Wry Martinis (23 page)

We walked past nine planes, over a quarter billion dollars worth of aircraft, to Thunderbird No. 8. Two very friendly, upbeat crew chiefs named T-Bone and Mike helped to strap me tightly into the backseat, and connected my oxygen mask and parachute harness.
Whatever else
comes of this
, I thought,
I will never again feel scrunched in economy class.
T-Bone pointed out the switch to the cockpit video camera mounted on the dashboard, presumably so that I could turn it off while I threw up, or blubbered with fear. Just before the canopy closed down, sealing me inside my snug metallic cocoon, Mike stuck two small plastic bags with ties into my G suit at either knee. “You won’t be needing these,” he grinned illogically.

Capt. Dan was now in his front seat, though I could only see the top of his red helmet over the headrest. “How’re we doing?” he said over the intercom. I was breathing through my oxygen mask like Darth Vader in
Star Wars: pssshhttt
Great
pssssshhttt.

He started the engine, a low whine that steadily built, making the cockpit needles quiver and the people on the tarmac cover their ears. A word about this Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-220 turbofan engine: it produces twenty-five thousand pounds of thrust. We would weigh twenty-three thousand pounds on takeoff. Any craft with a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than one-to-one is essentially a rocket. Cut off the wings and it will still fly, if erratically. Craning my head to one side, I could barely make out the wings. The total wingspan is only thirty-two feet.

Over my amplified breathing I could hear Dan request a “straight climb to sixteen thousand” feet from Nellis Control. During the pre-flight briefing he had told me that we would take off and then accelerate to 400 knots and then climb vertically, straight up, to sixteen thousand in about eight seconds. Nellis is at about two thousand feet above sea level, so our rate of climb would be seventeen hundred feet per second. The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet. So clearly this is a rapid way of getting to sixteen thousand feet.

“O-
kay
, Chris, if you’re ready, we’ll be taking off. Here we go.”

I’d be dishonest if I said that I remembered much of it, but reconstructing: we lifted fifty or so feet off the runway at 150 knots. Dan increased speed. “O-
kay
, now I’m going to add the afterburners.…” I do remember an amazing sensation of speed and being shoved back into the seat.

We increased speed to 450 miles an hour. (Big commercial jets take off at about 130.) I think I remember another hearty “O-
kay
” from the front, but then my world went weird. I recall that it became suddenly very eerily quiet inside. How they manage that, I don’t know, since
being near one of these birds on takeoff will leave you saying “Beg pardon?” for the rest of your life. I suppose Mr. Doppler has something to do with it. Either way, I remember no sound, only a vise squeezing everything below my waist. The G suit had automatically inflated to compensate for the four Gs of our vertical ascent.

The video records that I turned my head to the side, but I have no memory of that, only of Dan’s reassuring voice saying, with wonder in it, “Seven thousand, ten thousand … O-
kay
, leveling off at fifteen thousand, five hundred feet,” at which point I found myself looking up through the canopy at Nellis Air Force Base, three miles below. We were upside down. Nice touch.

“How’d you like that?”

I wish I could report that I said something more interesting than, “Wow,” but it’s all on video. I did have the presence of mind, at least, to ask where was the drinks cart. And the sense to reach back and toggle myself some 100 percent pure oxygen, as my stomach was telling me, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

“Okay, Chris, we’ll fly about forty miles to the northwest, and then I’ll turn the aircraft over to you.”

I liked the just-flying-straight for forty miles part, though I wasn’t at all sure about the taking over the aircraft part. We were now going about 400 mph. There was no sense of speed, other than the airspeed indicator. And, come to think of it, the clouds that were going by sort of briskly.

We did our forty miles in no time and were now over a much-practice-bombed quadrant of the Nevada desert called Indian Springs. It was here, in January 1982, that the Thunderbirds suffered their worst disaster: four T-38s flying the “line abreast” formation did a loop and crashed into the ground. The four scorch marks in the desert floor were eerily symmetrical. The reconstruction revealed that the stabilizer—the part of the tail that keeps an aircraft flying steadily—on the lead pilot’s plane had jammed, so that instead of coming out of the loop, the equivalent of a back flip off a diving board, he went into the ground at 478 mph. The other three pilots, eyes trained to stay on the next man, followed him into the ground. A total of eighteen Thunderbirds have been killed since 1953.

“Okay, Chris, I’m going to do an aileron roll now.”

We rolled upside down and over. All very smooth and effortless.

“All right, you have the aircraft.”

I used to fly a Piper Cherokee, which is to an F-16 what a bumble bee is to a falcon. I remember struggling with the trim tab to get the wheel so that I didn’t have to push it or pull it to fly straight-and-level. I took the stick in my right hand and nudged it to the left, imperceptibly, ever so cautiously. Immediately we were upside down.

“Fan-tastic!” said Dan, as if I had performed brilliantly. This is simply Thunderbird politesse. Another nudge and we were right side up again.

“Ready for a loop?”

It would be nice to report that I was indeed avid for a loop, but the truth is I was avid for something else. I turned off the camera, not wanting this moment to became a permanent part of the record. Here I had a fleeting moment of panic wondering if I would be able to remove my oxygen mask in time. This is essential to the operation I was about to undertake, unless you want to fill your lungs with breakfast. (I understand this is medically undesirable.) It came off—Praise the Lord—in one swoop. I hoped the intercom would not be too unpleasant for poor Dan. So much for homeopathic antimotion-sickness remedies.

I felt much better afterward, despite the sweat that was pouring off my face and collecting like a puddle inside the oxygen mask. I was ready, more or less, to do the loop.

“Okay,” said Dan, “let’s add the smoke.…” The smoke trail allows you to see how round a loop you have done. My G suit inflated and I strained and grunted against four Gs. All in all it feels as though an extremely fat person has suddenly plumped down onto your lap. At the apex of the loop there was a confusing moment of upside-down five Gs—if I’ve got this right—weightlessness, essentially, followed by decidedly positive Gs as we came out of the loop into our own smoke trail. That part of it
was
cool. But now it was time again to avail myself of the baggie at my knee.

“How we doing?” Dan asked. After listening to my imitation of a distressed walrus, he said solicitously, “Remember, we’re up here to have fun, so we can do as much or as little as you want. If you want, we can just do some sight-seeing.”

If it is possible, as the general would say, for one man to love another man, that was the moment; but merely to sightsee would have been like taking a Ferrari out on the track and driving around it at 65 mph.

We did a vertical roll. I can report that this was the most nauseogenic of our maneuvers. Indeed, watching the videotape of it, on my bed a few minutes ago made me blanch anew and my scalp tingle with sweat. First we dropped down to about a thousand feet off the ground, then it was back on the throttle and vertically up, up, up for many thousands of feet, only this time rotating 360 degrees three times.

“How was that?”

“Great,” I gasped. After availing myself of the baggie for the third time, I declined Dan’s kind offer of performing another vertical roll myself. Instead we did a zero-G maneuver: a brief parabola at the apex of which you become weightless. Dan instructed me beforehand to remove a glove. The video shows the glove levitating off my lap, bouncing off the canopy. He said that on long, boring flights, pilots sometimes play a little game where the front-seater sips some water and does the parabola, then spits it out and with the stick guides the suspended droplet, quivering in the air like a silverly ball of mercury, backward until it plops down onto the lap of the guy in the back seat. I don’t think they do this while bombing Baghdad.

We did something called an eight-point roll, a 360-degree rotation in eight, jerky installments. “One-” jerk “two-” jerk “three-” jerk … My own eight-point roll was considerably less fluid than Dan’s.

It was now time for the thing I was frankly not looking forward to, the nine-G turn. Dan kept politely insisting that we did not have to do nine Gs, but I had read enough about the Thunderbirds to know that “orientation fliers” such as my sad-ass self are divided into two kinds, those who do nine-G turns, and those who do not.

Dan’s tone of voice became slightly more businesslike, instructing me to tense all my muscles and hold my breath, put my hands on my lap, keep my spine straight and head back. I recall thinking that it can’t be possible to throw up during a nine-G maneuver, since everything is pressing down.

“Okay, I’ll put the nose down now so we’ll gain some speed … add the afterburners.” I felt a surge forward as the F-16 accelerated to .85 Mach, or 550 knots.

“Okay, Chris, are you ready?”

“Uh hunf.” I was already tensed to the consistency of granite.

“Okay, here we gooooo …” We were sideways to the ground now. Dan pulled back hard on the stick and we went into a tight turn.

The G suit inflated to the maximum. My hands pressed down onto my crotch. A crushingly heavy weight pushed down on my body. My helmet was nailed to the headrest. I was aware of a slight shuddering. The video shows the wings shaking. Somewhere a voice I did not recognize said, “Bingo, bingo!” Dan later explained that this was a fuel-warning device he had preset. At cruising speed, the F-16 carries enough fuel to stay aloft for two hours and ten minutes. With the afterburners on, it will use up all its fuel in fifteen minutes, which pretty much limits the number of nine-G turns you can do while dogfighting over enemy territory. In one hour and ten minutes of flying, we used two and a half tons of fuel.

But now I was aware of Dan’s voice again …

“… Seven … eight … there it is, nine!”

“We did it?”

“You sure did!” I appreciated the “you,” even if all I had done was to strain through the bowel movement from hell. But there it is on the video of the heads-up display, the pilot’s TelePrompTer-like screen that displays all his instruments, a little digital “9.1” at the lower left-hand corner.

The entire turn had lasted five seconds. I had not blacked out, or even lost any peripheral vision, my solitary, pathetic moment of triumph that morning. I don’t think I could have lasted another two seconds without blacking out. During their aerial shows, the Thunderbirds execute a seven-G turn lasting
eighteen
seconds, at a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. No margin of error for blacking out there. That is why Thunderbirds tend to be in their early thirties and possessed of great physical strength.

The audio portion of the video records a high-pitched whine as we came out of the turn. I think that was me. The camera shows me looking pale, but giving two wan thumbs-up. Then I turned it off, not wanting my memento of the day to show the gastrointestinal aftereffects of nine Gs.

We did a victory lap over Hoover Dam. Just before landing, Dan did two tight three-G turns to shed airspeed, but by now they hardly amounted to shucks, and then we were on the ground. The canopy was lifting, fresh, desert air filling the cockpit. I came down the ladder slowly, stood wobbily beside Dan for a photo while he pinned a Nine G button on my flight suit. Then I crawled to the Life Support Room where I
availed myself of a trash basket in the corner. We did the debriefing, watching the video, Dan sitting beside me hungrily eating an aromatic nitrite-red weiner with chili.

The nine-G turn doesn’t look like much on the video. All you see is a shifting of sunlight and a dark-visored figure crushed inert in his seat. The only sound is the loud, three-second exhalations, the strange “Bingo, bingo,” and a high-pitched whine that might have been the last of my air being crowbarred out of my lungs. I had to make a conscious effort to stay awake in the debriefing room, even though I was watching a video of myself in the cockpit of a fighter plane. But there was an insight in this fatigue. This is how they will feel, a lifetime of dinner guests glancing frantically at each other:
Oh God, here it comes, his Thunderbirds video. Tell him we have a baby-sitter and have to get home.

—
Forbes FYI
, 1996

One night I had the words “fuck off” tattooed on the outside edge of my right hand. Some explanation is, obviously, in order.

I was eighteen and drunk, both on the six-pack of beer I’d been plied with to ease the pain of the far more elaborate (and tasteful) tattoo being applied to my biceps and with the thrill of being a young merchant marine on my first night of shore leave in Hong Kong.