Stranger to the Ground

In flight, after an hour of low-level. Fuel suddenly streams from the leader’s airplane, flying back like a great white banner of distress. Broken fuel lines? An indicator of turbine blades spinning from the redhot wheel and an engine coming to pieces? Imminent fire and a burst of scarlet in the sky? No. Quite normal, this streamer of fuel. As the drop tanks feed the last of their fuel, and as the internal tanks join to feed their own fuel, there is for a moment too much JP-4 in the main fuel tank, and it overflows, as designed, harmlessly overboard. The airplane chuckles with an old joke.

Takeoff. Heavy laden at low airspeed, close to the ground, bailout a marginal thing before the flaps are up, and a brilliant yellow light flares on the instrument panel. Suddenly. I see it from the corner of my eye, and I am stunned. For a half-second. And the yellow light, all by itself, goes out. Not the yellow overheat-warning light I saw at that critical moment when fire could be disaster, but the mechanical advantage shift light, telling me, when I have recovered my composure, that the stabilator hydraulic system is going about its task as its destiny demands, changing the response of the flight controls as the landing gear locks up. And the airplane chuckles.

But once in a very long while the turbine buckets do break free and slice redhot through the fuel lines, the fire warning light really does come on with flame at its sensors, the cockpit does fill with smoke. Once in a while. And an airplane screams.

Tonight I cruise. The steady play of whines and thuds and rumbles and squeals, and through it all the luminous needles at 95 percent rpm and 540 degrees tailpipe temperature, and 265 knots indicated airspeed. Cruise is the long radium hands of the altimeter drifting slowly back and forth across the 33,000-foot mark and other shorter needles captured by arcs of green paint on their glass dials. There are 24 round dials on the panel in front of me in the red light. The fact is empty and unimpressive, although I feel, vaguely, as if it should be startling. Perhaps if I counted the switches and handles and selectors . . .

At one time I would have been impressed by the 24 dials, but tonight they are few and I know them well. There is a circular computer on the clipboard strapped to my leg that tells me the indicated airspeed of 265 knots is actually moving my airplane over the land between Abbeville and Laon at a speed of 465 knots, 535 miles per hour. Which is not really fast, but for an old Guard airplane it is not really slow, either.

Cruise. Hours neatly shortened and diced into sections of time spent flying between city and city, radiobeacon and radiobeacon, between one swing of the radiocompass needle and the next. I carry my world with me as I fly, and outside is the familiar, indifferent Other World of fifty-five below zero and stars and black cloud and a long fall to the hills.

From the light static in the earphones comes a quick and hurried voice: “Evreux Tower radio check Guard channel; one-two-three-four-five-four-three-two-one Evreux Tower out.”

There is someone else in the world at this moment. There is a tower operator six miles below me, dwindling at 465 knots, who is this second setting his microphone back in its cradle, glancing at his runway held in a net of dim white lights and surrounded by blue taxiway lights that lead to a parking ramp. From his tower he can look down on to tall rhythmic triangles that are the vertical stabilizers of his base’s transport airplanes parked. At this moment he is beginning a lonely stretch of duty; his radio check was as much to break the silence as it was to check to emergency transmitter. But now he is assured that the radio works and he settles down to wait the night through. He is not aware that I have passed over his head. To know, he would have to step out to the catwalk around his tower and listen carefully and look up through the last hole in the clouds, toward the stars. He would hear, if his night was a quiet one, the tiny dim thunder of the engine that carries me and my airplane through the sky. If he carried his binoculars, and if he watched at precisely the right moment, he would see the flashing dots of red and green and amber that are my navigation lights, and the white of my fuselage light. And he would walk back into his tower in the first drops of rain and wait for to coming of the dawn.