Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

The next night, when it was time for my second solo cross-country, fear was in my bones like a winter chill. I realized it was either conquer the fear and fly, or wash out of training. I delayed going to my aircraft, chain-smoking cigarettes. Then someone started testing the flight line loudspeakers for the Saturday parade. The music of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” soaked into the Ready Room and something almost mystical happened.

My desire to fly overcame my fear. I picked up my parachute and walked to my plane and aced my second night solo flight. From that day forward, whenever I found myself looking into the eye of a tiger, the cadence of “Stars and Stripes Forever”—if only in my head—got me through it. I have a record and tape collection of over twenty versions of the march. It became a key element of my way of life.

My training next took me into jets and an assignment farther west in Texas at Laughlin Air Force Base. Flight training is partly about the fear of failing, and partly about firsts. The top graduates got the best assignments. I wanted to fly the hottest fighter in the Air Force—the F-86 Sabre. In order to get the chance to fly fighters I had to be the best. To be the best I had to go all-out, reach into myself for every resource I had to meet the challenge. In the process I determined what my real capacity was and discovered that for much of my life I had just been coasting along.

My competition for the Sabre assignment was First Lieutenant Anthony (Zeke) Zielinski, who had made his way through the ranks. He had won the wings of a navigator as a sergeant flying over Korea in B-29s and was described as a natural-born pilot.

The competition between us extended to the social, as he tried to cut in on the girl I was dating. We got our pilot wings, graduated with identical scores, and both qualified for the Sabre. Later I aced him, however, for I would marry a wonderful Texas girl, Marta Cadena, whom Zeke also wanted to date. Marta pinned the wings on my chest. Zeke, a true wingman, would be my best man.

Zeke and I headed to Nellis AFB, near Las Vegas, to fly the world’s best and fastest fighter aircraft. Six weeks after I arrived at Nellis I climbed into the cockpit of an F-86H Sabre. After a takeoff and climb-out that felt like it would never stop, I started getting ahead of the power curve, just a bit, with this beautifully maneuverable airplane. An instructor flying alongside me put me through the flight. We landed, debriefed and refueled, then took off again and climbed to 35,000 feet, did some steep turns and a bit of trail formation. At this point my instructor told me to perform a split-S, roll out into a 45-degree dive, and call out the readings on the Mach meter. (The Mach meters in those days didn’t go a hell of a lot higher than Mach 1—the speed of sound.) I rolled inverted, picked up the dive angle, and was quickly at .95 Mach, where the nose wanted to pitch up. The instructor then told me to trim out the pitch-up stick force and comment on the aileron forces. Wing heaviness increased and the Mach meter rose to 1.0 and hung there. I had the feeling that I was skiing down a steep mountain bowl, pushing a lot of powder, and that it was impossible to go any faster. I throttled back, recovered, and followed the instructor’s lead in a high-speed spiral descent. It took me a moment to realize that I had just broken the sound barrier, a big deal with the airplanes we had in the 1950s.

But that was the bright and shiny side of military life. While I was at Nellis I broke my left wrist in a stupid accident (with the help of a goodly amount of beer) and managed to get myself grounded on September 6, 1956. This gave me ample time for reflection, during which I realized I was in love with the girl from Texas who had pinned on my wings. Since leaving Texas, where Marta and I had first met and started to date, I dated a few other girls but none of them measured up to Marta. I still had her phone number and the good sense to call her. She was still interested so I started to commute between Nellis and Marta’s home in Texas. The weeks passed too quickly and soon my duty at Nellis was over.

Upon completion of advanced training at Nellis, Zeke and I were stationed at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Myrtle Beach was a base in name only, parts of it still under construction. The only good part of the deal was that eventually we would have shiny new (they were still on the production line when I reported in) F-100 Super Sabres to fly. During long-distance phone conversations, Marta could always raise my morale thanks to her good humor and indomitable spirit. I wanted her to meet my family, so she came to Toledo during my Christmas leave. On Christmas Eve I asked Marta to marry me. We set the date for April 27 of the following year at Eagle Pass, Texas, where we had first met—fifty miles from Laughlin AFB but a commute I never minded making! It was one year to the date she had pinned on my wings. It started to snow as we left the chapel where I had proposed and we started to sing Christmas carols, wishing the magic of the moment would go on forever. We were on top of the world, and there was no question that whatever we faced in the future, we would face it together, and we would emerge victorious.

In courting Marta, I had been at a serious disadvantage, unable to communicate with her mother, Pura, who spoke only Spanish. Marta’s parents were born in Mexico and came to the United States after the revolution of 1910-1920. Her father became a citizen and opened a drugstore in 1950. While I was dating Marta, her mother was studying English preparing for her citizenship test. After the wedding, the señora was able to welcome me into the family with two words in English: “No givebacks!”

To the true regret of both of us, I soon was forced to do exactly that.

We had been married only three months when my orders arrived in June of 1957 assigning me to the last squadron of F-86Fs on active duty, the Fighting 69th, at Osan, Korea. My squadron commander at Myrtle Beach bent the rules and let me finish F-100 training before I shipped out to Korea. Marta told me that she was pregnant. This was when I started to learn that if you have a good marriage in the military, you will probably wind up with a great marriage, if it lasts. Our eighteen-month courtship consisted of seven dates.

Even though the war had ended in July of 1953, Osan Air Base, thirty miles south of the Korean capital at Seoul, was on a wartime footing. The squadron’s purpose was to provide fighters capable of striking northward, supporting the Korean and American units emplaced along the demilitarized zone and achieving air superiority. We had about fifteen minutes to launch defending aircraft in case we were attacked.

Sabre pilots were a rare breed, flying the hottest machine of its time, the greatest sports car ever invented for the air. When flying overseas, you had no regulations. We buzzed everything in sight, flying as fast and as low as our nerves would allow. This was balls-out flying. We did things we would never be permitted to do stateside. Every flight ended in a mock dogfight with one or more pilots diving, rolling, and scissoring for advantage. The fights continued until you ran out of altitude or you had the other guy on your gun camera film. This confidence was essential to aggressive flight performance.

The Soviets’ launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, while I was on a thirty-day deployment at Tainan Air Base on Formosa gave the Cold War a new dimension. I had seen the Russian fighters pulling contrails over the Korean demilitarized zone and the Straits of Formosa. Now their new prowess in space raised doubts about America’s commitment to lead the free world. I could suddenly see shadows of doubt about America’s technological superiority in the eyes of the Nationalist Chinese pilots.