Stranger to the Ground

Sometimes I stand on the ground or lie back on a soft couch and wonder how it is possible for me to become wide awake and a part of an airplane, to climb into that fantastically complex cockpit and go through all the procedures and do all the alert thinking that is necessary to fly in formation with other airplanes or around a gunnery pattern for score or to put a cluster of rockets on a target. This thought has stuck with me for long minutes, while I zip the legs of my G-suit, while I slide into my mae west, while I strap myself into the little cockpit. It is a dull lethargy that says, “How can I do everything right?” and wants only to withdraw into itself and forget about the responsibility of flying a high-performance airplane through a precise pattern. But one of the strange features of the game is that as soon as my finger presses the starter switch to start, the lethargy vanishes. In that moment I am ready for whatever the mission will require. I am alert and thinking about what has to be done and knowing just how it must be done and taking the flight one step at a time and taking each step surely and correctly and firmly. The feeling of trying to accomplish the impossible disappears with the touch of the switch to my glove and does not reappear until I am again off guard and un-alert and resting before the next flight. I wonder if this is common, this draining of aggressiveness before a flight. I have never asked another pilot about it, I have never heard another pilot speak of it. But as long as the touch of the switch is an instant cure, I am not concerned.

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.