Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat (11 page)

I’d always been proud—it goes with the occupation. But right then my heart was pressed against my chest. I’d passed the test. I’d fought and survived.

I’d seen the Elephant. In fact—I smiled, as I finally drifted off to sleep—I’d kicked him right in the nuts.

4

Fly Like an Egyptian

T
HIRTY MINUTES PAST SUNRISE, THE FIGHTER’S WHEELS RETRACTED
and the F-16 was airborne over central Egypt. It was 0601:45 on a Wednesday in January 1992.

I glanced rapidly between the outside world and the HUD’s green digital airspeed reading. A ruined Soviet-era bomber, a fence line, and even a small crumbling pyramid all flashed past as the dirty runway unrolled beneath the speeding jet.

This was one of the beautiful moments of being a fighter pilot. Thundering down a piece of concrete in the calm, cool, early-morning air. Strapped into an intimately familiar cockpit filled with warmly glowing displays. The metal around me throbbed with the power of forty thousand angry, charging horses, and I held the jet perfectly steady at twenty feet off the ground. The runway was 12,000 feet long, a bit over two miles, and I’d covered most of it with twenty seconds of full afterburner. As the little green number reached 510 knots, I took one more glance at the engine instruments, stared straight ahead, and smoothly pulled back on the stick at 0602:03.

Bursting free, the fighter surged upward, gulping thinner air, mixing it with jet fuel, and shooting the exploding mix out the back. Egypt fell away beneath me, and, within seconds, all my eyes could pick up was the distant horizon. Bunting forward slightly, I held the climb angle at sixty degrees and rocketed into the brilliant morning. The F-16 ejection seat is tilted back to counteract the tremendous G forces of dogfighting, so, combined with my climb angle, I was sitting perpendicular to the earth. The air-conditioning vent between my legs coughed and spit out a stream of misty, smelly air; dust from the Egyptian morning, hot plastic canopy baked in the sun, jet fuel, and a faint whiff of burned oil.

I frowned. Hot oil wasn’t normal, but this aircraft had just come out of maintenance after having the engine changed. It was also an Egyptian F-16. Anything was possible, which was precisely why I was flying it this morning on a functional test flight. This was a combination of specific maneuvers, called a profile, designed to thoroughly and brutally punish the aircraft before it was returned to normal flying with squadron pilots. The Egyptians always refused to take the chance of a test flight, so it fell to the Americans. I didn’t mind—it was extra flying time with no brief or debriefing. A few seconds after pulling vertical, I passed 5,000 feet, smiling under the oxygen mask and dark visor. Everything was working perfectly.

Briefly.

It was 0602:11.

“WARNING—WARNING . . . WARNING—WARNING . . .”

Shit.

My eyes snapped to the engine instruments, then to the row of RBLs (“really bad lights”). These were just under the glare shield at eye level maybe two feet in front of me.

Shit.

ENG FIRE
. . .
HYD OIL . . .
all the serious ones were suddenly glowing red. The jet was dying. Just like that. In less than a second.

0602:16.

Reacting instantly, I yanked the throttle back to
IDLE
and continued pulling over the top. Without the awesome thrust of its engine, the fighter slowed rapidly. Four hundred fifty knots and falling. If you were watching from a nearby cloud, the F-16’s flight path would have looked like the profile of an egg. At four hundred knots, the jet reached the top of the egg and was gracefully curving back, falling toward the horizon. Inverted now, I pushed the stick forward slightly into “negative” Gs and felt my butt float off the seat. This more or less kept me at the same altitude for a few moments while I hung upside down and decided what to do.

From the beginning of their career, pilots are taught how to troubleshoot complex and potentially fatal in-flight emergencies. The ability to diagnose, evaluate, and choose the correct action while still managing to fly an aircraft is fundamental. It’s another skill that separates a single-seat fighter pilot from the others. We don’t have a crew to read checklists or help evaluate the situation.

Doing all of this in a complicated F-16 loaded up with weapons and traveling at the speed of a rifle bullet is a big challenge. There are two types of emergencies—the kinds that won’t kill you and the ones that will. As this was definitely the latter, there was no time to do anything but react.

The huge, dry runway beneath me helped. European and American runways I’d used were much, much shorter and often wet or icy. On the other hand, the Russians had built this one for bombers, and it was enormous. Also, unlike American runways, which were aligned with the prevailing wind, this one seemed purposely built so there would always be a direct crosswind to complicate landings.

None of that mattered at the moment. I had no engine, and I was going nowhere but down. Eyeballing the gauges, I saw that the engine temperature, called Fan Turbine Inlet Temperature (FTIT), was spiked in the red range. Not good. But the hydraulics and electrics were okay, meaning the flight controls worked and I could still physically fly the jet.

0602:22.

I could smell burning oil; in a plane loaded up with 7,000 pounds of jet fuel and carrying missiles, this was definitely bad. The oil gauge in this $40M fighter was the size of a quarter, and I had to squint to see it. It was low. Not at zero, but well below normal. If I was truly on fire, I would have to either shut the engine down or eject.

Neither option appealed to me.

Or I could pull the throttle back to
IDLE
, glide to the runway, and hope I didn’t explode. Swiveling my head around to look past the tail, I saw there wasn’t any smoke from a burning engine, so I had that going for me. Hanging there, upside down, with cockpit dust floating in my face and a mile above an air base in the middle of Egypt, I had a brief thought that this wasn’t so bad. I mean, a wing hadn’t fallen off, and I hadn’t taken a missile up the tailpipe over hostile territory, right?

Right.

Without looking down, I reached to the left console by my knee, lifted the protective guard around the switch, and turned on the Emergency Power Unit (EPU). Immediately, a steady “WHRRRRR” vibrated up from behind my seat, as the system fired up. The EPU would provide essential power for hydraulics, flight controls, and the radios in the event the engine failed or I shut it down. There was also a Jet Fuel Starter (JFS) system. This was a small turbine shaft that ran through a gearbox and connected to the main engine. Using a mixture of compressed air and an extremely toxic gas called hydrazine, the main turbine would spin up to begin the ignition sequence. This allowed a startup independent of the old cumbersome “start” carts you see beside older jets.

0602:26.

Just then a violent shudder ran up from under the ejection seat, through the cushion and into my spine. Flipping the fighter upright, I blinked as the dust settled back to the floor. Rolling up on my left wing, because fighter pilots prefer to look left, I stared down at the field. I was too high and too close. Dumping the nose slightly, I angled away to the right, so I could look left at the runway. Glancing sideways into the cockpit, I squinted against the morning sun at the engine gauges. The EPU was providing minimal hydraulic pressure and enough electricity to keep the flight controls working. Everything else looked bad.

At 4,900 feet above the runway, at 0602:30, I keyed the mike.

“Beni Suef Tower . . . Beni Tower . . . MAKO Four One . . .”

I was now about a mile southwest of the field in a wide, shallow descending turn. Flying was all by the seat of my pants at this point. Distance and altitude . . . distance and altitude. I could see where I needed to be, and my hands worked to make it happen. Flameout landings were a huge part of F-16 non-tactical training. We practiced this technique repeatedly, day or night, in all weather and from random positions. But in the back of your head, in training, you know that if you completely ass it up, your engine still works and you won’t crash or eject.

Not this time. Although the engine was still running, the smell was worse, and I knew I’d never be able to go around and attempt it again. I was trying not to think about the Egyptian Air Force’s incompetent maintenance. There were thousands of spinning turbine blades, millions of micro-combustions, and miles of tubing, conduit, and wiring running beneath my feet. All repaired by Arabs, who generally didn’t read their own language, much less six-inch-thick manuals written in technical English. This was another reason I didn’t want to try the ejection seat.

“What the fuck am I doing here . . .” I muttered as I rolled and adjusted my flight path. I was holding about 250 knots and steadily dropping. Jets don’t glide well. The oil gauge now read zero pressure and the cockpit smelled like the inside of an oil can. But no smoke yet.

At 0602:34, I put the gear handle down and felt two belated “thumps.” Eyeballing the landing-gear lights, I saw only two lights. No nose gear. Perfect. Then the tower decided to wake up.

“Mahhko . . . Mahhko . . . theese Bani Toweler . . . you call?” The Egyptian sounded sleepy.

I swallowed and took a deep breath.

“MAKO Four One . . . Base Key . . . Emergency,” I answered calmly. I mean, you have to sound good, even in Egypt.

I was now about two miles southwest of the runway, passing 3,000 feet, and still no nose gear. I pumped the stick a few times to help it down but still had no light. It didn’t matter. Dumping the nose to keep my speed up, I steepened the turn and came around to point at the runway, just as the tower controller went bat-shit.

“Mahhko . . . WHAT?” he screamed. Arabs generally aren’t known for their ability to stay calm, cool, and collected.

“Say ageeen . . . you have . . .
mish’killah
?” He reverted to Arabic in his panic, although what he had to be excited about was beyond me. I was the one riding the pine, as we say. To help him out, I replied in Arabic.

“Aiwa habibi
. . . MAKO
jenoob harb . . . itneen kilo.”
You bet . . . MAKO is southwest, two miles.

As the tower operator erupted into a flood of high-speed Arabic and English, I just turned the volume down. He couldn’t do anything for me anyway, and I had other problems. Landing on two wheels wouldn’t kill me unless I was a complete jackass, and with a couple miles of concrete before me, it wasn’t too critical. I focused entirely on where I wanted to touch down—called an aim point—and my airspeed. If I was too slow, I’d stall and die. If I was too fast, I’d run out of runway and crash in the dirt. In this situation, the only way to get slower or faster was by trading altitude, and without an engine, I had all the height I was going to get.

Base Key was an established position in the standard F-16 flameout landing pattern. It meant I was somewhere between one and three miles at about 2,000 feet and lining up with the runway to land. I was in a decent position. Sufficient distance and airspeed to make it and enough runway to stop on. I exhaled, and for the second time I felt I might reasonably survive this.

Then I saw the smoke.

Little gray wisps of it floated out from my air-conditioning ducts. My eyes flickered back and forth between the ground and the smoke. Getting fixated on the wrong thing right now would be fatal. Besides . . . sometimes the vapor from the environmental control system
looked
like smoke. But vapor doesn’t burn, and this stuff stank.

Reacting instantly, I pulled the throttle back over the stop into
CUTOFF
and heard the engine immediately wind down. The cockpit got ominously quiet except for Bitching Betty’s annoying monotone and the sound of air rushing over the canopy.

“WARNING, WARNING . . . WARNING, WARNING . . .”

Yeah . . . I know.

It was 0602:40.

I passed through a thousand feet at 1.5 miles from the end of the runway, slowing to 230 knots. My throat was dry and my hands were clammy as I stared through the HUD. Far off toward the middle of the airfield, I saw the morning sun glinting from the control tower’s mirrored-glass windows. Several vehicles with flashing lights were racing down the taxiway, raising twin brown plumes of dust. That surprised me. I hadn’t known there were any emergency response trucks here.

Lining up the little green Flight Path Marker on the white centerline stripes, I noticed that the smoke had disappeared, which was good, but that my nose gear was still up, which was bad. Pulling a little on the stick, I let the jet rise slightly and slowly to 190 knots. Sometimes the nose gear wouldn’t extend if the airspeed was too high. But nothing happened, and as the controls got sluggish, I pushed the nose back over for more airspeed.

Holding 200 knots, I kept the little FPM nailed to the runway and glided over the threshold. With the ground rushing up, I made a gentle, blended pull, called a “flare,” and held the jet off the concrete. As I did this, I heard another thump as the nose gear finally came down. Not risking a look into the cockpit, I eyeballed the last few feet against the rapidly dropping airspeed. Rocking slightly between both wheels, the fighter touched down in wobbly F-16 fashion. I kept the nose off the ground as the runway zipped past.

At 100 knots, I let the nose drop and, despite the green gear light, I winced when the wheel smacked down. Without an engine to continuously power the brakes, stopping would be problematic on most runways, but this one was so long I wasn’t worried. Nevertheless, I let the F-16 roll out by itself for a few seconds, then smoothly pressed down on the brakes to completely stop the jet.

The fighter came to a halt 7,000 feet down the runway at 0603:07. I sat there for a few moments, staring straight ahead, my boots pressed hard against the rudder pedals and my hands still gripping the stick and throttle. One minute and thirty seconds had elapsed since I’d released the brakes for takeoff. Fifty-six seconds since the engine decided to come apart.

Reaching over, I toggled on the parking brake and then unhooked the left side of my oxygen mask. Leaning my head back against the seat, I gazed up through the canopy at the blue sky and the beautiful dawn that had nearly been my last. Off to the left, the emergency vehicles were careening in my direction; I exhaled slowly.