September 9th, 2009 by Life

Just watching the Blue Angels doing their Wild Blue Yonder air show practice…memories flashing by me as the jets did.

Sky Jjango

If you’ve been flashing across the sky making those sonic booms way above the clouds, you’ll really understand what “Wild Blue Yonder” really means.

It’s just sky. You feel like there is no end to where you can go. The Sky’s the limit – literally. The sensation of speed isn’t there at all in that straight and level. You’re very simply getting away from it all. Like a dream world…until the flight commander or ground control wakes you up for the customary communique every minute.

Look behind and see the stream of white going back from the engine as far as the eye can see. It’s about the only physical sign of speed and how far we have gone. But now, time to wake up. We all must as the squadron of 4 are now due for manoevers. We made a somewhat gentle turn in a wide arc to find our imaginary counters pulling about 4 Gs. Anyway, this was to be my last pretend sortie in this fancy brand spanking new airborne racer of the early eighties.

Flying First Time eh What?

This is just some kind of training over the weekend for me. My thoughts started to wander as this now bores me. This is not the fun times I had when I first started in a Strike Master Trainer. My first instructor was an aging major from the British Air Force… He was always a lark and a half in the air and on the ground, giving me my emergency crash flying course. I was to be sent somewhere in the middle of Indochina and I needed to learn to fly these things. Flying wasn’t the problem – I took to it very quickly – racing cars on the ground helped, it was the landing that made for very interesting times.

This Major was certainly either way too eccentric or simply had a death wish. First time up and sitting beside me and he talked me down to land the StrikeMaster. After all, the airport was an international sized one during training and I simply can’t miss it. The first try was bumpy beyond sanity before coming to a halt. Emergency vehicles were all over the runway with flashing lights. No, we didn’t use the drag chute because we did that manoevre over a dozen times in 3 hours…the rest as they say, is history. And so far, I’ve always walked away from every landing.

My First Landing 

From the cockpit I could still see the first time I had to jump into the co-pilot seat in a Huey. The pilot was out of commission and we were leaking fuel. We barely got out of there intact raked by machine gun fire. The refugees were all still here, but we were in trouble. The warning signals were going off everywhere. Pointing the nose straight towards the base would be a 21 minute charge but we were losing fuel fast. This was going to be a  tense over the hill top run. They, the pilot and the refugees were all under my charge, my responsibility.

Providence?

Within sight of our small grassy airfield the engine sputtered and started to quit. Fuel’s gone. Still with some forward momentum, there was still some hope to not become part of the dense jungle scenery. Now, this chopper had very large rotors for a reason. It made a great autorotation with the blades. It had great lifting capability. Without engine power, if there was enough altitude, autorotation could be used to slow our vertical descent. But it also took great timing to flare the blades just before touch down to give it a final cushion of air to prevent a total crash – that I did with a prayer and landed with a mighty bump. There we all stayed – the wounded pilot, the refugees, and me – all in silent thank you prayers until the rescue guys came about 5 minutes later. We had just cleared the trees and onto the tall grass.

BTW, I wasn’t an official pilot yet then. Just did what I had to. Back to the final landing…yes, made very sure I walked away from this last one too.