Someday I will give up trying to predict the performance of a UHF radio. “Roger, Rhein, Zero Five was Spangdahlem at two niner, flight level three three zero assigned instrument flight rules, Wiesbaden at three seven, Phalsbourg next. Latest weather at Chaumont Air Base, please.” A long pause of faint flowing static. My thumb is beginning to be heavy on the microphone button.
“Roger your position, Zero Five. Latest Chaumont weather is one thousand overcast, visibility five miles in rain, winds from the west at one zero knots.”
“Thank you, Rhein. How about the Phalsbourg weather?” The static is suddenly louder and there is a light blue glow across the windscreen. St. Elmo’s fire. Harmless and pretty to watch, but it turns low-frequency radio navigation into a patchwork of guesses and estimates. The radiocompass needle is wobbling in an aimless arc. It is good to have a TACAN set.
“Zero Five, Phalsbourg weather is garbled on our machine. Strasbourg is calling eight hundred overcast, visibility one-half mile in heavy rain showers, winds variable two zero gusting three zero knots, isolated thunderstorms all quadrants.” Strasbourg is to the left of course, but I could catch the edge of their thunderstorms. Too bad that Phalsbourg is out. Always seems to happen when you need it most.
“What is the last weather you had from Phalsbourg, Rhein?” A garbled teletype weather report is really garbled. It is either a meaningless mass of consonants or a black jumble where one weather sequence has been typed on top of another.
“Latest we have, sir, is two hours old. They were calling five hundred overcast, visibility one-quarter mile in . . .” he pauses, and his thumb comes off the microphone button. It comes on again “. . . hail—that might be a misprint—scattered thunderstorms all quadrants.” Quarter-mile visibility in hail. I have heard that nocturnal thunderstorms can be violent, but this is the first time that I have heard the direct report as I fly on instruments in the weather. But the sequence is two hours old, and the storms are isolated. It is rare for storms to hold their violence for a long time, and I can get a radar vector from a ground station around active storm cells.
“Thank you, Rhein.” The air is very smooth in the stratus, and it is not difficult to hold the new heading at 093 degrees. But I am beginning to think that perhaps my detour did not take me far enough around the severe weather.
I am well established in the routine of the crosscheck now, and occasionally look forward to the liquid blue fire on the windscreen. It is a brilliant cobalt, glowing with an inner light that is somehow startling to see at high altitude. And it is liquid as water is liquid; it twists across the glass in little rivulets of blue rain against the black of the night weather. The light of it, mingling with the red of the cockpit lights, turns the instrument panel into a surrealist’s impression of a panel, in heavy oil paint. In the steady red and flickering blue of the electrical fire on the glass, the only difference between my needles and the painter’s is that a few of mine are moving.
Turn back.
The air is smooth. The needles, except for the wobbling radiocompass needle and the rolling numbered drums of the distance-measuring equipment, move only the smallest fractions of inches as I make the gentle corrections to stay at 33,000 feet. The airplane is flying well and the UHF is back in action.
There are storms ahead, and this airplane is very small.
My crosscheck goes so smoothly that I do not have to hurry to include a look at the fuel flow and quantity gages, the pale green oxygen blinker blinking coolly at me as I breathe, the utility and flight control system pressure gages, the voltmeter, the loadmeter, the tailpipe temperature. They are all my friends, and they are all in the green.
I will not live through the storms.
What is this? Fear? The little half-noticed voices that flit through my thought like scurrying fireflies might warrant the name of fear, but only if I stretch the definition until it applies to the thoughts that scurry before I begin to walk across a busy highway. If I reacted to the half-thoughts, I would have quit flying before I made my first flight in the light propeller-driven trainer that first lifted me away from a runway.
The Florida sky is a gay blue one, puffing with the high cumulus that prevails in southern summers. The metal of my primary trainer is hot in the sun, but before my first flight in the United States Air Force, I am not concerned with heat.
The man who settles himself in the rear cockpit of the airplane is not a big man, but he has the quiet confidence of one who has all power and knows all things.
“Start the engine and let’s get out of here,” are the first words that I hear in an airplane from a flight instructor.
I am not so confident as he, but I move the levers and switches that I have studied in the handbook and call, “Clear!” as I know I should. Then I touch the starter switch to start, and feel for the first time that strange instant awareness of my ability to do everything that I should. And I begin to learn.
I discover, as the months pass, that the only time that I am afraid in an airplane is when I do not know what must be done next.
The engine stops on takeoff. Whistling beneath my airplane is a swamp of broken trees and hanging spanish moss and alligators and water moccasins and no dry ground for wheel to roll upon. At one time I would have been afraid, for at one time I did not know what to do about the engine failure and the swamp and the alligators. I would have had time to think, So this is how I will die, before I hit the trees and my airplane twisted and somersaulted and sank in the dark green water.
But by the time that I am able to fly the airplane by myself, I know. Instead of dying, I lower the nose, change fuel tanks, check the fuel boost pumps on and the mixture rich, retract the landing gear and wing flaps, pump the throttle, aim the airplane so that the fuselage and cockpit will go between the tree stumps, pull the yellow handle that jettisons the canopy, lock the shoulder harness, turn the magneto and battery switches off, and concentrate on making a smooth landing on the dark water. I trust the shoulder harness and I trust my skill and I forget about the alligators. In two hours I am flying another airplane over the same swamp.
I learn that it is what I do not know that I fear, and I strive, outwardly from pride, inwardly from the knowledge that the unknown is what will finally kill me, to know all there is to be known about my airplane. I will never die.
My best friend is the pilot’s handbook, a different book for each type of airplane that I fly. Technical Order 1F-84F-1 describes my airplane; every switch and knob of it. It gives the normal operating procedures, and on red-bordered pages, the emergency procedures for practically any critical situation that can arise while I sit in the cockpit. The pilot’s handbook tells me what the airplane feels like to fly, what it will do and what it will not do, what to expect from it as it goes through the speed of sound, procedures to follow if I suddenly find myself in an airplane that has been pushed too far and has begun to spin. It has detailed charts of my airplane’s performance to tell just how many miles it will fly, how quickly it will fly them, and how much fuel it will need.
I study the flight handbook as a divinity student studies the Bible. And as he goes back time and again to Psalms, so I go back time and again to the red-bordered pages of Section III. Engine fire on takeoff; after takeoff; at altitude. Loss of oil pressure. Severe engine vibration. Smoke in the cockpit. Loss of hydraulic pressure. Electrical failure. This procedure is the best to be done, this one is not recommended.
In cadet days, I studied the emergency procedures in class and in spare time and shouted them as I ran to and from my barracks. When I know the words of the red-bordered pages well enough to shout them word for word as I run down a long sidewalk lined with critical upperclass cadets, it can be said I know them well.