Switch pressed, in the airplane, I asked how I ever found the thought that flying single-engine airplanes is a complicated job. I cannot answer. It just seemed as if that should be, before I start the engine, and long ago, before I understood the 24 dials and the switches and the handles and the selectors. After I sit in one little space for 415 hours I come to know it rather well, and what I don’t know about it at the end of that time is not of great importance. Where did the thought of complication begin?
At the air shows, friends who do not fly climb the yellow ladder to my airplane and say, “How complicated it all is!” Do they really mean what they are saying? A good question. I think back, before the day I knew an aileron from a stabilator. Did I once consider airplanes complicated? I think back. A shocking answer. Terribly complicated. Even after I had begun to fly, each new airplane, each larger airplane, looked more complicated than the one I flew before. But a simple thing like knowing the purpose of everything in a cockpit dissolves the word “complicated” and makes it sound foreign when someone uses it to describe my airplane.
This dim red panel in front of me now, what is complex about it? Or the consoles at the left and right? Or the buttons on the stick grip? Child’s play.
It was a shattering disillusion, the day I landed from my first flight in the F-84. The Thunderstreak was considered then the best airplane in the Air Force for air-to-ground warfare. It could deliver more high explosive on target than any other tactical fighter airplane flying. I was hurt and disillusioned, because I had just gone through fifteen months of marching and studying and flying and Hit One, Mister, to prepare for an airplane that my wife could walk out to and fly any day of the week. I could settle her in the cockpit, put the harness over her shoulders and buckle the seat belt about her and tell her that the throttle is for fast and slow, the stick is for up and down and left and right, and there’s the handle that brings the wheels up and down. Oh, and by the way, sweetheart, a hundred and sixty knots down final approach.
There goes the feeling that some magic day I would wake to find myself a superman. My wife, who had spent the last fifteen months taking letters in shorthand, could step into that little cockpit and take it through the speed of sound; could drop, if she wanted, an atomic bomb.
Divorced from my airplane I am an ordinary man, and a useless one—a trainer without a horse, a sculptor without marble, a priest without a god. Without an airplane I am a lonely consumer of hamburgers, the fellow in line at a cash register, shopping cart laden with oranges and cereal and quarts of milk. A brown-haired fellow who is struggling against pitiless odds to master the guitar.
But as “The Speckled Roan” falls to the persistence of an inner man striving with chords of E and A minor and B7, so I become more than ordinary when the inner man strives with the material that he loves, which, for me, has a wingspan of 37 feet 6 inches, a height of 13 feet 7 inches. The trainer, the sculptor, the priest and I. We all share a preference for string beans, and distaste for creamed corn. But in each one of us, as in each of all humanity, lives the inner man, who lives only for the spirit of his work.
I am not a superman, but flying is still an interesting way to make a living, and I bury the thought of changing into a steel butterfly and stay the same mortal I have always been.
There is no doubt that the pilots portrayed in the motion pictures are supermen. It is the camera that makes them. On a screen, in a camera’s eye, one sees from without the airplane, looking into the cockpit from over the gunports in the nose. There, the roar of the guns fills the echoing theater and the sparkling orange flames from the guns are three feet long and the pilot is fearless and intense with handsome narrowed eyes. He flies with visor up, so one can see his eyes in the sunlight.
It is this view that makes to superman, the daring air-man, the hero, the fearless defender of the nation. From the other side, from alone inside the cockpit, it is a different picture. No one is watching, no one is listening, and a pilot flies in the sun with his visor down.
I do not see gunports or orange flames. I squeeze the red trigger on the stick grip and hold the white dot of the gunsight on the target and I hear a distant sort of pop-pop-pop and smell gunpowder in my oxygen mask. I certainly do not feel like a very daring airman, for this is my job and I do it in the best way that I can, in the way that hundreds of other tactical fighter pilots are doing it every day. My airplane is not a roaring silver flash across the screen, it is still and unmoving about me while the ground does the blurring and the engine-roar is a vibrating constant behind my seat.
I am not doing anything out of the ordinary. Everyone in a theater audience understands that this gage shows how much utility hydraulic pressure the engine-driven pumps are producing; they know perfectly well that this knob selects the number of the rocket that will fire when I press the button on top of the stick grip; that the second button on the grip is a radar roger button and that it is disconnected because it is never used; that the button that drops the external fuel tanks has a tall guard around it because too many pilots were pressing it by mistake. The audience knows all this. Yet it is still interesting to watch the airplanes in the motion pictures.
The ease of flying is a thing that is never mentioned in the motion pictures or on the recruiting posters. Flying a high-performance military airplane is exacting and difficult, men, but maybe, if you take our training, you will become a different person, with supernatural power to guide the metal monster in the sky. Give it a try, men, your country needs fine-honed men of steel.
Perhaps that is the best approach. Perhaps if the recruiting posters said, “Anyone walking down this street, from that ten-year-old with his schoolbooks to that little old grandmother in the black cotton dress, is able to fly an F-84F jet fighter airplane,” they wouldn’t attract exactly the kind of initiate that looks best on a recruiting poster. But just for fun, the Air Force should train a ten-year-old and a grandmother to fly quick aileron rolls over airshows to prove that the tactical fighter pilot is not necessarily the mechanical man that he is so often painted.
There is little to do. I have another six minutes before the wide needle of the TACAN will swing on its card to say that the little French city of Laon has been pulled by beneath me. I drag my tiny cone of thunder behind me for the benefit of the hills and the cows and perhaps a lonely peasant on a lonely walk through the cloudy night.
A flight like tonight’s is rare. Normally, when I fit myself into the cockpit of this airplane, there is much to be done, for my job is one of being continually ready to fight. Each day of the week, regardless of weather or holidays or flying schedule, one small group of pilots wakes earlier than all the others. They are the Alert pilots. They awaken and they report to the flight line well before the hour that is Target Sunrise. And each day of each week a small group of airplanes are set aside to wait on the Alert pad, power units waiting by their wing. The airplanes, of course, are armed for war.
After the innocuous flying of the Air National Guard, it is chilling at first to spend the dawn checking the attachment of thousands of pounds of olive-drab explosive under my wings. The Alert procedure sometimes seems an impossible game. But the explosive is real.