Stranger to the Ground

“Thank you, Rhein. How about the Phalsbourg weather?” The static is suddenly louder and there is a light blue glow across the windscreen. St. Elmo’s fire. Harmless and pretty to watch, but it turns low-frequency radio navigation into a patchwork of guesses and estimates. The radiocompass needle is wobbling in an aimless arc. It is good to have a TACAN set.

“Zero Five, Phalsbourg weather is garbled on our machine. Strasbourg is calling eight hundred overcast, visibility one-half mile in heavy rain showers, winds variable two zero gusting three zero knots, isolated thunderstorms all quadrants.” Strasbourg is to the left of course, but I could catch the edge of their thunderstorms. Too bad that Phalsbourg is out. Always seems to happen when you need it most.

“What is the last weather you had from Phalsbourg, Rhein?” A garbled teletype weather report is really garbled. It is either a meaningless mass of consonants or a black jumble where one weather sequence has been typed on top of another.

“Latest we have, sir, is two hours old. They were calling five hundred overcast, visibility one-quarter mile in . . .” he pauses, and his thumb comes off the microphone button. It comes on again “. . . hail—that might be a misprint—scattered thunderstorms all quadrants.” Quarter-mile visibility in hail. I have heard that nocturnal thunderstorms can be violent, but this is the first time that I have heard the direct report as I fly on instruments in the weather. But the sequence is two hours old, and the storms are isolated. It is rare for storms to hold their violence for a long time, and I can get a radar vector from a ground station around active storm cells.

“Thank you, Rhein.” The air is very smooth in the stratus, and it is not difficult to hold the new heading at 093 degrees. But I am beginning to think that perhaps my detour did not take me far enough around the severe weather.

I am well established in the routine of the crosscheck now, and occasionally look forward to the liquid blue fire on the windscreen. It is a brilliant cobalt, glowing with an inner light that is somehow startling to see at high altitude. And it is liquid as water is liquid; it twists across the glass in little rivulets of blue rain against the black of the night weather. The light of it, mingling with the red of the cockpit lights, turns the instrument panel into a surrealist’s impression of a panel, in heavy oil paint. In the steady red and flickering blue of the electrical fire on the glass, the only difference between my needles and the painter’s is that a few of mine are moving.

Turn back.

The air is smooth. The needles, except for the wobbling radiocompass needle and the rolling numbered drums of the distance-measuring equipment, move only the smallest fractions of inches as I make the gentle corrections to stay at 33,000 feet. The airplane is flying well and the UHF is back in action.

There are storms ahead, and this airplane is very small.

My crosscheck goes so smoothly that I do not have to hurry to include a look at the fuel flow and quantity gages, the pale green oxygen blinker blinking coolly at me as I breathe, the utility and flight control system pressure gages, the voltmeter, the loadmeter, the tailpipe temperature. They are all my friends, and they are all in the green.

I will not live through the storms.

What is this? Fear? The little half-noticed voices that flit through my thought like scurrying fireflies might warrant the name of fear, but only if I stretch the definition until it applies to the thoughts that scurry before I begin to walk across a busy highway. If I reacted to the half-thoughts, I would have quit flying before I made my first flight in the light propeller-driven trainer that first lifted me away from a runway.

The Florida sky is a gay blue one, puffing with the high cumulus that prevails in southern summers. The metal of my primary trainer is hot in the sun, but before my first flight in the United States Air Force, I am not concerned with heat.

The man who settles himself in the rear cockpit of the airplane is not a big man, but he has the quiet confidence of one who has all power and knows all things.

“Start the engine and let’s get out of here,” are the first words that I hear in an airplane from a flight instructor.

I am not so confident as he, but I move the levers and switches that I have studied in the handbook and call, “Clear!” as I know I should. Then I touch the starter switch to start, and feel for the first time that strange instant awareness of my ability to do everything that I should. And I begin to learn.

I discover, as the months pass, that the only time that I am afraid in an airplane is when I do not know what must be done next.