I look over toward Three, ready to nod OK at him. He is watching the other airplanes take off, and does not look back. He is watching them go . . . sixteen; eighteen; twenty . . .
The runway is nearly empty in front of us, under a low cloud of grey smoke. The overrun barrier at the other end of the concrete is not even visible in the swirl of heat. But except for a little bit of sudden wing-rocking, the earlier flights get away from the ground without difficulty, though they clear the barrier by a narrower and narrower margin.
. . . twenty-two. Three looks back to me at last and I nod my OK. Baker Blue Lead and Two are five seconds down the concrete when Three touches his helmet back to the red ejection seat headrest, nods sharply forward, and we become the last of Falcon formation to release brakes. Left rudder, right rudder. I can feel the turbulence over the runway on my stabilizer, through the rudder pedals. It is taking a long time to gain airspeed and I am glad that we have the full length of the runway for our takeoff roll. Three rocks up and down slightly as his airplane moves heavily over the ripples in the concrete. I follow as if I were a shining aluminum shadow in three dimensions, bouncing when he bounces, sweeping ahead with him, slowly gaining airspeed. Blue Lead and Two must be lifting off by now, though I do not move my eyes from Three to check. They have either lifted off by now or they are in the barrier. It is at this moment one of the longest takeoff rolls I have seen in the F-84F, passing the 7,500-foot mark. The weight of Three’s airplane just now finishes the change from wheels to swept wings, and we ease together into the air. A highly improbable bit of physics, this trusting 12 tons to thin air; but it has worked before and it should today.
Three is looking ahead and for once I am glad that I must watch his airplane so closely. The barrier is reaching to snag our wheels, and it is only a hundred feet away. Three climbs suddenly away from the ground and I follow, pulling harder on the control stick than I should have to, forcing my airplane to climb before it is ready to fly.
The helmet in the cockpit a few feet away nods once, sharply, and without looking, I reach forward and move the landing gear lever to up. There is the flash of the barrier going beneath us, in the same second that I touched the gear handle. We had ten feet to spare. It is good, I think, that I was not number twenty-six in this formation.
The landing gear tucks itself quickly up and out of the way, and the background behind Three changes from one of smooth concrete to rough blurred brush-covered ground; we are very definitely committed to fly. The turbulence, surprisingly enough, was only a passing shock, for our takeoff is longer and lower than any other, and we fly beneath the heaviest whirlpools in the air.
A low and gentle turn to the right to join on Blue Leader and Two as quickly as possible. But the turn is not my worry, for I am just a sandbagger, loafing along on Three’s wing while he does all the juggling and angling and cutting off to make a smooth joinup. The worry of the long takeoff roll is left behind with the barrier, and now, takeoff accomplished, I feel as if I sat relaxed in the softest armchair in the pilots’ lounge.
The familiar routine of a formation flight settles down upon me; I can hold it a little loose here over the trees and away from the crowd. There will be plenty of work ahead to fly the slot during the passes over the base.
There in the corner of my eye drifts Blue Leader and Two, closing nicely above and back to Three’s left wing. Around them are the silver flashes and silhouettes that make the mass of swept metal called Falcon formation, juggling itself into the positions drawn out on green blackboards still chalked and standing in the briefing room. The wrinkles in the monster formation have been worked out in a practice flight, and the practice is paying off now as the finger-fours form into diamonds and the diamonds form into vees and the vees become the invincible juggernaut of Falcon formation.
I slide across into the slot between Two and Three, directly behind Baker Blue Leader, and move my airplane forward until Lead’s tailpipe is a gaping black hole ten feet ahead of my windscreen and I can feel the buffet of his jetwash in my rudder pedals. Now I forget about Three and fly a close trail formation on Lead, touching the control stick back every once in a while to keep the buffet on the rudder pedals.
“Falcon formation, go channel nine.”
Blue Lead yaws his airplane slightly back and forth, and with the other five diamonds in the sky, the four-ship diamond that is Baker Blue flight spreads itself for a moment while its pilots click their radio channel selectors to 9 and make the required cockpit check after takeoff.
I push the switches aft of the throttle quadrant, and the drop tanks under my wings begin feeding their fuel to the main fuselage tank and to the engine. Oxygen pressure is 70 psi, the blinker blinks as I breathe, engine instruments are in the green. I leave the engine screens extended, the parachute lanyard hooked to the ripcord handle. My airplane is ready for its airshow.
In this formation there are probably some airplanes that are not operating just as they should, but unless the difficulties are serious ones, the pilots keep their troubles to themselves and call the cockpit check OK. Today it would be too embarrassing to return to the field and shoot a forced landing pattern on the high stage before an audience so large.
“Baker Blue Lead is good.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
I press the button. “Four.”
Normally the check would have been a longer one, with each pilot calling his oxygen condition and quantity and whether or not his drop tanks were feeding properly, but with so many airplanes aloft the check alone would take minutes. It was agreed in the briefing room to make the check as usual, but to reply only with flight call sign.
Six lead airplanes rock their wings after my call and the six diamonds close again to show formation. I do not often have the chance to fly as slot man in diamond, and I tuck my airplane in close under Lead’s tailpipe to make it look from the ground as if I had flown there all my life. The way to tell if a slot man has been flying his position well is to look at his vertical stabilizer as he lands. The blacker his stabilizer and rudder with Lead’s exhaust, the better the formation he has been flying.
I move up for a moment into the position that I will hold during our passes across the base. When I feel that it is correct, the black gaping hole of Lead’s tailpipe is a shimmering inky disc six feet forward of my windscreen and a foot above the level of my canopy. My vertical stabilizer is solid in his jetwash, and I ease the weight of my boots from the rudder pedals to avoid the uncomfortable vibration in them. If it were possible to move my boots completely off the pedals, I would, but the slanting tunnels that lead down to them offer no resting-place, and I must live with the vibration that means that the stabilizer is blackening in burnt JP-4. I can hear it, a dull heavy constant rumble of twisted forced air beating against the rudder. The airplane does not fly easily in this, and it is not enjoyable to fly with the tail, like a great dorsal fin, forced into the stream of heat from Baker Blue Lead’s turbine. But that is the position that I must fly to make Baker Blue flight a close and perfect diamond, and the people who will watch are not interested in my problems. I move the throttle back an inch and ahead again, touch the control stick forward, sliding away and down into a looser, easier formation.
Two and Three are using the time that Falcon formation spends in its wide turn to check their own positions. The air is rough, and their airplanes shudder and jolt as they move in to overlap their wings behind Lead’s. To fly a tight formation, they must close on the leader until their wings are fitted in the violent wake of Lead’s wing. Although that air is not so rough as the heat that blasts my rudder, it is more difficult to fly, for it is an unbalanced force, and a changing one. At 350 knots the air is as solid as sheet steel, and I can see the ailerons near their wingtips move quickly up and down as they fight to hold smoothly in formation. During normal formation flying, their wings would be just outside the river of air washing back from their leader’s wing, and they could fly that position for a long time with the normal working and coaxing and correcting. But this is a show, and for a show we work.