James Salter - Burning the Days

We passed over the beacon at two thousand feet, turned to the reciprocal of the field heading and flew for thirty seconds. It seemed minutes. The world was thundering and pouring out. I was determined to do everything exactly, to make a perfect approach. We began a procedure turn — forty-five degrees to the left, hold for one minute, turn back in. The direction-finding needle was rigid. It began to quiver and then swung completely around as we hit the beacon.

We started to descend. The minimum altitude for the field was eight hundred feet, minimum visibility a mile and a half. At five hundred feet we were still in the clouds. Four hundred. Suddenly the ground was just beneath us. The visibility was poor, less than a mile. I glanced at the fuel gauge: six hundred pounds.

A minute had passed. The second hand of the clock was barely moving. A minute and five seconds. A minute ten. Then ahead, like distant stars, faint lines of them, the lights of the field. Speed brakes out, I signaled. Gear and flaps down. We landed smoothly together in the dark.

A taxi drove us into town. We talked about what had happened, what might have. It was not an incident; it was nothing; routine. One flight among innumerable. We could find no place to eat. We slept in a small hotel on a tree-lined street and left early in the morning.

—

Once in a great while there was a letter from Horner. He had resigned his commission and was in his father-in-law’s business, landscaping. Dear Fly-boy, he would write, with a touch of wistfulness it seemed, I hope you’re having a good time in Europe. I used to.

At one reunion, years later, the rumor spread that he had just been seen driving through the main gate with two chorus girls. It turned out to be untrue. The days of chorus girls were past though we had once gone with two from the Versailles when we were in pursuit of everything except wisdom. Susie and I were there the other night, he wrote of another place, and the violinist came up to our table and asked us where the gentleman was who had been so fond of “Granada.” I assumed he was speaking of you, so I told him that you had returned to the front …

—

There are things that seem insignificant at the time and that turn out to be so. There are others that are like a gun in a bedside drawer, not only serious but unexpectedly fatal.

For Colonel Brischetto, it was not a single detail but a series of them, none of great importance and spread over months. He was the new wing commander at Bitburg who had arrived in August, filled with ambition but having very little jet time. Tom Whitehouse, the old commander, diminutive and gallant, turned over to him a veteran fighter wing. It was like turning over a spirited horse to a new, inexperienced owner who would, of course, attempt to ride.

All wing and group flying officers were attached to one of the squadrons. The wing commander flew with ours, not very frequently, as it happened, and not very well, though there was nothing alarmingly wrong. You could feel his weakness on the radio where he was like an actor fumbling for his lines, and in following instructions in the air there was often a slight, telltale delay.

We went, each year, to North Africa to gunnery camp. The weather was always good there. At Wheelus, a large airfield in Tripoli, we lived in tents for four or five weeks and flew every day. It was essential for all pilots to qualify during that time though there were occasional opportunities for a few planes to go and fire elsewhere. There were fighter wings from all over Europe scheduled into Tripoli throughout the year, nose to tail. Not so much as an extra day there could be begged.

That year we were booked for Wheelus in the very beginning of January. All preparations had been made but we did not go — the weather at Bitburg prevented it. Throughout the holidays there had been freezing rain and low ceilings; the runway was covered with heavy ice. In North Africa the sun was shining and irreplaceable days were passing. At last the rain stopped and the forecast seemed encouraging. All through the final night there were airplanes taxiing slowly up and down the runway, trying to melt the ice with the heat of their exhaust.

At noon the next day the ceiling lifted sufficiently. We were ready. It was six days after our intended departure.

An outwardly calm but impatient Colonel Brischetto was to go in the first flight. He was on the wing of an experienced pilot, a lieutenant, his favorite instructor, in fact, Cass. They were already on the runway when he called that his tailpipe temperature, a critical instrument, was fluctuating wildly, and asked Cass for advice — he had already had some minor difficulties with the ship. Airplanes had their own personalities. They were not mere mechanical objects but possessed temperaments and traits. Some were good in gunnery, others hopeless. Some were always ready to fly, others rarely. Some planes, if not creaking like ships, nevertheless made strange noises. Without minds or hearts, they were somehow not wholly inanimate. An airplane did not belong to one pilot, like a horse, but to all communally. There were no secrets — pilots talked freely about the behavior of planes and in time flew most of them.

When Brischetto asked Cass whether or not he should take off with an erratic indication, he was told that such a decision was up to the pilot. Despite his great anxiety, Brischetto made a prudent choice and aborted. He taxied back to the ramp, was assigned another airplane, and became part of another flight.

Now it was early afternoon. The first planes, Cass and his flight, were well on their way to Rome, where they would refuel before continuing. The clouds at Bitburg were holding at six hundred feet. The bases were ragged, the top of the overcast layered and uncertain; the visibility, threatened by rain, stood at five miles. Brischetto had just forty minutes of actual weather experience in the airplane. He felt, probably correctly, that he would have more difficulty flying on the wing of another plane in these conditions than having another plane flying on his, and he indicated he would like to lead the flight.

The four ships, in elements of two, the colonel leading, taxied out to the runway. The takeoff interval between elements was to be five seconds, and they were to join up, if possible, beneath the clouds so that all four could penetrate together with a single leader and a single voice.

Brischetto read his clearance back to the tower incorrectly. He was obliged to repeat it three times before permission was given to take the runway. He had a very steady pilot, Tracy, who had never flown with him previously, however, on his wing. So, after many delays, some unavoidable, they were ready to depart.

The planes lined up on the runway together. The noise of their engines swelled. With an almost dainty slowness, the first two ships began to roll. Five seconds later, the next two. I was watching with no particular interest, sitting in the cockpit in the squadron area, a flight leader, waiting to start. Very quickly the four planes disappeared into the clouds. They had not — I attached no meaning to it — come together as a flight.

In the air the colonel, as it happened, had responded with a distracted “Roger” to the request to reduce power slightly to allow the second element to catch up after takeoff. He then gave the command to change channels, from tower to departure control. Changing radio channels meant reaching down and back. The indicator was hard to see. It was best done by counting the clicks between numbers — perhaps Brischetto did this, though he was never heard on departure control.

On the ground time passed slowly, slipping by in the small, hesitant movement of the second hand on the instrument panel clock. Though it is hard to imagine, it was passing at different rates, not to be calculated in ordinary seconds, for the colonel and his wingman when they went into the clouds. For Tracy on the left wing it was like the regular, slow beat of a pulse, but for the colonel, in an abstract world of utter whiteness and noise, it had begun to accelerate. He had started a slight turn to the left towards the departure beacon, which became tighter, nearly vertical, his wingman at full power pulling hard to stay in position. Then, suddenly correcting, he began to roll the other way, to the right, going past straight and level, banking steeper and steeper, past the point where Tracy could stay with him, becoming inverted, heading down.