What makes people fly jets or climb into rockets? I went for a twirl with a pilot from the Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows display team to find out. His name was Dicky, he was twenty-seven and, like the other pilots I met that day, he had a calmness and sense of containment about him that was impressive. He’d grown up near an airport and from the age of about five would stand in his garden noting the times of the planes’ passing and what kind they were. It was a given that he was going to fly when he grew up, so he joined the Royal Air Force and there was a strange intimacy in his relationship with his plane, as though they were lovers rather than man and machine. Dicky told me that he had no desire at all to drop bombs on anyone, though of course he would if ordered to. He also taught me about the constant calculation that goes on in the mind of a pilot in relation to speeds and heights and angles, noting that it’s perfectly possible to reach the top of a low-level loop and suddenly apprehend that an unfortunate miscalculation moments ago makes it a mathematical certainty that you will be hitting the runway in 4.3 seconds, at a speed of 358 nautical miles per hour. In fact, one of the Red Arrows had done just this the previous year.
What I learned, though, is that Ed and Dick and Buzz are right about fast flying. It takes no effort on my part to recall the sensations. The British Aerospace Hawk is a trainer plane, meaning that you sit in an elevated position behind the instructor, with your own joystick and throttle. On takeoff, the cramped cockpit gets imposingly hot, but with only glass and air surrounding you, you seem to be hovering, to be part of the sky – an experience more akin to riding a magic carpet than flying in the back of a commercial airliner. When you turn, the wing dips through a full ninety degrees, until you’re perpendicular to the ground and intuition insists that you are about to plummet like a stone to meet it. You think that no one can hear you scream up there, but Dicky absolutely heard me. He also heard me giggle like a tickled infant when he flipped the Hawk over and we were powering along upside down, lifting our eyes to the homes and lives of all the not-pilots below. Dicky showed me how to do a loop and I flew my own, sliding the throttle full forward and pulling back on the stick in a way so counter to instinct that it takes a real effort to do it – but the thrill was indescribable. Coming over the top, I had what the pilot afterwards described as a grey-out, where the capillaries at the back of the eye are compressed to the point where vision blurs and momentarily dissolves into a grey vortex, and on the way down, we pulled four “Gs,” which is a sensation like no other: an inescapable, stifling physical presence that pins you to your seat and takes your breath away, as though you’re being crushed by some misanthropic phantom. One “G” is equivalent to the force of Earth’s gravity: four “Gs” are four times that force.
But there was more. Red Arrows planes are fitted with smoke pods for use in displays and Dicky’s “Red 7” had a new one which needed to be tested for stability at speed. To do this, we swooped down to 1,000 feet at 500 knots, then pulled back the stick and shot directly upward, exactly like a rocket, to 17,000 feet. The manoeuvre took seconds, but felt like aeons and as the plane gradually slowed I was left with a disorientation so complete that my mind simply abandoned ship. I was seated, but there was no pressure anywhere on my body, just a sense of floating in a horizonless, uniform, azure void, with nothing to provide perspective or evidence of where the world was, or even confirmation that it existed outside of myself. It occurs to me now that this is what Kubrick was trying to suggest in the closing scenes of 2001; an approach to nothingness or infinity, a state in which the mind dissolves into everything, no longer grasps itself; a foretaste of the unimaginable, the end. Still the most intense and extraordinary sensation I have ever had, when I told Dick Gordon about it, he enthused, “Hey, you’d have experienced some zero G there!” – just like in space. Bloody right, I said, and on the way back, having tumbled out nose-first and dropped down like a brick, we made six Gs and I blacked out properly, to wake with no control over my limbs. Pilots call this “lock-in” and it typically lasts about ten seconds. If it happens to one of them while flying solo, they’re unlikely to survive it, though of course they train hard to make sure that it doesn’t. A little later, after a succession of aggressive “skid and rolls” at 200 feet, I was finally sick. I got the feeling that Dicky wouldn’t have been satisfied until I was. My respect for pilots is absolute.
So they’re racing vintage Mustangs and Sea Furies and Yakovlevs as I step off the bus and move across a sea of tarmac to the runway. More vintage planes are being readied by loving mechanics, all bright chrome and dancing enamel paint; perfectly proportioned and unquestionably beautiful in the gleaming sun. There are some lacklustre aerobatic displays in between heats, but the rampaging heats are enough, like watching all the chariot scenes from Ben-Hur spliced together and run back to back as the planes jockey and joust and scream around the pylons within feet of each other. I take a bus to the centre of the field to get the even more thrilling view from the “home” pylon, and I am there when the “Sport” class planes take to the air. These are the aviation equivalent of hot rods, mostly built from kits and extremely powerful, with ungainly features – like immodestly short wingspans and attenuated tails. They’re small and light and fast, with an agility that comes from being fundamentally unstable and they bob and weave scarily for a share of the $46,000 purse.
And that’s when everything changes. As a quartet screams toward us and banks to turn left, the lead plane wobbles, then steadies, then begins to vibrate, its tail “porpoising” violently in the rough air thrown out by the other craft, and something seems to fall off – shit, part of the tail – at which point it simply turns to the ground, like a man turning away from a conversation he’s no longer interested in, and piles straight into it with a sickening crunch and show of dust; the dust rising slowly, almost tenderly, as if forming a shroud.
The race is halted. One of the other pilots, shaken, crashes as he tries to land and his plane is totalled but he’s unhurt. The craft which was lost was doing over 300 miles per hour and what remains of it is no more than a hundred yards from where I stand. I can hear an announcer speaking in a low voice on the other side of the runway, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. A hush descends. As so often with death, the shock is its lack of ceremony. There was no explosion, no fight with the controls, no tantalizing offer of redemption. No drama at all. As the jeeps and fire engines and ambulances arrive redundantly, we’re hustled back into a bus and returned to the public area.
During the hiatus which follows, I find myself drawn to the media centre, where half a dozen camera crews and forty or so reporters drink Pepsi and coffee from huge silver urns and kill time waiting for news. The gruff race president, Mike Houghton, won’t confirm the identity of the pilot at first, because his father and two sons have just arrived in Reno, and a committee consisting of the pilot’s team leader, the race chairman and chaplain have gone to meet them. He says he’ll tell us more once they’ve been informed; then he disappears, leaving the media to stew in the heat. As he marches away, a young woman from the local TV station, good-looking and bizarrely well groomed, bellows into a mobile phone: “I’ll give him my script and then we can cut a bite … and then you’re gonna – oh yeah, ’cos someone’s died. Yeah, he broke into lots of pieces. There’s virtually nothing left.” I watch, thinking of the icy weather-girl-turned-reporter Nicole Kidman played in To Die For, then move into the shade of the near-empty press Portakabin, where a retired Air Force colonel is holding forth on Korea and Vietnam. I ask him for his strongest memory of those conflicts and he says:
“You know, in those days, the most effective weapon we had was napalm. The most upsetting thing I was ever involved in was one day when we were ordered to drop some on a horse-drawn artillery unit. It was horrible, I couldn’t eat my sandwich afterwards, those horses were jumping around all over the place, just burning up. That was terrible to see.”
And he never saw it fall on people? I ask.
“Oh, sure. It’
s funny how, in a war, you don’t mind killing people, but hate to see animals getting hurt.”
A bomber-jacketed local reporter, whom I take to be a vet himself, nods solemnly.
The colonel goes on to tell us that he thinks these planes are inherently dangerous, and I can’t help noticing that the reasons he gives for this are all the reasons pilots think they look cool.
“People are too concerned with appearances these days,” he concludes with a frown and shake of the head.
Outside in the public area, everyone’s saying the same thing. At least he died doing what he loved. And I suppose they’re right, it’s better than being run over by a bus. But I keep thinking about the pilot’s sons at the check-in desk of their hotel, turning to see that whey-faced committee walking toward them, and I won’t be going back to the races. In the morning, the Reno Gazette- Journal front page carries stories about Colin Powell trying to build support for a U.N. resolution on Iraq, and a pugnacious Bush speech being angrily denounced by an official of that country … about an al-Qaeda cell being discovered in Buffalo, Bill Gates’s fortune falling from $54 billion to only $43 billion and a collection of Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy’s “fine art” photographs hitting town. It also reports that the crashed pilot’s name was Tommy Rose and that he was from Hickory, Mississippi. He had a father called Elmer and his plane was known as “Ramblin’ Rose.” What’s more, as they’d flown more than four laps of his race, the result was deemed to stand. Tommy won.
All Saturday, this is what I’m thinking:
If a pilot can go down so abruptly and without warning, in less than the time it takes to deal a hand of blackjack, then how on Earth do we explain the fact that Neil Armstrong is still with us?
We know about his near misses in Korea. Now add to them the time his X-15 rocket plane’s engine refused to fire after being dropped from a great height by its B-52 bomber host. More serious still was the occasion in 1966 on which he and his partner on the Gemini 8 mission, David Scott, attempted to rendezvous and dock with another craft for the first time – a manoeuvre that even the Soviets had failed to pull off up to then, because the logic of rendezvous in space bears no relation to that which applies closer to Earth. For instance, if a pilot wants to catch up with another plane, he or she simply increases thrust. It’s obvious. But increasing thrust in orbit will just push a spacecraft into a higher orbit – and higher orbits are slower because their circumference, the distance an object must travel in order to arrive back at the same place, is greater, and gravity weaker. Thus, through increasing your speed, you’ve ended up further behind your target than you were in the first place – which means that, bizarre as it sounds, the solution for an astronaut who wishes to catch up with another craft is to decrease velocity, so sinking to a lower, shorter, faster orbit, then to gradually transfer back up to the original one at precisely the right point to meet the target. This stuff is called “orbital mechanics” and it manifestly is rocket science.
All of which means that Armstrong and Scott were feeling good about catching and connecting with a specially adapted Agena rocket which had been fired into space for precisely this purpose. In fact, they’d made it look easy, and as they entered a part of their orbit where they would be out of contact with NASA’s tracking stations on the ground, everything looked fine. The next time Mission Control heard from the astronauts, however, all hell broke loose, because during radio silence the Gemini/Agena coupling had started to spin, then to roll, then tumble. David Scott tried to describe what was happening, but his voice was stressed and the words unclear. NASA had been concerned about the reliability of the Agena from the outset, but when the pilots undocked from it, the problem unexpectedly worsened. Soon they were tumbling at one revolution per second, banging heads as they were buffeted about the craft and suffering from “grey-outs” like the one I experienced with Dicky and there was a real danger of them losing consciousness. As Gemini 8 passed out of contact again, it looked as though America was about to offer its first sacrifices to space, but the next thing they heard on the ground was Armstrong telling controllers that he’d brought the ship under control. According to flight director Chris Kraft, his voice had stayed “amazingly calm” throughout. The problem was eventually traced to a faulty thruster, but they say that few NASA staff could watch the cockpit film of the incident without feeling sick. It’s unlikely that many people would have made it through that one, but Armstrong did.
And we’re still not done. More notorious even than Gemini 8 was the incident with the Lunar Module trainer, a terrifying piece of kit dubbed the “flying bedstead” because that was what it looked like: a bed with shrill jet engines and rockets screaming at the posts, which enabled it to hover as the LM would do over the Moon. The trainer was ungainly and unstable and the management didn’t like it, but the pilots did, until one day in 1969 Armstrong was at the controls several hundred feet off the ground and it began to tilt. He tried to steady it, but couldn’t … stayed, stayed and finally, with the contraption on the brink of upending, ejected, his chute opening just in time to save him. The trainer was consumed in a fireball and careful study of the now famous film of the ejection suggests that NASA was no more than two-fifths of a second away from requiring a new Apollo 11 commander.
And we’re nowhere near the Moon yet. America never lost anyone in flight until 1986 and the space shuttle Challenger, but the Russians did. The three-man crew of Soyuz 11 suffocated when their spaceship suddenly depressurized on reentry in 1971, but earlier, in April 1967, a few short months after the Apollo 1 fire, the popular and vastly experienced Vladimir Komarov hit trouble as soon as he reached orbit in Soyuz 1. Cosmonauts and engineers had known the craft to be dangerously flawed and Komarov had told a friend after an evening out with their families that “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.”
“Of course he kept his emotions in check in front of his wife,” said the friend, “but when we were alone for a moment, he collapsed completely.”
Asked why he didn’t refuse to fly, Komarov replied that then his friend Yuri Gagarin, as backup, would be killed instead. Gagarin, for his part, did everything possible to take the other man’s place. Both knew that Brezhnev and the Politburo were determined that the flight should take place as planned, probably so that it could perform a symbolic docking in space to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. The launch was successful, but once up, a solar panel refused to deploy, diminishing the power supply to the guidance computer and thrusters and causing the craft to tumble out of control. Komarov had twenty-six hours in which to contemplate his death as the malfunctions mounted, then to bid his wife, Valentina, farewell by videophone. Workers at an American listening post in Istanbul heard him advise her on how to handle their affairs and discuss the future of their children. When the hard-bitten future Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin came on the line, he was in tears, too, and although Komarov flew what by all accounts was a brilliant reentry under the circumstances, he was spinning violently as he reached Earth’s atmosphere, causing his parachute to tangle, followed closely by its backup. His final moments were spent careening into the steppes at 400 mph, conscious and cursing bureaucrats to the last, and it’s said that Gagarin never recovered from the loss: a year later, having become an open critic of the programme, he, too, was killed when the jet fighter he flew spun out of control. Conspiracy theorists like to imagine that he was assassinated.
Finally, a year after Gagarin’s death and just three weeks before Apollo 11 flew in July 1969, a gigantic N-1 Moon rocket, the largest ever built, exploded twelve seconds into its flight, finishing off Soviet lunar ambitions for good. The rocket stages and fuel tanks of leftover N-1s were reportedly hammered into storage sheds and playgrounds for children. The Space Race had a winner.
The point is that there was nothing inevitable about the safe return of Armstrong’s Apollo 11 crew. Most of the astronauts privately rated its chances of success at between 50 and 30 per cent, with a 30 per ce
nt likelihood of the unthinkable happening. The doyen of newscasters, Walter Cronkite, had asked how a society “which seems to have difficulty building a reliable washing machine dares to build a spacecraft to land on the Moon?” This seemed a reasonable question and NASA had a prearranged plan to cover disaster, which involved instantly cutting communications with the rest of humanity, while retaining their own lines to the doomed men. President Richard Nixon had a speech prepared for such an eventuality and Wernher von Braun had publicly hoped America could be mature enough to accept such an outcome. Not only were there the fears of the Lunar Module landing on icy slopes or molten lava; of falling through a thin surface crust, catching fire, blowing up, being consumed by insectlike aliens or the disgruntled grandparents of Nepalese schoolchildren; there was nightmarish stuff involved. For instance, the LM has been compared to a Stradivarius violin in the artfulness of its design and construction, but its fuel oxidizer was one of the most corrosive substances on Earth. A minuscule leak and the Eagle would eat itself. Indeed, fearing the prospect of a stranded crew, its manufacturers at Grumman Aerospace are said to have experimented with making the LM’s skin edible, but the result tasted so bad that starving seemed preferable.