"When did you say we'll be landing?"
The comebacks go on unmercifully for almost as long as the speech lasted.
"I need a blanket, please."
"This chicken is undercooked."
"What city is that over there, captain?"
"I want to go back."
Finally, the clowning is over, and after a few seconds of silence, the same calm, articulate, reassuring voice returns undaunted to the air, sounding as if we were all sitting in a pilot lounge sipping coffee, having known each other for years. "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."
I think I'd fly with this guy anywhere, anytime.
I stare ahead through the windscreen, chuckling over the captain's blunder. We are sandwiched between two thin layers of cirrus cloud, catching glimpses of blue stratosphere through holes and gaps in the speeding vapors. It reminds me of that astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey when he cruises through endless corridors of light patterns and color. My imagination runs rampant. I'm a being trapped within a being. The jet's windscreens are its eyes, I its soul. I look out and see the world but I'm detached from it. I'm at a console on another planet, controlling this giant probe remotely. When I'm up here, it's easy to-
An orange flashing light catches my attention. Joe Brewer sees it too, and he straightens up as well. It's the master caution light on the forward panel telling us something is amiss. Even as Joe resets the light to cancel it and make it ready for another alert, instinctively, our eyes flash down to the center console quarter panel where one of a bank of sixty lights tells us there is a malfunction in the inertial navigation systems.
The amber warning light flashes its message:
INS 25 DIFF
We know that it means the INS units are in disagreement. They are twenty-five miles apart in their determination of exactly where our present position is. This is critical, because a twenty-five-mile offset could put us halfway into a neighboring track, and as time passes, the condition will doubtless worsen, sending us farther off course. We could easily cross into the flight path of other aircraft flying parallel tracks with us.
In all probability, only one of the units is in gross error, but we don't know which is lying to us and which isn't. If we were committed to high seas navigation, we would have to choose between following one of the two and trying to split the difference and fly a course between the two. We determine that number two is the culprit because it shows an excessive ground speed readout. But we can't go on with just one operative unit while we're still in radar contact. So we turn back and request clearance to divert to Mildenhall Air Base in England.
The master caution light spells trouble. It always means inconvenience at best and calamity at worst. But all military and airline pilots live with it. The light is always located up high on the panel where it will catch your eye when it flashes and jolt you out of whatever form of complacency or concentration you're feeling.
Years ago I was pulling off a low-angle dive-bomb delivery when the light came on. I had released a bomb and was pulling four or five Gs, and as the nose came up through the horizon, I noticed it.
MASTER CAUTION
My eyes fell to the annunciator panel and my lungs seized at the sight of the flashing amber warning light.
WING FOLD
WING FOLD
WING FOLD
The locking mechanism on the wing fold hinges was unlocked. The A-7, being originally designed to fly off the Navy's big boats, had a folding wing feature, so that many of the jets could be crammed together.
If the wings folded in flight, what would happen? My mind raced. Would I continue to have control? I thought I remembered that the ailerons operated normally with the wings folded. But would the fixed part of the wings generate enough lift to keep me airborne? And if it did, wouldn't the ailerons now act as additional rudders? How would that affect roll control? And what if only one wing folded? I would corkscrew like a cheap bottle rocket. How would I eject from that at this low altitude? I was only 2,000 feet above the ground.
It took about a nanosecond to interview myself with all those questions, after which I rolled into a right climbing turn and told Lead that I was heading for the emergency strip. I warned the jets to the north, on Guard frequency, to stay high while I flew across two active gunnery ranges in a nervous beeline to the Gila Bend auxiliary field.
The wings never folded. The mechanics found a faulty warning circuit. The master caution light had toyed with me. The jet had winked its eye at me in a practical joke of some morbid sort.
"Got your attention, didn't I, big boy?"
Yeah, that's what it does bestgets your attention. Sometimes I feel like I've got a master caution light inside me. When it flashes, I ought to be looking down deep inside and checking my fault panel. But too often, I don't do that; I just reset it and plow on.
And that's what we're doingplowing on. On through the post-Desert Storm skies. But the rumors are running like the wind again. Joe Brewer thinks this will be our last trip. I'm not so optimistic.
Eighteen.
In Lindbergh's Prop Wash
You fly by the sky on a black night, and on such a night only the sky matters. Sometime near the end of twilight, without realizing when it happens, you find the heavens have drawn your attention subtly from earth, and that instead of glancing from compass down toward ground or sea, your eyes turn upward to the stars.
You have to cross this vast stretch of frothing nothingness to comprehend what he did. And you can't really grasp it while sitting back in seat 44D on United 913, eating lasagna and watching movies. You have to be up herein the cockpit.
I don't try to understand why he did it. I know that. What intrigues me is how Lindbergh felt about it. The nearness of death wouldn't bother me so much. But the totality of the lonelinessI don't know how I'd deal with that. At least I've got radiossix of themto talk with distant voices. And there's the reassurance that there are many other aircraft out here, piloted by people facing the same immense emptiness. And I've got Findley.
Findley is one of my two flight engineers. I look back and see him, sitting sideways to the airplane, in front of his colonies of switches, lights, and dials, their glow reflected in his spectacles. His panel is so enormous and complicated that the very sight of it confounds me.
Findley is an admitted jabberer. He talks constantly to whoever will listen. I guess it's his way of diffusing stress and fending off boredom. Even now he blabs incessantly into his boom mike as he scans his jumbled haunt.
"I just don't know how a man is supposed to make a living farming, these days. The middlemen are taking all the money. I put in eighty acres of beans last year and. ."
Because of the relative vastness of our cockpit and the noise created by the slipstream, we communicate with one another by headset. With a "boom mike" fixed an inch in front of my lips I can speak with anyone on the crew, fore or aft, in a normal tone of voice. In an electronic sense his ear is only an inch from my lips, and mine likewise from his. But such conversations go largely without eye contact. I have to careen about to see eye to eye with anyone except for the copilot with whom I'm talking or listening. This I do when there's urgency or when I want to emphasize a point. Or when humor is at work.
Normally we push a button to talk and release it to listen, just as we do with the radio. It makes laughing at a joke an awkward thing. You feel like a fool, pushing the talk switch just to laugh, but you don't want to embarrass the humorist with silence. So there's a certain subtle protocol we use to normalize the strange ways that we communicate on the interphone system.