When the throttles were shoved into the afterburner range on that first demonstration ride, you sank back into the seat under the tremendous acceleration. Your lungs seized and the name of your Savior escaped your lips as the runway stripes raced at you with a blur. Within seconds you were cutting through the air like a knife on stubby blades that somehow passed for wings, while Garfield County angled back and shrank into yesterday. You sat out on the long needle point nose and gawked at a new stratospheric world that was bigger, higher, clearer, and faster changing than any altitude the Tweet could ever aspire to. Feeling like a rookie jockey clinging to a blind racehorse, you burned white contrails against the blue heavens over the Oklahoma panhandle and left sonic booms cascading across the prairies. You worked to develop that delicate touch on the sensitive control stick but sometimes blundered into roll rates of over 360 degrees per second. Or maybe you dished out and let your nose get buried inthe brown and green of the beneath world, and your guts knotted up while your instructor cursed and took over the controls, slamming the throttles to idle, gingerly pulling the nose back into the realm of blue. Gradually, you learned to keep your mind well out in front of a creature that gobbled 800 feet of airspace per second. You developed an uncommon sense of awareness, unparalleled in any other human endeavor.
And within a few short weeks, your solo was at hand. But now the event was much different. In the world of the Tweets, the first solo was a big deal. Your instructor rode with you on the appointed day and got out of the little jet after a few satisfactory landings. He then entered the runway supervisory unit, the RSU, and watched you carefully, microphone in hand, as you nervously flew a few patterns around the field. Afterward, you were locked into a seventeenth-century-style wooden stock while your classmates happily hosed you down. But come time for you to go it alone in a T-38, it was all business.
You walked in one morning and saw the S-word beside your name, and when the time came, you grabbed your gear and went out to your assigned jet alone. And you secured the straps in the empty rear cockpit, mounted up on that magnificent white steed and mated yourself to it, and rocketed out to the "tubes," where you were supposed to practice the basic maneuvers in a special piece of airspace assigned you. You didn't practice much of anything. You just held on, trying to keep it pointed in some relatively safe direction while your senses buzzed, and you marveled at the tightrope you were walkingmishap was only a slip away, yet you were riding the pinnacle of life. Then you found your way back to Vance Air Patch before the fuel got too low, set that puppy down on one seven right, and taxied it back into the same hole you came out ofyou hoped. You stopcocked the throttles and listened to the engines spool down and rode the bus back in, and your IP said "How'd it go?" without even looking up at you, and you knew that at last your epiphany was at hand.
But for some of us bitternessand worseawaited still.
We were about halfway through the '38 program when the wing commander met with us in the officer's club for a rendition of his safety philosophy. Midway through his presentation, his portable radio squealed, and he spoke into it. We all sat horrified at the hissing message that came back to him. A T-37 had crashed near the town of Nash. One fatality was suspected. Later that day we learned his identity. I didn't know his name, but his face burned through my memory. It was the red-haired kid who was a couple of classes behind us. I had shot the breeze with him in the break room. He was the quintessential kid next dooralways smiling, always talking of home. And now he was dead. The Tweet, spinning out of control, had slammed into a wheat field. The red-haired kid had stayed with it too long. He had ejected too late. His body was found still strapped to the ejection seat.
For the next few days our mood was somber, and then the pressures of the program compelled us to look ahead and concentrate on the task at hand. But violent death would strike our band eventuallywe knew it. We just didn't talk about it.
By T-38 midphase I was reaching my stride. On my first formation flight I discovered one of flying's greatest joysto waltz the sky inches from another aircraft. I reveled in the challenge of absolute concentration and was truly at home on the wing. I dreamed of becoming a Thunderbird, flying one of the beautifully painted jets in the famous diamond formation, thundering across an azure sky; crowds looking up, shading their eyes in unbelieving awe. I don't know what it is that makes pilots want to impress surface dwellers with their thundering prowessjust ego, I guess. But I know that any pilot who doesn't have such a desire is probably minimally skilled anyway. And this "shine-ass" tendency, as it's known, is the torment of commanders, who work hard to suppress it and to make examples of those who succumb to it. Yet a chosen few have both the means and the license to bathe crowds in thunder, to wash them with waves of wild delight and wonder. I should have been one of them. But Willy Mays was the one destined for Thunderbird blue.
We took our formation flight checkride together, he with a check pilot in his jet, me with an examiner in mine. I knew he was good, and I set about to bring it out. We were flying a standard USAF formation. I was leading and Willy was on my left side, or left wing. No matter what I didwhether I climbed, descended, or turnedhe stayed in his position, which was slightly low and slightly behind. From his vantage point, my left wing tip was superimposed on the circle-and-star symbol painted on my air intake. Keeping the wing tip on that star was his sole objective.
And there he sat, as if glued to some invisible bar between us, making us one instead of two, his wing tip only three feet out and behind mine. He was doing well, and I decided to challenge him. The signal for directing the wingman to change positions to the other side of the leader is a quick wing dip by the leader to the opposite side. To do this, the wingman reduces power very slightly and gently slips under and across to the opposite wing. But we had never been taught to do this except in level flight. We were in a 45 degree left bank when I swallowed hard and gave him the signal. I watched as Willy first hesitated, then slowly dropped low and crossed to the high side of the formation, resuming a perfect position on the right side. I rolled into a steep right bank and signaled him again to cross back to the left side. He was good, damn good. I challenged him again later, after signaling him to fall back into extended trail, by immediately starting a four-G loop. As soon as he had radioed that he was in his position 2,000 feet behind me, I jerked the stick back, pulled the T-38's long nose straight up, and continued the pull over the top into a giant 600-mile-per-hour loop. It was standard practice to give the wingman a little breather before starting such maneuvering, but again, I knew Willy could hack it.
Then it was his turn to lead, and I reaped what I had sown. I hung tight on the wing and stayed solid through the maneuvers. Then he signaled me back to extended trail. I took the spacing and settled back to follow him through the enormous loops. At one point during an almost vertical climb his jet entered a supercooled layer of air and began to "conn." It was as if a great white tentacle were reaching out from his tailpipes and racing toward me. I had the wild feeling that Willy had impossibly and instantly reversed his course and was screaming straight at me. I flinched when the vapors hit. No drug could ever duplicate the euphoria of the spectacle. It was no trivial expression that the words "naturally high," a slogan concocted by Willy Mays, were embroidered on our class patches.
We finished the ride and climbed onto the crew bus, soaked with sweat in midwinter, as our check pilots wondered aloud why we hated each other. But it wasn't so. We grinned at one another. And we both passed with high marks.