SAN DIEGO — From March through December 1956 I went through the Naval Flight School, Pensacola, Florida, as a student pilot. We were transferred to different airfields in the area for each phase of training. At any one time, day and night, there were a couple hundred SNJ, T-34 and T-28 training planes in the skies overhead, practicing different types of maneuvers. Saufley Field is where we were taught formation flying. This story is about an incident that happened when I was stationed there.
There was a horrendous rainstorm the night before, accompanied by the pandemonium of garish streaks of lightening, followed by window rattling belches of thunder. It was questionable whether we would be able to fly the next morning. However a cool dawn showed patches of blue sky overhead and flight operations gave us a “go” for the “hop. I liked flying at dawn, the air was still and the sun was not the glaring, blinding factor it could be later in the day.
The hops required twisting and turning all over the sky in complex maneuvers. The better the elements, the easier it was to perform with precision.
I strapped my parachute on in the hanger and walked the long flight line to my assigned aircraft, a World War II vintage yellow SNJ tail-wheeled trainer. My stride gingerly avoided fresh puddles of water, the residue of the previous night’s deluge. After a visual preflight inspection around the airplane, I climbed onto the wing, stepped into the cockpit, strapped myself in, and started the engine. All the gauges on the instrument panel sprang erect and were within acceptable range, and the magneto test was normal.
I ran the propeller through its pitch and feather cycle, and this too was okay. The entire regimen took a few short minutes. Everything checked out and I gave a thumbs up to the lineman to remove the wooden chocks wedged in front of the tires. He then gave me a hand signal and direction to depart down the taxiway.
I pressed the throttle forward and maneuvered toward the take-off runway in a fishtail movement, so I could see down the taxiway looking out the side of the cockpit. This was necessary because the “J bird” sat with its tail on the ground, its nose in the air higher than the cockpit, that blocked the pilot’s ability to see straight ahead.
The morning’s flight was a four-plane formation. The lead student pilot, first in the air, would climb to 2000 feet, and make a slow circling turn. The other three planes would take off immediately after him, climb and maneuver to the inside of his arc, and then join him, one by one, ten feet to the rear, and ten feet below the plane in front. When this gathering was complete, it looked like a loose slanted deck of cards. The instructor took off last, and stayed several hundred feet back to observe and evaluate our performance.
I was number three to take off. I reached up above my head to pull the glass canopy shut, then pushed the throttle forward, “Balls to the wall” full power, with my foot on the rudder pedal opposite the direction of the propeller rotation, to counter the rotation torque of the engine. The aircraft started down the runway, gathered speed, and flew itself off the deck at eighty knots. I gently pulled back the stick to climb at 500 feet per minute, and pulled up the wheel retraction lever. It was a routine takeoff, and the airborne aircraft was soon a few hundred feet in the air at the end of the runway where concrete stopped and the endless green pine trees of the Florida Panhandle began.
Suddenly the engine started to sputter and cough. At that moment I acted instinctively and lowered the nose, looking for a place between two trees to crash land straight ahead as I had been taught. I didn’t have enough air speed or altitude to turn back. To do so would have caused a stall and spin into the ground. That’s what happened a year later to Frank Yamaguchi, a flight school friend, who killed himself at Chincoteague, Virginia, flying an A-4D in a similar situation.
The sputtering and hesitation lasted for a minute or two. I tightened my shoulder harness straps and for some reason was not afraid. I remember thinking, “Well this is going to be a new experience.” Then as suddenly as it started, the sputtering stopped, and the engine noise smoothed out to a normal healthy sound. I raised the nose and resumed climbing. I called the control tower and told them what had occurred. The duty officer replied, “It was moisture in the magnetos from the rain last night. The heat from the engine had dried it out. Did I want to declare a deferred emergency and return to base?” I chose not to, and climbed up to join the gathering formation.
Our fully assembled flight climbed to 7,000 feet and began maneuvers. In formation the lead pilot is the eyes of the group, and makes all the flying decisions as to direction, altitude, speed, and maneuver. The other pilots flying in close proximity look only at the plane just ten feet in front and above, and are keenly aware of another aircraft the same distance beneath them. Things went smoothly for the better part of an hour, my earlier trauma forgotten in the intense concentration required in the tactics.
A soft feeling of satisfaction came over me as the flight progressed. Everything was going well. I looked forward to telling my hairy story in the hangar when we landed. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I saw a plane a short distance away coming straight at me. Again, instinct took over. I knew I could not climb or dive, for fear of hitting the aircraft above or below. The only thing to do was to press the left rudder pedal as hard as I could, and slip horizontally out of the formation then a slight descent when I thought I was clear of the other planes. In the middle of this delicate maneuver, my eyes glancing everywhere to avoid being hit or hitting another plane, I saw a yellow Navy T-28 trainer with the instrument hood covering the student portion of the cockpit racing by my plane almost within touching distance.
The instructor in that plane sitting in the front seat, who is the eyes in the sky while the student is under the hood, must have had his eyes down on the instruments observing his student’s performance. He never saw us. Miraculously none of our aircraft were hit by the oncoming plane, or hit each other. We quickly reformed our formation and completed the exercise.
Later, safely on the ground, our instructor told us in debriefing that from his view form the rear of us, it looked like an explosion had hit us the way the planes scattered all over the sky. The flight textbook recommends after such an experience, the pilot take off his flight suit and check his shorts. I didn’t have to read the manual.
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Ira Spector is an author and freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.