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  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 ge
t 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.

  “Let’s level her out.”

  Ferguson leveled the aircraft.

  “How high are you now?”

  “One hundred and eighty feet, sir.”

  “Could you get us back up to two hundred feet so we don’t hit anything?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ferguson, under the hood, is a little nervous at this point. There are radio towers and tall buildings in the area.

  “Okay. We’re skimming right above the trees, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  My guess is that Jackson, up in the front seat, was tempted just to push the nose over and let the airplane go through where Ferguson thought the ground was, but he knew Ferguson might eject. “I have the aircraft. Pull back the hood, Lindbergh. Look around.”

  After a month or so of flying in the backseat under the hood, I then flew “contact” missions—missions from the front seat, still using instruments, but relying mostly on the world outside, while the instructor sat in the backseat.

  “Okay, Edgerton,” says Lieutenant Jackson. “I’ll talk you through a loop. Let’s line up with that road down there at three o’clock. Drop the nose. More. You’re looking for five hundred knots. Okay, level out and give me a good four-g pull-up, straight up. Good. Keep the pressure in—keep pulling.”

  I’m tightening my stomach and leg muscles as the G suit squeezes tight.

  Now the nose is pointed straight up.

  “Watch your ADI [attitude indicator] for wings level. Good. Good. Let off a little pressure—that’s too much buffet.”

  Then I’m falling over onto my back.

  “Okay, good.”

  We’re inverted.

  “Two hundred knots. Keep the back pressure in. That’s right. Look outside and keep those wings level. Back pressure, back pressure. Be smooth. Good.”

  Now we’re pointed directly toward the ground. The airspeed is picking up dramatically.

  “Ease off the back pressure. Whoa, not too much.”

  And now I’m coming back to where I started, lined up with the road, at 500 knots but a bit lower than the 15,000 feet we started with. I should be right on the button at the same altitude.

  I was learning, step by step, to feel the aircraft as if it were a part of me, and aerobatics were preparing me for air-to-air combat with other aircraft—dogfighting—if I happened to end up in a jet fighter down the line. I couldn’t imagine flying some big, slow airplane. But it could happen.

  And of course I had to learn to land from the front seat, and flying the final turn to landing in the T-38 was difficult, more difficult than any procedure I’d encountered flying an airplane. Because there is nothing much to hold the aircraft up at slower speeds—the wings are relatively small—it seems to want to fall out of the sky while maneuvering at slow airspeeds. And because the wings are so far back on the fuselage, they are not much help to a pilot in sensing degree of bank in a turn.

  In addition, I had to keep my power up while turning and descending in the aircraft and looking out at the runway, because letting a jet engine’s power get too low means that acceleration, if you suddenly need it, will be slow. I was also, during this final turn, making a radio call, lowering the gear and flaps, and correcting for wind. It was a difficult series of maneuvers and actions in a short time. I’d be going relatively slow, and sinking, and applying back pressure on the stick to hold the turn. And in the mix was a final-turn aircraft buffet that occurred just prior to a stall. Stalling out in the final turn in the T-38 would mean no room below for recovery.

  Traditionally, several pilots washed out of training while trying to learn to fly the final turn to landing in the T-38. I remember sitting in my room, working with the handle of a commode plunger up from the floor as if it were the stick in the aircraft and calling out my radio calls, looking back over my left shoulder, then looking back to where my airspeed indicator would be. That is the time I worked the hardest during pilot training—on that one maneuver: the T-38 final turn to landing. The cockpit was always the easiest part for me; the academics were more difficult.

  It didn’t help to know that in a class or two before mine, one of our current instructors, Lieutenant Smith, and a student had stalled out in the final turn and had both ejected—safely. I’d heard that Smith was the consummate screamer. I wondered if he’d been screaming before, during, and after the stall.

  After touchdown, the most effective braking method was to pull back on the stick and raise the nose off the runway so that the entire belly of the aircraft served as a speed brake. That procedure seemed risky: if you raised the nose too early, you’d hop back into the air. But what wasn’t risky about flying this airplane? Danger was always out there, just out of reach—you hoped. And for me and my buddies, that risk, plus our firm belief that we couldn’t die before old age, made our flying lives an adventure.

  Fingertip Formation

  AFTER FLYING SEVERAL SOLO missions and a cross-country or two, I was eager for the final phase of training—flying in formation.

  Put the fingers of your left hand together and look at the back of your hand. Pretend your four fingernails are airplanes. The lead aircraft, or number one, is the fingernail of your middle finger. Number two is your index-finger nail. Number three is your ring-finger nail, and four, your little-finger nail. That’s how a “four-ship” often flies somewhere. The lead pilot, out front, is usually more experienced. He is looking around, navigating, making all decisions as if the flight of four were only one airplane. Every other pilot has his eyes glued to the aircraft next to and just in front of him.

  On my first formation flight in the T-38, Lieutenant Jackson, in the backseat, didn’t just suddenly fly the
airplane into a fingertip position and then give me control. That would never work, because flying in formation is not unlike riding a bicycle—it’s something you learn through trial and error, and at first, you’re bad at it.

  We were number two in a two-ship (the nails of your middle and index fingers) and Jackson was flying. (Much of our learning was in two-ship; only late in the program did we fly several flights of four-ship.) We moved into “route,” or loose, formation; that is, we separated from the lead aircraft so that we could relax and glance inside our cockpit.

  “You have the aircraft,” said Jackson.

  “I have the aircraft.” I jiggled the stick to acknowledge that. (The stick has enough play in it so that at normal speeds, jiggling it doesn’t cause the aircraft to jump around in the sky.) I found myself falling back a bit, so I added a little power; then when I was about even with the lead aircraft, I pulled my power back, but whoops, I was going right on past him. I’d added too much power, even though it was just a touch. And I’d somehow gotten too high, so I pushed the nose over just a bit and . . . whoops, I rapidly sank down below lead as I found myself way out in front of him. I was in front of lead. And down below him. I was looking up and back. So I corrected for that and found myself way back behind lead. The general problem was overcorrecting. I was all over the sky—below lead, above him, behind, ahead.

  Gradually I learned to hold it steady out at a distance and then flew in a bit closer, and when I learned to steady it there, I finally moved into fingertip position. This didn’t happen in one day. Several flights passed as I learned to make very tiny corrections in power and stick position—to anticipate and make small corrections before they were needed. For example, if I dropped back a few feet, I added power and then reduced it a bit even before the power kicked in. The two throttles in my left hand were inched up and back in tiny increments, first one, then the other, up and back, up and back, while I moved the stick left, right, back, forward, in very quick and tiny movements. When I became proficient, my airplane appeared to sit very still beside lead, while in fact I was making all those rapid, minute corrections with stick and throttle. At the same time, along with the other aircraft, I was moving through the air at several hundred miles an hour. Only if the flight was close to the ground did I get a sense of speed, and even when I was only twenty feet above the ground—in close formation—my eyes had to be glued to the lead aircraft, not the ground.