Stranger to the Ground

I remember that I wondered, once, what flying a fighter airplane would feel like. And now I know. It feels just the same as it feels to drive an automobile along the roads of France. Just the same. Take a small passenger sedan to 33,000 feet. Close the walls around the driver’s seat, cut away the roof and cap the space with plexiglass. Steer with a control stick and raider pedals instead of with a wheel. Put 24 gages on the instrument panel. Wear a sage-green set of many-pocketed coveralls and a tight-laced zippered G-suit and a white crash helmet with a dark plexiglass visor and a soft green rubber oxygen mask and a pair of high-topped black jump boots with white shroud-line laces and a pistol in a leather shoulder holster and a heavy green flight jacket with a place for four pencils on the left sleeve and sew your squadron emblem and your name on the jacket and paint your name on the helmet and slip into a parachute and connect the survival kit and the oxygen and the microphone and the automatic parachute lanyard and strap yourself with shoulder harness and safety belt into a seat wife yellow handles and a trigger and fly along above the hills to cover eight miles a minute and look down at the growing wall of cloud at your right and watch the needles and pointers that tell you where you are, how high you are and how fast you are moving. Flying a fighter airplane is just the same as driving an automobile along the roads of France.

My airplane and I have been in the air now for 31 minutes since we left the runway at Wethersfield Air Base. We have been together for 415 flying hours since we first met in the Air National Guard. Fighter pilots are not in the cockpits of their airplanes a tenth as long as transport pilots are on the flight decks of theirs. Flights in single-engine airplanes rarely last longer than two hours, and new airplanes replace old models every three or four years, even in the Guard. But the ’84 and I have flown together for a reasonably long time, as fighter pilots and their airplanes go. We have gotten to know each other. My airplane comes alive under my gloved touch, and in return for her life she gives me the response and performance that is her love.

I want to fly high, above the cloud, and she willingly draws her own streamer of tunneled and twisting grey behind us. From the ground the tunnel of grey is a contrail of brilliant white, and the world can see, in the slash across the blue, that we are flying very high.

I want to fly low. In a roar, flash, a sweptwing blur we streak across the wooded valleys. We rustle the treetops in the pressure of our passing and the world is a sheetblur in the windscreen with one point fixed: straight ahead, the horizon.

We enjoy our life together.

Every once in a while as an idle hour catches me thinking of the life I lead, I ask why the passion for speed and for low-level flying. For, as an old instructor told me, you can do anything you want in an airplane without the slightest danger, until you try to do it near the ground. It is the contact with the ground, with that depressingly solid other world, that kills pilots. So why do we fly low and fast occasionally just for the fun of it? Why the barrel rolls off the deck after a pass on the army tanks in the war games? Why the magnetism of the bridge, the silent patient dare that every bridge makes to every pilot, challenging him to fly beneath it and come away alive?