Solo Page 5

  For the first time, I was about to fly with a fighter-pilot stick grip in my right hand.

  Among several buttons and a trigger on the grip was a button that engaged the nose-wheel steering.

  The two throttles were side by side on the left console and could be operated simultaneously under my left hand or independently. The instructor had the same setup—stick and throttles.

  “Let’s taxi,” said Captain Dunning.

  Through my gloved hands I felt the stick and the throttles that were controlling this machine. I moved the throttles forward. No movement. A little farther. We were moving.

  We bounced along the taxiway with the whole world out there. I steered with my feet by pressing on either the left or the right rudder pedal.

  Inside my helmet were earphones, and in the oxygen mask covering my nose and mouth was a microphone. My mic and Captain Dunning’s were “hot,” so that whatever one of us said, the other heard. In order to be heard by someone in the tower, I had to press a button on the throttle grip with my left thumb.

  I could look in our rearview mirror and see myself with my new helmet, sun visor lowered, wearing the oxygen mask now necessary in the T-37.

  What was I feeling? A strange pride and power. I saw myself as I thought I’d look to an observer, as I’d viewed fighter pilots all my life—as a hero, with all the attendant awards, recognitions, and love.

  While waiting on the taxiway to be cleared onto the runway for takeoff, Captain Dunning said, “Now, when you’re cleared on, taxi out and turn around at the end of the runway—as close as you can get to the back edge there, with your nose wheel on the runway centerline. You always want as much runway in front of you as possible.”

  Cleared for takeoff, I taxied out and stopped the aircraft facing down the runway. I knew what to do, but Captain Dunning would talk me through every move.

  “Get on the brakes,” he said. “Stand on them if you have to. Now push the throttles to one hundred percent and check all your instruments.”

  The toes of the rudder pedals operated the brakes. I almost stood on my toes to hold the aircraft still. I brought the twin throttles in my left hand forward and watched the needles on the rpm gauges rise to 100 percent.

  “They’re all in the green,” I said.

  “Let’s go.”

  I released the brakes and we were rolling, slowly at first, and then there was a significant pickup of speed. I watched the runway centerline. I was drifting left. I touched the right rudder, too far right, then the left, and was back centered. The airspeed indicator showed 40 knots, 50, 60. At 65 I pulled back the stick, the nose lifted, we rolled along on the main gear, and then the aircraft smoothly lifted into the air. We climbed out at 180 knots, almost twice as fast as I’d ever gone while piloting.

  Captain Dunning talked me through climb-out. He made all the radio calls himself so that I would not be distracted. We leveled out at 12,500 feet, higher than I’d ever been as a pilot. I was in a dream.

  Before Captain Dunning explained a maneuver, he would take control of the aircraft so I could relax and listen carefully. And when I was taking over the aircraft, I learned to respond to his “You have the aircraft” by taking the stick in my right hand and the throttles in my left and saying, “I have the aircraft,” while giving the stick a slight wiggle. The procedure was reversed when he took control. This would be a rule from then on during my time in the Air Force. Side by side we could see each other, but it’s easy to imagine the pilot in the front seat of a tandem-seat aircraft saying to the pilot in back, “You have the aircraft,” and then turning loose the stick and throttle (without a response) to someone who hadn’t heard.

  The maneuvers we practiced over the next weeks included stalls, slow flight, steep-banked turns, and aerobatics. We practiced bad-weather instrument approaches to landing, the good-weather traffic pattern, and landing.

  After a few weeks of flying it was time for my first check ride. My instructor for that ride was Captain Gillison, from our sister squadron. I felt confident. We flew to our practice area and I performed all maneuvers requested: descending turns, aerobatics, stall recoveries. On the way home he told me to descend. I accomplished my before-descent checklist and started down, looking below me and all around for other aircraft. I’d always been instructed to look out of the cockpit constantly. After I’d descended a thousand feet or so, Captain Gillison abruptly took the aircraft from me. “Edgerton, you didn’t do your descending turns.” I didn’t know what he meant.

  Captain Dunning, while instructing me to always be looking outside the aircraft, had not taught me to lower the right wing and then the left as I descended, making gentle turns. This allowed for better vision below the aircraft. Captain Gillison gave me the first of the two Fairs I’d get during pilot training, and it marked my departure from the top of my class. My intense flight training in the T-37, flying every day and preparing for those flights, left less time for academic study, and my academic average would slip, not far; but my stint at or near the top of the class was over.

  One day, halfway through a lesson of touch-and-gos, Captain Dunning asked me to land, full stop. It was my day to solo. I taxied to the flight line. He got out of the aircraft and I taxied out, took off by myself, and flew in the traffic pattern for several touch-and-go landings. A traffic pattern flown in good weather (when visual flight rules, or VFR, are in effect) is shaped, looking down from above, like a rectangular racetrack. All turns are normally to the left.

  My landing gear is lowered while I’m flying opposite to the direction of landing, with the touchdown point at my nine-o’clock-low position. I lower my landing gear, then my flaps, check to see if my gear-down indicators are in the green, fly straight ahead for a short distance, and then start a descending turn to the left so that a 180-degree turn will put me on a final approach, aiming straight ahead for touchdown. During the final approach, the idea is to get settled down with the right airspeed (slow) and heading so that as I come in over the end of the runway, everything is set for touchdown, and all I have to do is “flare”—that is, pull the nose up slightly so that the aircraft stops descending. As I flare, my throttles are now in idle and I’m pulling back on the stick more and more to keep the wheels barely above the runway. Just prior to stall speed, the wheels settle onto the runway. The trick is to know the exact instant to level off above the runway. You learn that instant by feel. Waiting too long to level off means I bang onto the runway, a hard landing—and perhaps a bounce. Leveling off too high means I float along high above the runway until the airspeed bleeds off and the airplane loses lift and drops way down onto the runway. Another hard landing.

  When it’s done right, I’ll level off just barely above the runway, with a foot or so between my wheels and the asphalt, and I hold it off as the airspeed bleeds, hold it off, hold it off, hold it off, and finally the lowering airspeed (with my throttles in idle) reduces lift, so that just as the aircraft starts to settle toward the runway, why, there’s the runway, and the touchdown—at the lowest speed possible, just above a stall—is gentle and smooth. But if the angle down toward the runway is too steep or too shallow, or the airspeed is too slow or too fast, or if I flare too soon or too late—or any combination of the above—then the chances for a smooth landing are reduced.

  You know in your muscles and bones if a landing is good, mediocre, or bad—every one, ever. That’s one reason I love landing an airplane: feedback is instantaneous and accurate.

  Captain Dunning was waiting in the flight building. He shook my hand, patted me on the back. “Congratulations,” he said. “Now, I want to talk to you about singing in our church choir.” (He was serious.)

  AFTER WE’D BEEN flying together for a while, it was time for Captain Dunning and me to fly an overnight cross-country flight. The idea was to plan a flight from Laredo to some other military base in the United States, outside Texas. We’d spend the night and then fly home the next day. Captain Dunning would be along to advise me on all aspe
cts of cross-country flight in a jet.

  “Have you ever been to New Orleans?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Oh, Clyde, you’ll love New Orleans,” he said, smiling.

  After planning for the flight, studying routes and radio procedures, we packed our bags, briefed, and took off. On the way we were supposed to practice low-level navigation.

  On the final leg of the journey, Captain Dunning said, “Okay, let’s take it down.” We were cruising at about 350 miles an hour. I reduced power, and we started losing altitude. At a couple of hundred feet above the ground, I leveled out. We were over a sparsely inhabited area—flat land, large green fields of pastureland. Trees flew by just under us.

  “Lower,” said Captain Dunning.

  I now, just this instant, thirty-seven years later, remember the smell and feel of the T-37—the faint smell of jet fuel, the smell and feel of the cushionlike parachute I sat on, the parachute harness on my shoulders, the worn metal—and there in front of me the crowded, complex instrument panel I knew well. My successes in flying this aircraft, little moments of victory in completing a 360-degree steep-banked turn without losing altitude, loops started and finished at the same altitude, smooth landings—these little victories warmed me to the smells and feels and sights of the cockpit, a cockpit that felt more and more like comfortable old clothes.

  With confidence and a thrill, I continued to descend until I was no more than fifty feet above a miles-wide green pasture.

  Captain Dunning looked far ahead and said, “Lower. Fly between those two trees way out there.”

  The trees looked to be about a mile away and I could feel that at my present altitude I’d fly over rather than between them. I pushed the aircraft closer to the green grass of the level pasture, on down until I felt that if I dropped a wing it would scrape the ground. Our speed was over three hundred miles an hour. I was headed right between those two lone trees. They were wide enough apart for me to get between them, weren’t they? I looked carefully beyond them for a fencerow. Or a cow. I could see nothing but level green earth. I stayed right on the ground. The trees, which had appeared to be moving toward me slowly, were now coming rapidly, and suddenly I was between them and instantly they had jumped far behind me. I’d not looked at the trees; I’d been “feeling” a position exactly between them. And if I’d looked at their tops, I would have had to look up.

  This was about the best thing I’d ever done. I had driven a car at age eight sitting in my mother’s lap and by twelve had sat behind the steering wheel alone on country roads. And now this. What else could life be about?

  In New Orleans we checked into our naval air station barracks, and after dinner, Captain Dunning told me we were going downtown. So I got dressed and we caught a cab for Basin Street. Captain Dunning served as tour guide, but after about fifteen minutes of touring, he said, “Let’s go in here.”

  It was a strip joint.

  Captain Dunning was not at all obnoxious about his religion. He generally kept it to himself. But a kind of saintly attitude seemed to define him. He practically always wore a smile. At meals he said the blessing. He never cursed. He’d invited me to attend his church. And I’d sung in the choir!

  I’d never been in a strip joint. Well, once or twice at the Durham County Fair back in North Carolina, but that experience was relatively tame.

  We were led to a table, where we got our nonalcoholic drinks—I don’t remember what they were—or maybe we got whiskey sours. Hellfire, why not go all the way.

  I was stunned. I looked around, thought about Mrs. Dunning, about the church we were attending back in Laredo. But not for long.

  I can still see the headliner. As I recall, her name was an alliteration, something like Lindy Land. My Lord. She started out wearing a small white outfit, and what she did around the fireman’s pole sent golden lust through my blood.

  My visual memories of that cross-country trip are two: flying between those trees, and . . . Lindy Land.

  Captain Dunning sat silent through the whole show, and when it was over he said, “Well, that was sure something.” I was more or less breathless. We left and, in our Christian modesty, never mentioned where we had been, where he had led me. Where I had followed.

  The Spin

  PICTURE AN AUTUMN LEAF falling from a tree, turning in little circles. That’s an airplane in a stall and a spin at the same time. Stalls may lead to spins if you don’t know what you’re doing—or sometimes even if you do know what you’re doing.

  It is not common for pilots to intentionally spin most civilian and military aircraft. However, we practiced spins in the T-37 because it’s not difficult to accidentally get into a spin in that aircraft. We needed to practice recovery.

  What happens at the onset of an accidental spin may be that the airplane for some reason gets very slow in the air. Perhaps you are climbing and look back over your shoulder at the ground and forget you’re losing airspeed. Suddenly the airplane begins to shudder. You attempt to turn the airplane, but there’s hardly enough wind coming over the wing to act against the raised aileron along the wing’s trailing edge. The airplane, now in a complete stall, goes into a lazy turn, but neither wing drops enough to allow the nose to point down far enough for the aircraft to pick up speed and become controllable. So the aircraft starts spinning, like a maple leaf falling to the ground. Or like some paper airplanes after an initial short flight.

  During a spin in the T-37, normal movement of the flight controls has little or no effect. What the pilot must do is “break the spin.” To practice, he must intentionally get the aircraft into a spin and then recover.

  On a typical spin-recovery mission, Captain Dunning and I climbed to above twenty thousand feet for plenty of vertical room. We cinched our seat belts especially tight, stowed checklists, maps, pencils, and any other loose items in our flight suit pockets, and zipped the pockets closed. During the recovery we’d be pulling negative g’s, which meant that dirt, coins, pencils, or anything else loose in the cockpit might float up into the air. (Being lifted in your seat in a roller coaster going over a hump is “pulling negative g’s.” During the stall recovery, something like that happens for several continuous seconds.)

  First, Captain Dunning demonstrated the entire process of getting into and out of the spin. He raised the nose, pulled the throttles to idle, and as the aircraft began to stall, he pulled the stick back farther and farther (to hold the nose up). Then, at the last second before a full stall, he popped in the left rudder. (It could as easily have been the right.) The nose dropped, but not much, and the aircraft started a flat turn (little or no bank) to the left and then sped up. Both wings were level or almost level, the nose was slightly down, and we were in a full-fledged spin. What I saw in front of me was the earth moving rapidly from left to right.

  This is a condition an airplane will not “fly out” of. Without recovery, it will continue until it hits the ground.

  Captain Dunning then demonstrated the recovery procedure while he talked.

  “First determine direction of spin. The ground is moving left to right, so we’re spinning left. See . . . see, we’re spinning left. Keep the stick back in your lap, and apply a very firm full opposite rudder.” He stomped the right rudder. The whole world out there still moved left to right, but more slowly than before.

  “Now we hold the rudder in for one complete revolution. You find a spot out there and wait for it to come back around. That lake and the smoke.”

  We waited as the aircraft spun.

  “Okay, there’s the lake. Now, with both hands, ram the stick forward as far as it’ll go.” When Captain Dunning slammed the stick forward to the stop, the nose dipped and we pulled negative g’s. We were thrust upward, but our seat belts, tightly cinched, held us down. Dirt and other loose items floated up—a potential hazard, as something could wedge itself into the wrong place and cause problems with the throttle, stick, or rudder pedals.

  “If the recovery has been exe
cuted briskly,” said Captain Dunning, grunting, a bit tense, “the aircraft now enters a controlled spiraling dive, see, gaining speed, and we can bring . . . bring the wings level and then slowly but firmly pull out of the dive . . . There . . . there we go. Add power, and now let’s climb back up and you try it. I’ll talk you through it. You have the aircraft.”

  “I have the aircraft.”

  If we failed at the first recovery—in other words, if we didn’t break the spin—then we were to try again. The second of two tries should get us out of the spin before we reached ten thousand feet above the ground. If we tried several times and were still in the spin below ten thousand feet and were not recovering, then the procedure called for us to eject. Pulling the eject handle between my legs would propel my seat and me up through the Plexiglas canopy. The parachute would open automatically and I’d be separated from the seat. At least that’s what they told us.

  A problem sometimes encountered during spin recovery was determining the direction of the spin. I couldn’t be hesitant. During the heat of recovery, I couldn’t afford to think this way: If the earth is coming from left to right, does that mean I’m turning left and must press the right rudder? Or does that mean I’m turning right and must press the left rudder? Or the right?

  Pressing the wrong rudder would only wrap me more tightly into the spin—as the altimeter rapidly wound down.

  To further complicate matters, if somehow in entering the spin the aircraft became inverted, then everything had to be done backward. All the lefts became rights and vice versa. And spinning downward, upside down, you didn’t want to wait too long to eject—and be propelled toward rather than away from the earth.