Scareforce (18 page)

It wasn’t that way at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona. The guiding force at Willy grabbed you by the neck and dragged you
in the minute you crossed the fence. It pulled you directly to the flight line and wrapped its arm around your shoulder and
pointed with pride to the noisy ramp and said loud and clear, “Here We Train Pilots!”

Everyone on the base was caught up in the mission and goal of the base. They all trained pilots. Willy boasted the best weather,
the best instructors, the biggest student load, the busiest ramp, and the most-crowded skies of any base in the world. It
was kind of the big-mouthed Texas of Air Force bases.

With three runways and a huge ramp, the air traffic never stopped. Unlike most fields, where an approach to the main runway
could be discontinued anywhere, if you were established on final ten miles from the main runway at Willy, you were either
going to fly over the runway or land. There was no place else to go. Hopefully, if you chose to land, it would be on the runway.
But that wasn’t always a given.

Pilot training at Willy was known as the “year of fifty-one weeks.” The base had only fifty-one weeks to turn a ground pounder
into a flyer. The base also had roughly fifty-three weeks of training built into the syllabus. So somewhere along the way
they crammed in those extra two weeks.

The students referred to it more as the day of twenty-seven hours. Pilot training was grueling. There was no time to relax
or digest what was being taught. Classroom academics were taught in a style known as the Guillotine Method. Every day in every
class you were required to put it on the line. You had to prove yourself worthy to hold the title of pilot. Each day brought
more tests. And the tests were handled in a unique fashion. No open book, true-false, multiple guess with plenty of time to
think. These were on your feet in your face interrogation tests with lots of derision and sarcasm to help you along. The instructors
were not the kind and gentle old “Mr. Chips” type. They evolved more from the teaching techniques of Attila the Hun. Torquemada
would have been pleased to know that the Spanish Inquisition lived on in the hearts and minds of flight instructors.

“I taught academics at Willy—several different classes. I know what kind of pressure is generated and I firmly believe in
this method of teaching. I mean, we were trying to teach pilots here. We had to ensure that they knew the airplane and everything
about flying it. They couldn’t hesitate. They couldn’t wait for something to come back to them. They had to know it cold,
or somebody would die.

It was in one of my classrooms that I saw him. I was sitting at my desk between classes trying to catch up on some reading.
I heard the door open and a chair move and I assumed it was one of my students getting in a little early. After a couple of
minutes I looked up. Sure enough there was a stud in the back row, with his head down buried in a book. We referred to the
students as studs. They thought it meant that they were macho types. We actually meant they were as dumb as a bunch of nails.

It was quite normal for studs to get to class early and try to learn everything they were supposed to know in five or ten
minutes. It never works. I made it a point to pick on them.

I went back to my reading. A few minutes passed when I heard him say, “Sir, could you explain something to me?” I finished
the paragraph I was reading and looked up ready to answer his question. He wasn’t there. Nobody was there.

I didn’t hear anyone open the door to leave. That was strange because it was a creaky old door. And there was absolutely no
place to hide in the classroom. Believe me I’ve made students want to hide.

I got up and checked the hallway. It was empty. Not a soul. It was on my way back to my desk that I recognized the voice.
I knew it couldn’t have been him, but it was his voice. It was only frightening in retrospect.

I wish I knew what he wanted me to explain.

Flight training at a training base is just as difficult and serious as the academic training. It isn’t a lot of graceful surly
bonds slipping as the poet would have us believe. It is flying with all the fun carefully removed.

It starts at preflight. The airplanes used for pilot training are modern, capable jet aircraft. There are attack versions
of both the initial and the advanced jet trainers. But to the Air Training Command the aircraft are training aids. And the
students tend to think of them as booby traps.

The student arrives at his aircraft and is required to perform a very thorough inspection of every aspect of his appointed
beast under the watchful eye of his instructor. He must be able to explain just what he is looking for and how everything
should be set, positioned, or adjusted prior to starting engines. And woe to the student who misses something.

The Air Force tries to instill in the pilot the need for a very complete understanding of how everything must be so that an
airplane will fly. They believe in using the carrot-and-stick technique of instruction without the carrot.

“I saw it, or him, on the flight line. I’m a crew chief for T-38s. I was catching a ride with the ramp tramp out to the bird
I was supposed to preflight for an early morning go. It was way out on the end of the line. I was thinking I would get there
early when all of a sudden the driver says, ‘Looks like you’re late again.’

I looked down at the end of the line and sure enough there’s this student already checking the plane over. I looked at my
schedule again thinking I must have read it wrong. According to it I still had a half hour before anyone was supposed to show
up.

I watched the stud check the tail of the 38 as we pulled up to the parking stub. I jumped out and ran up and grabbed the forms.
The student had disappeared around the tail so I went the other way around to catch up with him and find out why he was there
so early.

He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere on that side of the aircraft. I looked under to see if I could see his feet on the other
side. I thought maybe he had doubled back on me. He wasn’t on the other side either. And he wasn’t up in the cockpit. He wasn’t
anywhere. He was just gone.

The crew showed up at the plane right on time but I was so busy trying to find that other guy that I hadn’t even started the
preflight. The instructor chewed on me some for that.

I saw him out here a couple more times but I never got close to him. I know some of the other crew chiefs saw him too, but
they don’t like to talk about it much.”

Flying aircraft, especially high-performance jet flying, is inherently a dangerous business. It’s even more so at a training
base. Students find out early that they must do every task exactly right every time if they want to survive. And even if they
do everything exactly right, sometimes the aircraft won’t cooperate. It is at that moment that the students take their most
difficult tests. They find out if they have really learned the material about the airplane and flying it. They find out the
hard way. And inevitably some fail their tests. And they aren’t the kind of tests that you get to retake.

Air-training bases see more accidents than most bases. Instructors try their best to accident-proof their students, but it
just isn’t possible. The unofficial motto at Willy was, “in an operation of this size, you expect to lose a few.” So it’s
a common thing. It’s expected. But no one ever gets used to it.

“Yeah, I’ve heard the stories. I knew a lot of the guys who told them, too. They were all sterling gentlemen and I’d never
call any of them liars.

I myself have never seen a ghost stalking the flight line or whatever. But I did see something pretty strange. I saw it twice
in fact. Blew my mind both times. Almost caused me to pink a ride. A pink is a deficiency on a flight mission. I guess somewhere
back in the deep dark past they were printed on pink paper or something. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what color they are. Students
don’t want any of them. You get more than one and you have to start looking around for a desk job.

Let me go back a little ways first. It was when I just checked into the program. They hit you hard and fast at first and I
was walking around in a daze most of the time except I didn’t have much time to walk around. One night around nine or ten
o’clock a friend of mine who works in the tower gave me a call. He said that a stud in a T-38 just bought the farm. Ran right
into a mountain.

I headed out to the base to see what was going on. Wanted to make sure it wasn’t somebody I knew. It took me twenty minutes
to get to the flight line and even after all that time I could still see where the accident happened. It was in the middle
of a sheer face in the Superstitions. The fire was still burning brightly. A good share of the 38 is made out of magnesium.
The plane was literally melting down the face of the cliff. He must have been busting the Mach when he hit that mountain.

Turns out I didn’t know him but I’d heard of him. Had a reputation for flying with his head in the cockpit all the time. Trusting
the instruments too much. He became object lesson number one for situational awareness.

Anyway, almost a year later, I was finally solo in a T-38. It was a night mission. I was flying in the local area when suddenly
I saw the whole side of the mountain light up. It was right where the other guy hit but I didn’t remember that until later.
I called RAPCON but they said that everyone was accounted for. I made a quick 180-degree turn to take a closer look. But it
was gone. I almost flew out of my area trying to look for it. The instructor in the mobile tower saw the sloppy turn I made
and started yelling at me. I was just barely able to lie my way out of it. I remembered the accident later in the club.

I saw it one more time when I was dual with an instructor. I pointed it out to him. He glanced at it and I know he saw it
but he just told me to keep my mind on what I was doing. He didn’t mention it after the flight and I didn’t either.”

When an aircraft goes down at a military base, the emergency team swings into action. The Air Force has some of the best-equipped,
best-trained, and unfortunately, most-experienced rescue workers in the world. And those at pilot-training bases tend to be
the best of the best. It’s almost like the experience gained in a war.

During a war the pilots are often hampered in their attempts to return to base by battle-damaged aircraft. At a pilot-training
base the aircraft are often hampered by the inability of the novice pilot behind the controls. Whatever the reason, all the
personnel charged with the safe operation of the airfield have definite jobs to perform during an emergency. And those personnel
at a pilot-training base have seen so many types and colors of emergencies that they know what to do immediately.

“I never saw the ghost or whatever at Willy but the more I think about it the more I’m sure I talked to him. It was during
an accident response. I was working the mid shift on a Wednesday night in the tower and we got a call from the radar guys
that they had lost contact with one of the students. The bad thing was that they didn’t know which one. It was never simple
at a training base.

Anyway what happened was that it was a nice clear night and some of the students were going visual flight rules or VFR. They
would just pop up and talk to radar when they wanted an approach. The pattern controller said some guy popped up and asked
for vectors for a ground-controlled radar approach to the main runway. The controller identified his target and gave him a
turn to the radar pattern, then asked for him to say his call sign. It had been garbled on first call-up. All the pop-up said
was, ‘Oh, shit,’ and then stopped talking.

That was enough to get the controller’s attention because swearing on the radio is a definite no-no. But then the radar target
disappeared right after so he called us real fast. I checked with the super and he said to start a comm search. In a comm
search everyone who is in the airport traffic area is supposed to give his call sign and location. As each one calls in the
controller checks him off on the active flight progress board and makes sure everyone is accounted for.

I was taking the calls and rogering all the studs as they checked in. I was keeping a running count of the numbers because
I knew we had twenty-seven airborne that night. We got calls from twenty-seven different aircraft and I thought everything
was okay. But the ground controller said that there was a mistake because one of the call signs was wrong.

I asked her which one was wrong and which one was still missing. I thought maybe one of the studs had mixed up his call sign.
It happens. I made a call for both of them to report in to the tower. The one who supposedly had the wrong call sign answered
up but the other one failed to answer.

About that time things really went into afterburner. An instructor in a T-38 reported a fire on the ground about seven miles
out on final. We scrambled the rescue helicopter and he beat it out reverse course to check it out. In the meantime we closed
the center runway, which led to an emergency situation in itself. The wing king ordered all aircraft back to the ground.

They found the guy who didn’t answer his call sign in the comm check. He was walking back to base after jettisoning the aircraft
in some farmer’s field.

It was about then that the senior controller pointed out what was wrong with the bad call sign. It was one we hadn’t used
in almost a year. None of the present-day students would have even heard it.

It wasn’t until later at the club over a cold one that we got to talking about it. I’m almost sure that the call sign we heard
that night was the same one the guy was using the night he plowed into the mountain.

Wonder what would have happened if I had cleared him to land?”

At a pilot-training base the students are introduced to another time-honored tradition of the Air Force. Since men first learned
to fly they have maintained the tradition of the post flight. This post flight is usually carried out in a darkened, cozy
room filled with similarly inclined fellow aviators. The room can come in many shapes and sizes, but it must be equipped with
a friendly resident serving large quantities of soothing libation. Said libation must be of sufficient potency to ensure that
the celebrants can wind down from the rigors of their flying.