Solo (9 page)

When I was fifteen, I’d counted down, day by day, for nine months until the day I got my driver’s license—I was mad to drive. Had I known about this, how long would I have counted? Lieutenant Jackson raised the nose of the aircraft and entered a rapid climb, still in afterburner. The altimeter showed 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 feet. The sky turned a darker and darker blue. At 52,000 feet the sky was a very deep blue, unlike any sky I’d ever seen. The airframe began to buffet a bit. We were as high as we could go and as high as I’d ever again be from Earth.

A winding-down sound brought my eyes to the instrument panel. The left engine instruments were winding backward. Engine failure?!

“Oh,” said Lieutenant Jackson. “I forgot to tell you this might happen. Lack of oxygen. Engine failure. No problem.”

We descended to about 30,000 feet on one engine. Lieutenant Jackson told me from the back how to restart the engine up front. “Okay, the left throttle is in idle. Hit the start switch. There you go. Good. We’re up and running again.” The left engine instrument needles moved until they matched the needles on the right engine instruments.

Then we were on our way home.

“Do you want to fly for a few minutes?” he asked.

“Yessir.”

“You have the aircraft.”

“I have the aircraft.”

Oh, angels. Oh, angels who have visited me. I tried a gentle right turn, then a left turn. “Okay if I roll it, sir?”

“Sure.”

I pulled the nose up slightly, snapped the stick to the left, and held it. The aircraft rolled 360 degrees, through inverted, and as it neared upright I centered the stick. I looked out and about and did a clearing turn to be sure no other aircraft was in sight. I rolled inverted, wings level, then pulled back on the stick and performed the second half of a loop. The maneuver is called a split S. Back straight and level, I pushed the throttles into afterburner. We jumped forward, accelerating. What a kick! I rolled it again as I pulled the throttles back out of afterburner. Those two trees on the way to New Orleans were fading into the second row of all-time exciting flying events. Lindy Land lingered.

Lieutenant Jackson took control of the aircraft and we headed home. It was, overall, a relatively short flight because the afterburners consumed so much fuel. Back on the ground and safe inside the flight-planning room, I handed Lieutenant Jackson a dollar bill.

My buddy Cal Starnes was about to fly. He asked how it was. I told him it was about the same as the T-37.

“You lie.”

“Naw, I swear. I was expecting something special, but you can tell on run-up that . . . I mean, I don’t know if it’s the insulation of the cockpit or what, but there is no feeling of power or anything, and then the burner climb-out actually felt slow.”

Cal turned his head to the side a bit, tucked his chin, frowned. “Are you shitting me?”

“I’m thinking about switching to helicopters.”

A
FEW MORNINGS LATER
, at 0700, we all sat at tables in the main briefing room. At my table sat Starnes, Buckley, and Ferguson. Our instructors walked into the room. We stood at attention. Lieutenant Jackson approached us and said, “Be seated.” On the surface he was all business. Behind the facade was a twinkle in his eye. Looking back, I think the kindness and sentimentality he’d lost in instructor training had been replaced by a kind of nonabrasive, humorous sarcasm.

Jackson would fly with me at 0830 and then with Ferguson at noon while the others studied. After a brief discussion of scheduling and other business, the other pilots left for the study lounge. Lieutenant Jackson and I
discussed what would happen during my first instrument ride—the first after the dollar ride. I’d be in the backseat under a hood that extended, accordion-like, just under the canopy and over the entire backseat so that I couldn’t see outside, and with the exception of taxi and touchdown, I’d do
all
the flying. Then after weeks of learning to fly on instruments only, I’d move to the front seat and be able to look around.

Lieutenant Jackson asked me a few emergency procedures. For example, if he said, “Engine-fire warning during flight,” I’d recite, “Throttle-affected engine retard to idle. Throttle-affected engine off if fire-warning light remains illuminated.” Then we stopped by the equipment room to pick up our helmets, G suits, and parachutes. A G suit snaps around the waist and legs and inflates when g’s are pulled. G’s are a measure of gravitational pull. During certain maneuvers (rapid pull-ups, hard turns) the pilot is pressed downward toward the bottom of the aircraft.

It works like this: say the aircraft is cruising at 400 knots. Your body is sitting in the airplane also going 400 knots straight ahead. Suddenly you pull the stick back and the airplane climbs. Your body will want to keep going straight, but since it must stay in the plane, you get pressed against the seat bottom while the airplane makes the transition to a climb attitude. After the transition, the g’s stop. Three g’s means that if you were on a scale, you’d show three times your normal weight. Vision becomes impaired at around six g’s. First comes a gray-out, and then a tunneling of vision. At seven or eight g’s, the pilot may black out, but still be conscious. Beyond eight g’s comes unconsciousness,
until the g’s are released. The inflation of the G suit around the stomach and on the legs causes body fluids to be retained in the upper part of the body, keeping more blood in the head and reducing the chances of a blackout or unconsciousness. High-g maneuvers usually occur during aerobatics and especially air-to-air combat, but not during the kind of flight, an instrument flight, that we were about to take. Even so, we were required to wear G suits on all flights.

Once strapped into the backseat, I lowered my canopy, then reached behind and over my head and grabbed the leading edge of the large canvas hood and pulled it forward until it snapped into place in front of my face, over my head. A fitted partition prevented my seeing outside through the instructor’s canopy up front. I made my radio call to ground control for clearance to taxi—Lieutenant Jackson taxied—and then once we were near the runway, I switched to tower control. After we received clearance for takeoff, Lieutenant Jackson taxied out and stopped in the middle of the runway, as near the end as possible. He gave me control of the aircraft. I glanced at all indicators to be sure engine temperatures, oil pressures, and other readings were in the green. I held the brakes with my feet and moved the throttles up to 100 percent and checked instrument readings again while the aircraft shuddered from the power of the racing engines. I released the brakes and slipped the throttles forward into afterburner. I began the takeoff roll on instruments only, watching the heading indicator especially, to keep the aircraft heading down the middle of the runway. There was no very sensitive
instrument to keep me in the middle of the runway. However, in bad weather conditions, taking off from the
front
seat, being able to see outside, I’d follow the runway centerline, lit by my landing lights, and I could take off with that outside visual aid and then after liftoff immediately go back on instruments and stay on them until I was above the clouds. But under the hood in the backseat, I couldn’t see the runway in front of me, and if I drifted left or right of the centerline, Lieutenant Jackson applied left or right rudder from the front seat to keep the aircraft in the middle of the runway. At 135 knots I began pulling the stick back. All was suddenly smooth; I was in the air. Soon after we became airborne, Lieutenant Jackson pulled up the handle that retracted the gear and then the handle that retracted the flaps, and I felt a pickup of airspeed (because of reduced drag). Things were happening so much faster than in the T-37—so fast that I could barely keep up. At 300 knots I pulled the throttle out of afterburner, keeping the nose at only about a 3-degree pitch up, and suddenly we were at 400 knots. I raised the nose to hold the speed down to four hundred knots for the climb out. Four hundred knots is about 460 miles per hour.

I was supposed to level off at 12,000 feet. In the T-37, in the weeks prior, in order to level off at 12,000 feet, I’d wait until reaching about 11,700 feet and then start smoothly pushing the nose forward (from the climb attitude) while reducing power, so that I’d level off at 12,000 feet. I’d been warned by Lieutenant Jackson to start my level-off a thousand feet early in the T-38. I forgot and
shot right through 12,000 feet to almost 13,000 feet. This happened regularly on the first few level-offs in the T-38, much to my embarrassment. I would learn to think several steps ahead of what I was doing. To find myself concentrating on what I was doing at the moment meant I was dangerously behind.

Each time I flew, I learned more about the feel of the aircraft. Remember the first few times you tried to parallel-park a car? You didn’t feel as if you were a part of the car. You wanted it to do one thing, but it seemed to have a mind of its own. Once you become proficient at parallel parking, you can better “feel” where the car is, where the curb is. If you have to do it often—say, several times a day—you quickly gain proficiency. You’d get
real
good if you knew that being just a bit off could kill you.

Lieutenant Jackson said, “Okay, Edgerton, let’s make a thirty-degree banked turn to the right.”

I very smoothly moved the stick to the right so that the right wing dropped and the left wing rose until my angle of bank was exactly 30 degrees. If you lower your arm from straight out so that your hand drops about 2 feet, that is, relatively speaking, about how far my right wing lowered. An instrument on the instrument panel called an attitude indicator—a mock-up of the wings—showed degrees of bank in a turn. Before the wings approached the 30-degree mark, I smoothly moved the stick back toward the center position so that just as my bank reached 30 degrees, the stick was centered to hold that 30-degree bank. If I then did nothing else to my flight controls after
I was in a 30-degree bank, I’d simply start “falling” slowly to the right, losing altitude and gaining airspeed. To stay level, with a constant airspeed, I had to do two very important things: (1) Pull back on the stick just the right amount to keep from losing altitude. What’s the right amount? Only experience and “feel” can answer that. (2) Add just a bit of power, because by pulling back on the stick to keep altitude, I lost a bit of airspeed. Adding the right amount of power kept airspeed constant.

Unlike the T-41 and T-37, the T-38 needed no rudder during normal flight.

While I was flying in the back, Lieutenant Jackson, up front, besides watching for other aircraft, was also carefully watching my airspeed, altitude, and angle of bank on his instrument panel. Initially, the first few times I did this simple turn (and held the bank for a complete circle in the air), Lieutenant Jackson may have tolerated several degrees of bank over or under 30 degrees, the loss of several knots, and perhaps the loss or gain of several hundred feet in altitude. But as I practiced, the parameters shrank, and after several flights I was expected to stay
exactly
on airspeed, altitude, and bank—no deviation. None.

Why couldn’t I just look at the altitude and airspeed on my flight instruments and hold the correct pressures? Because there was a slight lag in what the instruments told me. If I added power to gain a few knots, then the next thing I knew, I had overshot my airspeed. If I then pulled back on the throttle and waited for the right airspeed, I’d go through it and be on the slow side. Trying to “fly the instruments” resulted in continuous overcorrections. I
learned to lead the instruments and to feel for needed adjustments. I remember Lieutenant Jackson saying, “Edgerton, you’re about a half degree off your heading. The best way to get back is to
think
yourself to the correct heading. If you try to move the airplane, you’ll probably overshoot.”

After I’d mastered a 30-degree banked turn, I practiced 45-degree turns. A steeper bank makes it harder to hold your altitude and maintain an exact airspeed through the roll-in, during the turn, and then through the rollout. Next came turns with the aircraft in a 60-degree, or “steep-banked,” turn. These were initially very difficult. The fact that I’d practiced them in the T-41 and T-37 didn’t seem to be helping out.

Over the next few flights came 30-degree
descending
turns and 30-degree climbing turns. After those came 45-degree climbing and descending turns and then the same with the most difficult of all—60-degree turns.

Finally: “Okay, Edgerton, I want a forty-five-degree turn to a heading of one eight zero while you descend three hundred feet.”

So I’m in this turn, watching my attitude indicator and feeling this 45-degree turn, trying to freeze it so I don’t go over or under, and I’m glancing at my rate of descent indicator to be sure I don’t overshoot that 300-foot descent, and I’m looking at my heading indicator, thinking about how much I need to lead my heading so that I smoothly roll out and find my wings level just as I reach a heading of 180 degrees—having descended
exactly
300 feet. And way back there in the shade (in my mind) stands Lieutenant Jackson, hands on hips, ready to jump out into the
sun, screaming his head off—at me. I’d heard rumors that if things got bad, Jackson turned into a screamer—in Captain Coleman’s big league.

One day while in the backseat under the hood, Phil Ferguson, my classmate, was just under 10,200 feet up but misread the altimeter and thought he was at just under 200 feet above the ground, near the runway. He was coming in for a landing—he thought. He’d been 10,000 feet high for a while. It’s understandable that an altimeter could be misread, though it takes a beginner or someone who’s very confused. It’s like looking at a clock that says 1:05 and believing it says 12:05.

Phil had started his final approach to landing from about 12,000 feet up (thinking he was at 2,000 feet) and Lieutenant Jackson hadn’t said a word. Then Jackson asked, “How far are you from the ground, Ferguson?”

“Just under two hundred feet, sir.” At about 200 feet, Jackson would normally take control of the airplane in order to land.