Operation Thunderhead (5 page)

On that first solo ride, Dramesi piloted his plane down along the Texas coastline. With the ocean on one side and the beach below him, the young pilot went “down on the deck,” moving his jet closer to the ground. Being at a low altitude gives the pilot a greater feeling of the speed of his plane, and moving a jet along the beach was a real rush. But an even greater feeling took hold as Dramesi approached someone walking toward him on the beach.

Just as he reached the person, Dramesi pulled his jet up and headed for the sky. Looking back, John could see everything start to get smaller as he gained altitude at a higher speed than anything he had flown in before. This was power at his fingertips and where his joy of flying came from. As he turned around to see the man, beach, and earth growing smaller as his altitude increased, he thought of himself as being in a rocket going to the moon or out into space.

As a young boy, Dramesi dreamed of going into space as so many of his generation did, listening to the radio shows and watching Flash Gordon serials at the movies. Piloting a jet as it screamed up and away from the ground was as close as any human could come at the time to launching up toward orbit. It was years before the first man orbited the earth in a space capsule, but for that moment, the new pilot at the controls of his craft could feel a kinship with those men who would become astronauts.

John Dramesi wasn't an astronaut; he was a pilot in training and had the bug for speed and altitude. The path to high-performance aircraft was by becoming a fighter pilot. The students in Dramesi's class had an opportunity to choose what would be made available to them by the Air Force. But the options were limited by a student's ranking in the class. Choices were more limited as your ranking in the class went down. Other students often became helicopter pilots, cargo pilots, or went on to other assignments. To be a fighter pilot was supposed to be the ultimate peak of high-performance flying. It was where all of the “good” Air Force pilots went first. Standing as number three in overall student ranking put Dramesi tantalizingly close to a jet fighter assignment. But there were only two fighter pilot slots available to the class, and there were two students ahead of him.

With a carefully thought-out plan in his mind, Dramesi moved about with his fellow students, talking about all of the things that young men normally talk about. His emphasis in the conversations was on how great it would be to go to Japan or France, two of the other assignments available to the pilots. In those exotic foreign countries, the beautiful young women would be all over handsome American officers. And as pilots, they would be flying F-86 jets and other planes out there at the forefront of the Air Force's fleet.

His plan proved fruitful, as one of the students in front of him chose F-86 jets and the overseas deployments. His new assignment for further training was going to be at Myrtle Beach Air Force Base on the easternmost point of where South Carolina sticks out into the Atlantic. His plane would be the F-100 fighter craft. Dramesi would be flying faster than the speed of sound.

The North American F-100 Super Sabre was the first supersonic fighter to be in the Air Force inventory. This was an aircraft that was the world's first operational jet fighter that could exceed Mach 1—the speed of sound, or about 760 miles per hour at sea level—in level flight.

During fighter training, Dramesi had exceeded the speed of sound in an F-86. That aircraft was able to break Mach 1, but not in level flight. To go past that magic number for the first time, Dramesi was to take his plane up to a certain altitude and put her nosedown in a dive. As the jet engine pushed at the plane, gravity pulled down and the acceleration increased.

Going into his dive, Dramesi watched his speed gauge, the Mach meter. The needle on the gauge crept up, and the plane dove down toward the ground. The airplane wanted to level out as the dive continued and speed increased. Inside the cockpit, Dramesi watched the indicator creep closer and closer to the red dot, which indicated the speed of sound. He piloted the plane down, continuing his dive as the airframe bucked against him. The ground was coming up; he was going to fly past the safe altitude before that needle would pass the red dot that seemed so important. Finally, he pulled the plane up and out of the dive, disappointed that he hadn't broken the sound barrier.

There was no difference in the feel of the plane during the flight. If he had exceeded the speed of sound, the only indicator Dramesi would have would be that on his Mach gauge. There was no particular sound, shaking, or other dramatic indication that the aircraft would actually be going faster than the sound of its own flight. The noise of its passing would actually be behind it, spreading out in a cone of expanding air and sound known as a sonic boom.

It turned out Dramesi was a little bit in error on his reading of his speed during that flight. Going back to the base after the flight, Dramesi reported to his instructor that he had probably not even reached Mach 1, let alone exceeded it. When asked by his instructor why he hadn't done as ordered, the young lieutenant reported truthfully that he had done as instructed. He had accelerated, gone into the dive, and held it as long as he could. The needle on his Mach gauge had reached quivering toward the red dot, touched it, but had never passed it. The answer back from his instructor was a little blunt.

“You dummy,” his flight instructor said, “that red dot is the speed limitation for the airframe. Mach 1 is way back there someplace.”

Even though the F-100 could break the speed of sound in level flight, Dramesi learned that it was still difficult to do so. He excelled as a pilot of the Super Sabre at and other assignments, enough so that when a new single-seat fighter-bomber came on line in the late 1950s, he was offered his chance to fly it.

The Republic F-105 Thunderchief is a big, sleek jet with swept-back wings and tail and distinctive “reverse-swept-back” air intakes at the leading edge of both wing roots. The powerful turbojet engine in the body of the Thunderchief pushed the airframe well past Mach 1 to a maximum speed of Mach 2.1, or nearly 1,400 miles an hour. Once in the F-105, Dramesi became a test pilot for the new aircraft. One of the things that had to be done to ensure that all of the aircraft's systems were working properly was to take the plane past Mach 2. Working with the Thunderchief soon gave Dramesi the distinction of being a pilot who exceeded the speed of sound more than most of his contemporary fliers.

During normal flights, even in the F-105, most pilots didn't exceed the speed of sound, certainly not reaching Mach 2 or beyond. Although the airplanes were easily capable of it, exceeding that speed, with the accompanying sonic boom, fuel consumption, and all other considerations involved in high-performance flight, just wasn't done much during peacetime, especially over populated areas.

One time while in Spain, a number of pilots from Dramesi's old squadron showed up while he was piloting the F-105D. When his old friends went past his position, he scrambled his plane to chase them. The speed of the F-105D was such that he was quickly able to catch up with and pass the other fliers. They were at about 20,000 feet, climbing to 25,000 when Dramesi pulled up in front of them, intending to do a loop and join up with the others.

When Dramesi pulled his plane up, he was already at 25,000 feet. In the thin air, his aircraft wasn't acting properly. If he pulled the aircraft around hard, there would have been a good chance that Dramesi could have stalled the plane, possibly going into a spin. Instead, he just let the nose drop. When the nose went down, the plane was going well over Mach 1. When he pulled out, he had full control of the airplane, but his friends had never even known he was in trouble. It didn't take long going at Mach 2 to catch up with his old squadron's flight; his friends were none the wiser.

One thing the pilots trained a lot at doing was a unique bombing action required by the possible tactical use of nuclear weapons. Using a nuclear weapon launched from a fighter-bomber could make a quick, strategic attack against a massed enemy formation possible. The Soviets were known to have a huge reserve of armor. The Air Force's single-bombing action could stop or slow a potential Soviet advance on NATO.

One way to have a relatively small, agile craft attack with a nuclear weapon was with a high-arcing lob of a bomb, releasing the weapon while the plane was in a sharp climb. When the plane released the bomb on a calculated trajectory, the bomb followed its ballistic arc, continuing up into the air along the path of release until gravity pulled the weapon back down to earth. While the bomb was traveling up and over, the releasing aircraft could wing over and rush away from the site of the upcoming nuclear detonation. That would put the aircraft out of the blast radius of its own weapon.

It took a lot of practice to become really proficient at that kind of high-arcing bomb launch, and Dramesi and the rest of his squadron worked diligently to obtain and polish those unique bombing skills. During one training operation near a U.S. base in Libya, before the Air Force gave up the desert base, Dramesi and his fellow pilots practiced releasing ordnance on the range targets.

One of the escape maneuvers for when an aircraft released a nuclear weapon would be for the craft to first overfly, go directly over the target, climb sharply, and release the bomb in a high arc. The plane would have a great deal of recovery speed, so it would complete the loop and dart away from the area before the bomb would drop back on the target.

The first time Dramesi did the action at the Libya range, the range officer had never seen that style of bombing attack before. The range officer thought that Dramesi was being a more than flamboyant pilot, if not all-out crazy and dangerous. As a result, Dramesi was kicked off the range.

After the flight, when Dramesi reported to the operations officer for the mission, he was immediately asked why he had been kicked off the bombing range.

“All, I did was a loop,” Dramesi said simply.

“Wow, the officer commented, “a loop, off the ground?”

That kind of maneuver was unheard-of in the regular Air Force.

“Yes, sir,” was all Dramesi could say.

“Then I can understand why he kicked you off the range.”

“Just a minute.” Dramesi spoke up in his own defense. “That is one of the described maneuvers for us in our manuals.”

After the attack was described in detail to the operations officer, and why such a maneuver had to be done, Dramesi was put back on flying status.

PUNCHING OUT

In terms of technical information and investment in time and money, a modern pilot is the most highly trained individual in the military. Before a pilot is put in command of one of the most complex and expensive single war machines in the world, he has to go through weeks, months, and years of costly training. Long before one of these individuals climbs aboard an aircraft for their first combat flight, he represents an investment of millions of dollars just in training on the part of the government. People who can complete the arduous course of instruction are valuable in and of themselves even without taking into account the cost of training.

During the earliest years of air-to-air combat, there were few options for pilots at the controls of a stricken plane. The man could try to ride the plane down to some kind of landing, spin down into a crash, or, if the plane was on fire, turn a weapon on himself rather than burn to death. During World War I another option was being offered to pilots: the parachute. By the end of the war, the parachute was being used on all sides of the conflict.

In the decades following, the method of parachuting from a damaged plane was fairly simple: The pilot climbed out of the cockpit and fell away. If the parachute was a static-line system, the rig opened automatically as the distance from the aircraft increased. Very quickly, the more flexible ripcord system parachute, opened on command by the wearer by pulling on a handle, became the most popular form of self-rescue for a pilot or aircrew while in flight.

During most of World War II, the only chance to escape from an aircraft involved opening the canopy or a hatch in order to exit. As the speed of aircraft increased, eliminating the open cockpits of earlier years, it became much harder to open a hatch or jettison a canopy against the ever-increasing windblast. The windblast or slipstream created by a speeding aircraft could even hold a pilot back in his seat, preventing him from even climbing out of the cockpit. The time to successfully escape a damaged aircraft was limited; the pilot or crew had to get out before the fuel exploded, fire reached the bombs or ammunition on board, or the plane got too low to successfully bail out of.

A new problem developed as the speed of fighter aircraft increased. Even if a pilot could get out of the cockpit, he had to fall away from the plane far and fast enough so that he wouldn't strike the tail surface of the plane as it went past. The Germans were the first to address this problem when they developed the ejector seat, a powered escape mechanism. Once activated, the ejector seat would push whoever was sitting in it far enough away from the plane that he wouldn't be in danger of hitting the wreckage as it went past.

Other countries were developing the same kind of escape mechanism for fliers, but the Germans were the first to field one. The seats were installed in their earliest jet aircraft, and in many cases was the only means of survival for the pilots. The German jets were introduced too late in the war to significantly change the outcome, but they showed the world the future of combat aircraft. And the nearly sixty Germans who had safely ejected during the war were living proof of the new means of survival for the pilots and aircraft crews.

The early ejection systems were nothing more than a seat strapped to a highly modified gun. During experiments in Britain, it was found that the force of ejection from those single-shot gun systems could seriously damage the spine of the user. When the propellant charge fired the seat up and out of the aircraft, the vertebrae of the user's spine would collide with each other from the severe G-force. Using multiple, smaller charges to quickly build up the velocity of ejection was found to help minimize the injury to the pilot from the seat itself.