Tactical fighter pilots have traditionally been on marginal terms with the thought of weather flying, and only by superhuman efforts has the Air Force brought them to accept the thought that nowadays even fighter airplanes must fly in weather. The official emphasis takes the form of motion pictures and ground schools and instrument schools and required minimum hours of instrument and hooded flight every six months. Each successive fighter airplane becomes more capable of operating in all-weather conditions, and today interceptor pilots in their big delta-wings can fly a complete interception and attack on an enemy airplane without ever seeing it except as a smoky dot of light on their attack radar screen.
Even the fighter-bomber, long at the mercy of the low cloud, is today capable of flying a low-level attack through the weather, using sophisticated radar systems in order to avoid the hard mountains and identify the target. Beyond the official emphasis and the pressure of regulations, tactical fighter pilots of the newest airplanes must learn all there is to know about weather flying simply to keep up with their airplane, to be able to use it as it was meant to be used. But weather is still an enemy. The cloud robs me of the horizon and I cannot see outside the cockpit. I am forced to depend completely on seven expressionless faces in glass that are my flight instruments. There is, in weather, no absolute up or down. There is only a row of instruments that say, this is up, this is down, this is the horizon. When so much of my flying is done in the clear world of air-to-ground gunnery, it is not easy to stake my life on the word of a two-inch circle of glass and radium paint, yet that is the only way to stay alive after my airplane sinks into cloud. The feel and the senses that hold the pipper steady on the tank are easily confused when the world outside is a faceless flow of grey.
After a turn, or after the harmless movement of tilting my head to look at the radio set as I change frequencies, those senses can become shocked and panic-stricken, can shout you’re diving to the left! although the gyro horizon is a calm and steady guide on the instrument panel. Caught in the contradiction, I have a choice: follow one voice or follow the other. Follow the sense that marks me expert in strafe and rocket and high-angle dive-bomb, or follow the little bit of tin and glass which someone has told me is the thing to trust.
I follow the tin, and a war is on. Vertigo has become so strong that I have had to lean my helmet almost to my shoulder in accord with its version of up and down. But still I fly the instruments. Keep the little tin airplane level in its glass you’re banking hard to the right keep the altimeter and vertical speed needles steady look out, you’re starting to dive . . . keep the turn needle straight up and the ball in the center of its curved glass tube you’re rolling! you’re upside down and you’re rolling! Keep crosschecking the instruments. One to the next to the next to the next.
The only common factor between combat flying and instrument flying is one of discipline. I do not break away from my leader to seek a target on my own; I do not break away from the constant clockwise crosscheck of the seven instruments on the black panel in front of me. The discipline of combat is usually the easier. There I am not alone, I can look out and see my leader and I can look up and back to see the second element of my flight, waiting to go in and fire on the enemy.
When the enemy is an unresisting grey fog, I must rely on the instruments and pretend that this is just another practice flight under the canvas instrument hood over the rear cockpit of a T-33 jet trainer, that I can lift the hood any time that I would like, and see a hundred miles of clear air in all directions. I am just not concerned with lifting the hood. Weather, despite the textbook familiarity that ground schools give and that experience reinforces, is still my greatest enemy. It is difficult to predict exactly, and worse, it is completely uncaring of the men and the machines that fly into it. It is completely uncaring.
“Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, France Control with an advisory.” Like a telephone ringing. My radio. There is not the slightest flaw in its operation. How can that be when only a minute ago . . . but it is working now and that is all that matters. Microphone button down. Professional voice.
“Roger, France; Four Zero Five, go.”
“Four Zero Five, Flight Service advised mutiengine aircraft reports severe turbulence, hail and heavy icing in vicinity of Phalsbourg. Also T-33 reported moderate turbulence at flight level three zero zero, light clear icing.”
Button down. What about that. Sounds as if there might be a thunderstorm or two in the stratus ahead. That was in the textbook, too. But still it is rare to have very large thunderstorms in France. “Roger, France, thank you for the advisory. What is the current weather at Chaumont?”
“Stand by one.”
I stand by, waiting while another man in a white shirt and loose tie riffles through his teletyped weather reports looking for the one out of hundreds that is coded LFQU. With one hand he sorts and moves the weather from the Continent over; he shuffles through rain and haze and fog and high cloud and winds and ice and blowing dust. He is at this moment touching the sheet of yellow paper that tells him, if he wants to read it, that Wheelus Air Base, Libya, has clear skies with visibilities to 20 miles and a 10-knot wind from the southwest. If he wants to know, a line on the paper tells him that Nouasseur, Morocco, is calling high broken cirrus, visibility 15 miles, wind west southwest at 15 knots. He thumbs through weather from Hamburg (measured 1,200-foot overcast, visibility three miles in rain showers, wind from the northwest at ten knots) from Wiesbaden Air Base (900-foot overcast, visibility two miles, wind from the south at seven knots), from Chaumont Air Base.
“Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Chaumont is calling a measured one thousand one hundred foot overcast, visibility four miles in rain, winds from the southwest at one zero gusting one seven.” The weather at Chaumont is neither good nor bad.
“Thank you very much, France.” The man clicks his microphone button in reply. He lets the thick sheaf of yellow paper pile upon itself again, covering with its weight the weather of hundreds of airports across the Continent. And cover the report from Phalsbourg Air Base (measured ceiling 200 feet, visibility one half mile in heavy rain showers, wind from the west at 25 gusting 35 knots. Cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-ground lightning all quadrants, one-half-inch hail).
I drift along above the slanting cloud as if reality were all a dream with fuzzy soft edges. The starlight falls and soaks into the upper few feet of the mist, and I relax in a deep pool of red light and look out at the cold idyllic world that I called, when I was a boy, Heaven.
I can tell that I am moving. I do not have to accept that with my intellect as the radiocompass needle swings from one beacon to the next and the mileage drum of the distance measuring equipment unrolls. I see smooth waves of cloud pull darkly silently by a few hundred feet beneath my airplane. A beautiful night to fly.
What was that? What did I say? Beautiful? That is a word for the weak and the sentimental and the dreamers. That is not a word for the pilots of 23,000 pounds of tailored destruction. That is not a word to be used by people who watch the ground disintegrate when they move their finger, or who are trained to kill the men of other countries whose Heaven is the same as their own. Beautiful. Love. Soft. Delicate. Peace. Stillness. Not words or thoughts for fighter pilots, trained to unemotion and coolness in emergency and strafe the troops on the road. The curse of sentimentality is a strong curse. But the meanings are always there, for I have not yet become a perfect machine.