Highest Duty (10 page)

A
MERICA LABELED
Charles Lindbergh as “Lucky Lindy,” but he knew better. I’ve read
We
, his 1927 book about his famous transatlantic trip. In it, he made clear that his success was due almost entirely to preparation, not luck, or as I prefer to call it, circumstance. “Prepared Lindy” wouldn’t have had the same magic as a nickname, but his views of pilot preparation have long resonated with me.

Whenever a fellow airman lost his life during my military career, I tried to think of how I might have reacted, and what steps I might have taken. Could I have survived?

At Nellis, each pilot and his WSO were assigned a particular airplane. We had our names stenciled on the canopy rails.

At one point, I was on temporary duty (TDY) at Eglin Air Force Base in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. I was there to have a rare opportunity to fire an air-to-air missile at a remotely controlled target drone over the Gulf of Mexico.

One morning while I was in Florida, another crew was scheduled to fly my plane, an F-4, back at Nellis. The F-4 had a nosewheel steering system that was controlled electrically and powered hydraulically. There was an electrical connector that had wires to connect the cockpit control with the nosewheel. Once in a while, moisture would get into the connector. If there was contamination there, it would short out the connector pins. So the nosewheel could end up turning without a command from the pilot. We’d have to write it up in the aircraft maintenance log and the technicians would check it and repair it as necessary. Sometimes, the connector simply needed to be dried out so it would work properly.

This pilot was set to take my plane for a training flight that morning. Taxiing to the runway, he noticed that the nosewheel steering was not working properly. He taxied back to the ramp, shut the airplane down, and reported the discrepancy in the maintenance log. The maintenance crew took corrective action and signed it off.

Later that day, that same F-4 was scheduled for a flight, including a formation takeoff, in which pilots in two jets were going to power up, release their brakes, and then take off in formation, matching each other exactly in acceleration.

One of the pilots in the formation was at the controls of the F-4 that had been assigned to me, the one which had aborted
earlier in the day. After he started his takeoff, the nosewheel turned sharply to the left without him commanding it to do so. It took him into a ditch beside the runway, collapsing the landing gear and rupturing one of the external fuel tanks.

He and his WSO were sitting in the damaged airplane, deciding how to extricate themselves, when the leaking fuel caught on fire, and they were engulfed in a ball of flames.

I wonder if I had been the next pilot to fly that plane, would I have read the maintenance record, seen how the nosewheel issue had been addressed, and known to be especially watchful of any evidence that it would fail again?

That pilot and WSO were a good crew. But at their funerals, I was reminded of how a crew must be diligent on every front on every flight.

This was graphically illustrated in my own close calls, too.

One time at Nellis, I was in an F-4, on a high-speed, low-level flight. The goal was to fly as low as possible, which is what I’d need to do if I ever had to fly below enemy radar. I was flying just a hundred feet off the ground at 480 knots, and there were hills I had to go over. The techniques I was practicing required me to maneuver the jet so it would barely clear a hill without getting too high above it. Flying too high would make me obvious to enemy radar.

Doing this properly took a lot of practice. Each time I had to raise the nose to fly over the hill, and then push the nose back down after we’d cleared the hill. It was a bit like riding a roller coaster. If it was a steeper ridgeline, I’d come up to it, pull up steeply to clear it, and as I crested the top, I’d roll inverted, upside
down, and then pull down the back side of the hill and finally roll back to the upright position.

At one point, I came to a ridgeline, thought it was tall enough that I would be able to pull up to the crest, roll inverted, and pull back down the back side. At the top of the ridge, I realized I didn’t have enough altitude ahead of me to complete the maneuver. It was a potentially fatal misjudgment on my part. I had to quickly push myself back up into the sky and then roll out.

I had seconds to correct the situation, and I managed to do it. But let me tell you: The incident got my attention. There were pilots who died after making similar misjudgments.

When we got back into the squadron building, I took responsibility for what happened. I turned to the WSO who had been with me and said, “I’m sorry, Gordon. I almost killed us today, but it won’t happen again.” I then explained to him exactly what had happened and why.

After I had been at Nellis a few years, I was assigned to an Air Force Mishap Investigation Board. We investigated one accident at Nellis in which a pilot in an F-15 had tried an aggressive turning maneuver too close to the ground. He didn’t have enough room to complete it. The vast desert practice ranges we used, north and west of Las Vegas, had elevations starting at about three thousand feet above sea level and going much higher. If you’re looking at your barometric altimeter, it is set to give a reading of your altitude above sea level. It doesn’t give you the height above the surface of the ground. The pilot apparently misjudged how high he was, and how much room he had. It’s likely he realized this when it was impossible to correct. As pilots say, “He lost the
picture.” Errors had crept into his situational model and had gone unnoticed and remained uncorrected until too late.

I had to take statements from the other guys in his squadron. I had to sort through photos of the accident, shots of the shattered plane on the desert floor. The carnage was chronicled in exact detail, including photos of identifiable sections of the pilot’s scalp.

As in every Air Force accident, investigators had to turn all the specific circumstances inside out to learn exactly what transpired. It was as if the pilot who died still had a responsibility to help ensure the safety of the rest of us, his fellow aviators.

Pilots are taught that it is vital to always have “situational awareness,” or “SA.” That means you are able to create and maintain a very accurate real-time mental model of your reality. Investigating this pilot’s apparent inaccurate SA reminded me of what was at stake for fighter pilots. It took an absolute commitment to excellence because we were required to do incredible things close to the ground and fast, often changing directions quickly, while always making sure that the way we were pointed was safe to go.

In so many areas of life, you need to be a long-term optimist but a short-term realist. That’s especially true given the inherent dangers in military aviation. You can’t be a wishful thinker. You have to know what you know and what you don’t know, what you can do and what you can’t do. You have to know what your airplane can and can’t do in every possible situation. You need to know your turn radius at every airspeed. You need to know how much fuel it takes to get back, and what altitude would be necessary if an emergency required you to glide back to the runway.

You also need to understand how judgment can be affected by circumstances. There was an aircrew ejection study conducted years ago which tried to determine why pilots would wait too long before ejecting from planes that were about to crash. These pilots waited extra seconds, and when they finally pulled the handle to eject, it was too late. They either ejected at too low an altitude and hit the ground before their parachutes could open, or they went down with their planes.

What made these men wait? The data indicated that if the plane was in distress because of a pilot’s error in judgment, he often put off the decision to eject. He’d spend more precious time trying to fix an unfixable problem or salvage an unsalvageable situation, because he feared retribution if he lost a multimillion-dollar jet. If the problem was a more clear-cut mechanical issue beyond the pilot’s control, he was more likely to abandon his aircraft and survive by ejecting at a higher, safer altitude.

My friend Jim Leslie was on a training mission in an F-4 in 1984, dogfighting with other airplanes. His plane ended up in a spin due to a mechanical malfunction, and there was no way to get it to fly again. “Pilots are only human,” he later told me. “In stressful situations, your brain tells you what you want to hear and see, which is: ‘This ain’t happening to me!’ And so you mentally deny that your plane is going down. You think you have time to fix the problem or to escape, when really, you have no time. And so you eject too late.”

Jim pulled his ejection handle, which first sent his WSO out of the F-4, then sent him a split second later. “I thought I had ejected us in plenty of time,” he said, “but I later learned that I
did it just three seconds before the plane hit the ground.” Had he waited even one second longer, he wouldn’t have made it safely out of the aircraft.

“Nobody wants to crash,” Jim said. “It’s not a good mark on your flight record. The loss of that F-4 cost the Air Force four million dollars that day. But I lived. And some people die because they don’t want to be responsible for the cost of the plane.”

Jim later had a chance to fly the F-16. Two of his roommates died in F-16 training accidents, and the job fell to Jim to pack up their gear and return it to their families. Later, Jim would again have to eject from an unflyable plane, an F-16. Again, he survived. “Every day I wake up is a bonus,” he’d tell me.

P
ERHAPS THE
most harrowing flight of my military career came in an F-4 out of Nellis. My “GIB” (“guy in back” or “backseater”) was Loren Livermore, a former bank clerk from Colorado who decided to abandon his desk job and become an Air Force navigator. He and I were on a gunnery range over the Nevada desert. I was leading a formation of four fighters, flying a box pattern around the target on the desert floor as part of bombing practice.

We were at a very low altitude, and I felt the plane move by itself. Imagine being in your car, driving along, and all of a sudden, without turning the steering wheel, you start veering to the left. It would be a bit shocking.

For us, in the F-4, the unsettling moment came when we felt the plane make a sudden uncommanded flight control movement.

Loren had hooked up a cassette recorder so he could have a record of what we said to each other, and of our radio transmissions. My response to this movement was very clear on the tape.

“Goddamn it!”

“What was that?” Loren shot back.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

Being just a hundred feet above the ground, traveling 450 knots, in a plane with a mind of its own—that’s not a path you want to be on. I immediately pulled the F-4 skyward. I needed a rapid climb to get away from the unforgiving ground. I had to buy myself time and give myself room. At a higher altitude, Loren and I might be able to make sense of the malfunction and deal with it more effectively. More important, if the situation worsened, we would have the time and altitude to be able to recover, or successfully eject and survive.

I radioed, “Tasty one one, knock it off.” That was my order to the other three planes to abandon the practice run and stop the training mission.

Each pilot acknowledged my order.

“Two knock it off.”

“Three knock it off.”

“Four knock it off.”

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” I said. “Tasty one one. Flight control malfunction.”

As leader of the formation, I still had to give direction to the other three planes. “Two and four go home,” I said. “Three join on me.”

I wanted two of the jets to go back to Nellis. They could serve
no useful purpose, and I didn’t want the increased workload of being responsible for them anymore. As flight lead, I had a responsibility to my flight of four jets as well as myself and my WSO. It was prudent to stop the training when it was no longer reasonably safe and to focus my attention on the higher priority of merely staying alive a little longer.

I chose to have No. 3 escort me, since he was also a flight lead and was more experienced than either No. 2 or No. 4. I wanted No. 3 to see if he could help me make sense of whatever my F-4’s malfunction was. Before 2 and 4 left the range, and the frequency, I radioed, “Tasty one one, armament safety check complete.”

Each of the other pilots responded.

“Two, armament safety check complete.”

“Three, armament safety check complete.”

“Four, armament safety check complete.”

This ensured that all arming switches were returned to the safe position before planes left the range.

The No. 3 pilot was George Cella. At the time there was a popular TV commercial for Cella Lambrusco wine. The lovable character in the commercial, named Aldo Cella, was a short, pudgy Italian guy with a dark mustache. He wore a white suit and hat, and had women hanging all over him because of his brand of wine. So George’s tactical call sign was “Aldo.”

Aldo said, “Better do a controllability check.”

When I got to a higher altitude, about fifteen thousand feet, I slowed down the jet to make sure it would remain controllable at a slower speed when the time came for me to attempt a landing.
Loren, my WSO, turned to the appropriate troubleshooting page, E-11, in our emergency checklist and we verified we could control the plane.

Aldo flew his jet very close to mine. He and his WSO inspected the exterior of my aircraft, looking for any obvious damage, fluid leaks, or other anomalies. “You look OK,” Aldo said as he chased me in his F-4.

I contacted Las Vegas Approach Control and advised the civilian controller of my emergency status and of my need to return for landing at Nellis. The controller put certain constraints on how I might return, and how long I could take to line up. He wanted a tighter turn to my final approach.

“Unable,” I told him. That’s the standard response when a pilot can’t do what a controller is asking him.

I told him I needed a five-mile final approach to make sure I could be stabilized for landing. I was glad I had insisted on that, because as I was descending, a gust of wind caused a wing to dip. Aldo and his backseater assumed I was losing control of the F-4. They expected to see Loren and me flying like cannonballs out of our plane in our ejection seats. But I moved the control stick full right, and was able to raise the left wing that had dipped. For the moment, we held on.