Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

He reshelves Administration between Finance and Discipline . He opens his desk drawers. Stray paper clips, elastic bands. A hefty stapler, tablets of lined yellow paper. A brass pencil sharpener in the shape of an airplane. He spins the tiny propeller.

Thanks to the air force, Jack got his MBA at one of the finest schools in the world — a single eye-straining year at the University of Michigan. He could earn better than double out in the civilian world — on civvie street. His job here is, in civilian terms, a management position comparable to a corporate executive vice-president in charge of operations. He will report directly to the CO, his time his own to organize as he sees fit. He is, for all intents and purposes, his own boss.

As such, Jack has devised a couple of rules for himself. Ask before telling. And listen more than you talk. His job is to know what everyone else’s job is, to get everyone pointed in the right direction and then get out of the way. He’s bound to encounter some resistance — resistance to change is only human — but if he listens, he’ll find out what ain’t broke and doesn’t need fixing. And if he asks the right questions, his subordinates will tell him what he would otherwise have to tell them. Like many effective managers, he’ll appear not to be working at all. Jack smiles to himself and reaches in his inside pocket for a folded personnel list. Rule number three: learn the names.

The next thing he’ll do is seek out the station warrant officer — the equivalent of a factory superintendent, the fella who knows what makes the whole place tick, technically subordinate to Jack but in reality ranked just below God — and say hello. Jack consults his list: Warrant Officer Pinder. He refolds the list.

The third thing: Friday beer call at the officers’ mess. All the news that’s neither fit to print nor to speak aloud at a meeting will come out at these bull sessions. Jack only ever has one, maybe two beers, keeps his ear to the ground and enjoys himself thoroughly, standing around with the rest of the gentlemen and rogues, “telling lies.”

Over the course of his first week he will study personnel files. He’ll consult them the way a pilot consults a map before a mission. The paper acts as a guide but should never be confused with the real thing. Behind every name, rank and serial number is a human being. Barking orders may work in battle but gets you nowhere in peace-time.

And Jack is acutely aware that the Western world is in one of the longest stretches of peace and prosperity in its history. Not to mention anxiety. Everyday life resembles a hot-air balloon floating in a clear summer sky — it looks effortless from the ground, yet it’s fed by fire, kept aloft by tension. Jack recalls his daughter’s morbid reference to “melted skin.” He and Mimi do their best to prevent their kids from dwelling on the threat, but in 4 Wing they, like the other air force families, stored a week’s supply of food and water in the basement locker of their PMQ; there was an evacuation plan, and regular drills at the children’s school. Part of life. The Cold War has escalated, marshalling unprecedented destructive force, most of which operates as an elaborate deterrent and requires a large bureaucracy to administer it. This is a war that is not so much waged as managed.

He pulls a frayed textbook from the shelf: Principles of Management: A Practical Approach . We can do better than that. He has begun to assemble his own management text, a compilation of the latest articles coming out of the States, places like Harvard and Michigan. The world is changing rapidly and the military, being among the largest corporations in the world, can either lead or lumber behind like a dinosaur. Leaders today have to understand teamwork. That’s the key to all the latest advances in science and technology. We’ve virtually wiped out serious infectious disease, we’ve got satellites orbiting the earth, you can’t open a newspaper without reading of another breakthrough. And we do it without enslaving people — that’s why thousands of East Berliners voted with their feet before the Wall went up.

Jack is not alone in believing that the military chain of command is not simply a series of orders and knee-jerk responses, but a model for the flow of information and accountability. Air force types — especially if they are veterans — tend to share this thinking. But it’s important to codify and teach it so that it’s not dependent on unwritten traditions and individual temperaments. He tosses the old textbook into the wastebasket.

A cool head and a light hand are as important in an office as they are in a cockpit. A man who can’t keep his cool can’t make a good decision. So Jack’s management style is relaxed, but when he makes a “suggestion” it is rarely mistaken for anything but an order.

This is something he learned from his flight instructor years ago, right here in Centralia. Simon was famous for his suggestions. In the air, from the instructor’s seat beside Jack: “You may want to try stalling the engine.” And after seconds of deadly aerial silence, “Shall we see if you can roll out of it?” The cool Queen’s English, coming out of a spin: “Good, now I wonder if you can land without bending the kite out of shape.”

In April 1943, Jack and the rest of his class already had their wings and were embarking on advanced training. They were cocky, eager to go operational — to fly ops. Jack was not quite eighteen, none was over twenty. Simon entered the classroom, his RAF cap pushed rakishly back on his head, its sides permanently bent in the “fifty-mission crush”—the long-term effect of wearing a radio headset in the cockpit, a badge of operational status. His tie loose, moustache pencil-thin, he sat on the desk, lit a cigarette and addressed them, wearing his upper-class accent like an old scarf.

“I know you sprogs think you know how to fly. You, and most of the great apes at the stick of any given aircraft, haven’t a bloody clue how to fly, and it’s not my job to teach you. It’s my job to teach you sorry bastards how to stay in one piece long enough to bomb the Scheisse out of the Germans like gentlemen. Questions?”

“Squadron Leader Crawford, sir …?” one skinny boy ventured.

“My name is Simon. Life is too short — especially yours, especially mine once I climb into the seat next to you — to waste time with a lot of syllables, so call me by my fucking name, there’s a good lad.”

They called him by his first name and revered him as an elder because, at twenty-three, Simon was an old man. A living exception to the rule “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.” One of the few to fly both fighters and bombers. A decorated Battle of Britain ace who had requested reassignment from Spitfires to big lumbering Lancaster bombers “because being in a Lanc makes me feel more akin to a tin of Spam, and what’s lovelier than Spam, really?” A different sort of risk, the opportunity to fly with a crew; Simon needed to keep himself interested. He came to them having survived a full tour of duty overseas: thirty bombing missions.

Simon was a great flight instructor because he never took control too soon. He waited to see if his pupil could handle it first, because once you went operational, nothing would happen according to Hoyle. Jack’s hand shaking on the control column, head bursting on the verge of red-out after a steep dive at eight thousand feet, recovery at six hundred, his wheels touching down, one side then the other, then the other and the other again, then both—“Bit of a ropey landing, Jack.”

Hauling himself over the side, legs almost buckling on the tarmac, Jack realized that Simon was still strapped in on the instructor’s side. “You can go straight back up now, mate, or find yourself gun-shy next time round. Either way you’re going to shake for two days.”