Aviator Brief VII: No Guts, No Glory

On a day of such crappy weather even the seagulls stayed grounded on the grass between the runways, Colonel Sullivan turned for takeoff from Runway 7 at MCAS El Toro. Pushing forward the throttle and kicking in the afterburner, he lifted off from the surly bonds of earth into a flock of seagulls startled by the decibels of an F-4 turbine.
 

Three hundred seagulls funneled into a jet engine were a problem of compressibility. Blood and feathers, guts and bones don’t pack well into the relatively small space of a Phantom’s engine.
With one turbine destroyed and unsure of the damage to the other, the colonel looked at the land near the base. If the jet stopped being able to fight gravity and he had to jump out, the hunk of steel and explosive jet fuel would twist and burn into homes, schools and/or stores. Not a good option.
 

Good pilots make good decisions in the worst of circumstances. He pointed his radome south and flew the crippled bird with its many mangled birds to Yuma, Arizona, where he managed to land safely.
 

The CO of the squadron appreciated the decision to divert, preventing a potential public relations disaster. He also appreciated the skill of the pilot in preserving a valuable piece of machinery. Engines could be replaced. A plane crashed and burned was unrecoverable.
 

Yuma, the day Col. Sullivan landed, had a high of 105-degrees. Yuma registered 105-degrees the next day, too. The plane, with its multiple bird strike, FODded engine, sat on the flight line in the heat for two days.

Then the maintenance officer, Snatch, flew to the desert to inspect the extent of the damage to the engine.
 

The guys in Yuma working on the tarmac were happy to see him. A wide area had been cleared around the colonel’s aircraft. No one wanted near the miasma of gull guts rotting in the gutted turbine blades. 

Neither did the hapless maintenance officer.
 

Snatch got the guts. Col. Sullivan the glory.

I never thought about this story much before re-reading it this week, but the troops were the ones who had to use the pressure hoses and replace the engine in the Yuma heat with the smell to high heaven. The AMO would have supervised, and had to deal with the smell, but the guts were on other hands. Snatch says the plane still stunk for awhile afterward, which would have made the airframe one of the least favorite to win in the “What am I flying today?” lottery.

So who am I in my life? Am I the person who in the nick of time and with derring-do flies a plane away from those who could be hurt by it if it crashed and burned? Am I the maintenance officer who has to supervise the rotting guts of the disaster and repair it to fly again? Or am I the troop on the ground who actually gets my hands dirty fixing what the magic flyboys wreck (even when it is no fault of their own?)

I’d never have made a good pilot. My reaction time is slow in an emergency. I don’t panic, but I don’t automatically react with split second decision making. In a disaster, time slows waaa-aay doowwwnnnn. I usually get to a good solution, but I’m afraid the plane might be in twisted bits if I were at the controls. I’m no Col Sullivan.

I would have made a good maintenance officer. I like to know how things work and I like to fix my life and those of my friends. I’d much rather tell someone else how to fix things than get seagull guts all over me. I don’t much like taking orders.

So I’d probably not make a very good troop. God bless them for what they do and the shit they take. The troops help keep the derring-doers and the other pilots like my husband up in the air and back down again for safe landings.

So who are you? In your life and relationships do you fly through bird flocks, but recover well? Do you analyze a situation and figure out how to fix it? Do you like to give orders or just follow them?

Aviator Brief IV: To Eject or Not to Eject (#2)

Stu Mosbey, while landing behind a DC-10 in Yuma, got caught in the wake turbulence--in the days before safe separation was established--his F-4 flipped upside down--a bad position to eject from close to the ground. Did he panic? Did he try to eject anyway? Did he crash and burn? Nope. He lit the afterburners and flew it out. Mosbey’s Aerial Circus Act. “Hey, Stu, You should take that one on the road with the Blue Angels.”

If the afterburners wouldn’t fly you out, there were three ways to eject from a fighter. The first required reaching up above the helmet with both hands, and grasping the face curtain--not an actual curtain, just a striped loop--then pulling down, putting the elbows in a safe position for launch. The second method required reaching between the legs and pulling up on the ejection handle, another striped loop.

The third method was not to eject. This has only been successful once. A pilot making a red-eye tracking run at the Yuma Proving Grounds made a very low pass. Too low a pass. He ran out of sky and bottomed out on the desert floor. Next thing he knew he sat amid the sage and scrub in his ejection seat, but without a plane surrounding him. It had disintegrated into pieces in the crash. He had not. Known as the immaculate ejection. Grins all around.

The worth of an ejection seat depends on circumstances. Shit happens. Machines fail. A lucky pilot who keeps his cool lives to fly another day.

Miraculous. Lucky. A good stick. Sometimes the prayers of angels or God’s hand saved me or mine from certain death--physical or spiritual. Sometimes the fortunes of the world shook the dice or the Fates decided to change what would have been a certain horrific outcome. Sometimes years of training and practice and skill paid off, rescuing my loved ones or my precious-to-me rear end and the rest of my attached self from certain annihilation.

Do I care what agency of miracles, luck, or skill achieved those saves? No. But I care that I am still here and semi-sane and able to be a wife, a writer, a mom, a Nana. My father-in-law used to say, “The proof is in the pudding.” By which--I think--he meant something about my kids turning out well so I must be an okay person.

The proof is not in the pudding for me. I am proud of my creative accomplishments and the impact I have had on the future of the world. But if my pudding never sets--my books aren’t published, my children reflect poorly on me, my husband and I become distant, my grandchildren act like no relation of mine, a former student does a terrible act (and none of these horrific scenarios seem a distant possibility)--what is important is that I made the pudding. I acted. I collected ingredients. I learned how to read a recipe. I measured and poured and mixed and hoped it would all turn out tasty. I did the best I could do with the best of intentions.

I never ejected, either. But I think about flying in a broken plane, a burning plane, an unflyable plane. I realize I would eject--not from life, but from that one untenable situation. To live to fly another day. Let’s all live to fly another day.

Photo of ejection seat used by permission of Kevin Coyne: www.ejectionsite.com