Every once in a while, though, I fly an airplane that hums in the air, and the cockpit is a finely engineered box of torture. Back on the throttle after takeoff, to cruise cross-country, to stay on a leader’s wing. MMM . . . Back a little more on the throttle. MMM . . . The resonance ripples through me as if I were a metal servomotor bolted to the fuselage. I shake my head quickly. It is like trying to disperse a horde of hungry mosquitoes with a toss of the head. I open my eyes wide, close them, shake my head again. Futilely. Soon it is difficult to think of flying formation, of cruising, of navigation, of anything but the all-pervading hum that makes the airplane tremble as with a strange malady. Speed brakes out, halfway. Throttle open to 98 percent rpm. The hum subsides with the increased power, replaced by the tremble of air blasting against the speed brakes. To fly two hours in a badly humming airplane would reduce its pilot to a hollow-eyed automaton. I would not have believed that such a simple thing as sound and vibration could erode a man so quickly. When I wrote one airplane up for severe engine resonance, I discovered that it was most often caused by a loose tailpipe connection, allowing the eight-foot tube of stainless steel to rest lightly against the airframe like a tuning fork against a water glass. The perfect tool of a saboteur in wartime would be a wrench with which to loosen, ever so slightly, the tailpipe mounting bolts on enemy airplanes.
Other things. The airplane has a hundred little jokes to play. A hundred little things that seem to indicate that Something Is Wrong, when nothing at all is amiss. Just before takeoff, during the engine runup on the runway, grey smoke floods into the cockpit, geysering from the air vents. Engine fire? A broken oil line in the engine compartment? No. The cockpit air temperature control is set too cold, and the moist outside air is turned to instant fog by the obedient cooling system. Press the temperature control to hot for a moment, and the smoke disappears. And the airplane chuckles to herself.
The same moment, runup. Smoke, real oil smoke, streams from the fuselage, blasting down from a hidden orifice onto the runway, splashing up to wreathe the airplane in grey. Normal. Just the normal oil-mist from the pressure-lubricated bearings, venting overboard as designed.
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.
I remember that I wondered, once, what flying a fighter airplane would feel like. And now I know. It feels just the same as it feels to drive an automobile along the roads of France. Just the same. Take a small passenger sedan to 33,000 feet. Close the walls around the driver’s seat, cut away the roof and cap the space with plexiglass. Steer with a control stick and raider pedals instead of with a wheel. Put 24 gages on the instrument panel. Wear a sage-green set of many-pocketed coveralls and a tight-laced zippered G-suit and a white crash helmet with a dark plexiglass visor and a soft green rubber oxygen mask and a pair of high-topped black jump boots with white shroud-line laces and a pistol in a leather shoulder holster and a heavy green flight jacket with a place for four pencils on the left sleeve and sew your squadron emblem and your name on the jacket and paint your name on the helmet and slip into a parachute and connect the survival kit and the oxygen and the microphone and the automatic parachute lanyard and strap yourself with shoulder harness and safety belt into a seat wife yellow handles and a trigger and fly along above the hills to cover eight miles a minute and look down at the growing wall of cloud at your right and watch the needles and pointers that tell you where you are, how high you are and how fast you are moving. Flying a fighter airplane is just the same as driving an automobile along the roads of France.