much different place for me than it is for them. It is a patterned country, broad and wide in the sunlight, wrinkled in the south by the Pyrenees and in the east by the Alps. It is a country over which someone has spilled a great sack of airports, and I seek these out.
France is not the France of travel posters. France is Etain Air Base and Chateauroux Air Base and Chaumont and Marville. It is the patchwork of Paris about its beloved river, a patchwork that flows like crystallized lava around the tictactoe runways of Orly Field and Le Bourget. France is the repetition of walking over the concrete to Base Operations and being aware, as I walk, of tiny villages outside the perimeter fence and hills everywhere.
Europe is a pitifully small place. From 37,000 feet above the Pyrenees I can see the cold Atlantic at Bordeaux and the shores of the French Riviera on the Mediterranean. I can see Barcelona, and in the haze, Madrid. In thirty minutes I can fly over England, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, and Germany. My squadron flies nonstop to North Africa in two and a half hours; it patrols the border between West and East in Germany; can fly to Copenhagen for the weekend. So this was a school for mankind. A small schoolyard.
But I rarely get first-hand, visual evidence of the postage stamp that is Europe, for much more often than not the land is covered by tremendous decks of cloud, seas of white and grey that stretch without a rift from horizon to horizon. It is the weather in Europe, as in the United States, that reminds me now and then that, although I can span continents in a single leap, I am not always so godlike as I feel. Some clouds in summer tower past my airplane to 50,000 feet, and some boil up and build faster than my airplane can climb. Much of the time I am correct in saying that mine is an over-the-weather airplane, but clouds are watch-keepers over arrogant men, they remind me, just often enough, of my actual size.
The swirling masses of white cumulus will some days harbor only the mildest of turbulence along my path. Another day I may penetrate the same type of cloud and come out of it grateful to the man who designed the crash helmet. Tight as safety belt and shoulder harness can be, it is still in the province of a few clouds to snap my helmet sharply against the canopy and flex the steelspar wings that I once swore could never be forced an inch.
I was once constantly wary of the hardest-looking clouds, but I have learned that, despite the snap of helmet on canopy, their turbulence is rarely strong enough to really damage a fighter airplane. Every once in a while I read of a multiengine airplane that lost its windshield or radome in the hail, or has taken a bolt or two of lightning, for these instances are duly reported and photographed in detail for the pilots’ magazines. There are a few airplanes that have taken off into bad weather, into thunderstorms, and have been found days later or weeks later scattered across a lonely stretch of earth. The reasons are unknown. The storm might have been unusually powerful; the pilot could have lost control; he could have been caught in a web of vertigo and dived from storm into ground. So, although my airplane has a six-layer bulletproof windscreen designed for worse than hail and an airframe stressed to withstand twice the force that would tear the wings from larger airplanes, I respect thunderstorms. I avoid them when I can; I grit my teeth and hold on to the control stick when I can’t. So far, I have been knocked about by a few small thunderstorms, but I have not seen them all.
There are procedures, of course. Tighten the safety belt and shoulder harness, pitot heat and defrosters on, cockpit lights to full bright, airspeed down to 275 knots, and try to hold the airplane level. In the vertical air currents of a thunderstorm, altimeters and vertical speed indicators and even airspeed indicators are practically useless. They lag and they lead and they flutter helplessly. Though the ’84F tends to yaw and roll a bit in turbulence, I must try to fly by the little airplane on a two-inch gyrostabilized horizon set ahead of me on the instrument paneclass="underline" the attitude indicator. I fly to hold my attitude straight and level through the storm. So I am prepared. I always have been.
In the darkness of the French night, my airplane flies easily along the continuous stream of miles between Laon and Spangdahelm, through air as smooth as polished obsidian. I tilt my white helmet back against the red ejection seat headrest and look up from the thick dark layer of cloud to the deeper, bright layer of stars overhead, that have so long guided men across the earth. The constant, eternal stars. The reassuring stars. The useless stars. In an airplane like mine, built to work at its best through a pilot’s eyes and a pilot’s direction, the stars have become only interesting spots of light to look out upon when all is going well. The important stars are the ones that draw the luminous needles of the radiocompass and the TACAN. Stars are nice, but I navigate by the S and the P and the A.