Stranger to the Ground

I enjoy the color and the taste of life a very great deal. Although death is an interesting sort of thing on the path ahead, I am content to let it find me where it will rather than hasting to meet it or deliberately searching it out. So I ask myself, why the rolls, the lower-than-necessary passes at high speed? Because it is fun, the answer says, throwing up a screen that it hopes will be accepted as self-sufficient. Because it is fun. There. No pilot will deny that. But like a child experimenting with words, I ask, why is it fun? Because you like to show off. Aha. The answer begins to be seen, slipping into a doorway a half-second too late to escape my attention. And why do I like to show off? The answer is caught in a crossfire of brilliant spotlights. Because I am free. Because my spirit is not shackled by a 180-pound body. Because I have powers, when I am with my airplane, that only the gods have. Because I do not have to read about 500 knots or see it in a motion picture from a drone airplane or imagine what it would feel like. In my freedom I can live 500 knots—the blur of the trees the brief flash of the tank beneath me the feel of the stick in my right hand and the throttle in my left the smell of green rubber and cold oxygen the filtered voice from the forward air controller, “Nice show, Checkmate!” Because I can tell the men on the ground that truth that I discovered a long time ago: Man is not confined to walk the earth and be subject to its codes. Man is a free creature, with dominion over his surroundings, over the proud earth that was master for so long. And this freedom is so intense that it brings a smile that will not cede its place to mature, dignified impassiveness. For, as the answer said in part, freedom is fun.

She is responsive, my airplane. She does not care that she drinks fuel at low level as a fall drinks water. She does not care that the insects of the forest are snapped into sudden flecks of eternity on her windscreen. She flies at the tops of the trees because that is where I want to fly, because she is a sensitive and responsive airplane. Because I have moved a gloved hand to give her life. Because I paint her a name on the forward fuselage. Because I call her “she.” Because I love her.

My love for this airplane is not born of beauty, for a Thunderstreak is not a beautiful airplane. My love is born of a respect for quality of performance. My airplane, in the life that I bring to her, expects that I fly her properly and well. She will forgive me the moments that make it necessary to force her where she would not smoothly go, if there are reasons for the moments. But if I continually force her to fly as she was not meant to fly, overspeed and overtemperature, with sudden bursts of throttle, with hard instant changes of flight controls, she will one day, coldly and dispassionately, kill me.

I respect her, and she in turn respects me. Yet I have never said, “We landed” or “We tore the target to pieces”; it is always “I landed,” “I knocked out that tank.” Without my airplane I am nothing, yet I claim the credit. What I say, though, is not egocentric at all.

I step into the cockpit of my airplane. With shoulder harness and wide safety belt I strap myself to my airplane (I strap on my wings and my speed and my power) I snap the oxygen hose to my mask (I can breathe at altitudes where the air is very thin) I fit the radio cable to the black wire that comes from the back of my fitted helmet (I can hear frequencies that are unheard by others; I can speak to scores of isolated people with special duties) I flick the gun switch to guns (I can cut a six-ton truck in half with a squeeze of my finger I can flip a 30-ton tank on its back with the faint pressure of my thumb on the rocket button) I rest one hand on the throttle, one on the contoured, button-studded grip of the control stick (I can fly).

The swept aluminum wings are my wings, the hard black wheels are my wheels that I feel beneath me, the fuel in the tanks is my fuel which I drink and through which I live. I am no longer man, I am man/airplane; my airplane is no longer merely Republic F-84F Thunderstreak, but airplane/man. The two are one, the one is the “I” that stops the tank holding the infantry in its foxholes, that strikes the enemy man/airplane out of the blind sky. The I that carries the wing commander’s documents from England to France.