Why You and I Don’t Fly Fighter Jets

Believers in the right stuff would rather crash and burn.

--from “The Right Stuff,” by Tom Wolfe

Navy airplanes keep falling from the sky. In the last six weeks, eight powerful, and powerfully expensive, jet aircraft have gone down in crashes scattered from the Persian Gulf to the Nevada desert. Ten lives have been lost, including three civilians crushed by a falling fighter in Tennessee. Squadrons have been grounded, aircraft carriers called back to port, congressional inquiries convened. It is, in short, a mess. It also is a mystery.

“We are still looking for a common thread,” Vice Adm. Brent M. Bennitt told reporters Monday on the tarmac at Miramar Naval Air Station. He had chosen as his backdrop a black F-18 fighter sporting the legend “Top Gun.” His news conference was interrupted every 15 seconds or so by the terrible roar of a fighter taking off. The aircraft, Bennitt wanted to make clear, were flying again--even if no one could say for certain why so many had fallen. This was military aviation, after all, and not the friendly skies.

Many theories have been advanced to explain the Navy’s bad patch. They run from overworked maintenance crews to flawed engines, from makeshift repairs to statistical inevitability. In Bennitt’s view, only one unifying theme has emerged so far. It does not explain the rash of “mishaps,” as the Navy calls its crashes, but it does go to the high body count.

“For some reason,” he said, “ . . . in at least three of these mishaps we appear to have a problem in that the air crew are staying with the airplane longer than we think they should.”

Why?

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A fighter pilot’s story: It was February of 1991, just four months before he was to leave the military after a 15-year career. He was flying an F-4 Phantom high above the Panamint Valley, out in the California desert, showing a newcomer what the high-powered aircraft could do in a dive. He took the plane straight up and then “let it fall.”

He pushed the stick. Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. “I’m not sure what happened. We were just wailing down through the sky, and obviously I was no longer flying her.” He raced through a scripted list of recovery procedures. Nothing. By now the plane had dropped to 12,000 feet. In a second or two it would have descended to 10,000 feet, at which point flight protocol dictated that the crew must bail.

Looking back on the incident the other night, this pilot--a friend of mine--was amazed how much thinking he squeezed into those few frantic seconds. He recalled calculating that, since he was over a flat valley, he could hang in a little longer, maybe down to 8,000 feet, and attempt to save the aircraft. He argued with himself about this. How many times had he preached to trainees that airplanes can be replaced, but pilots cannot? How many times had he told himself: “I’m only flying it. I’m not buying it.”

And yet, he was a fighter pilot. He was expected to rearrange the rules of the military, and physics, to match his prowess. He chided himself for getting into such a fix: “I remember very clearly telling myself as the plane was going down, ‘Way to go, pal. Way to end your career. You only have four months to go, and now you are going to drop your first airplane. What a screw-up. What a screw-up.’ ”

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Anticlimax: The fighter came back under control at about 10,000 feet, and today this pilot is a high school coach in Nevada. He still flies, though, and has followed the string of crashes. He, too, has noticed pilots missing chances to bail. He can understand it, but he can’t explain it--at least to a nonflying mortal.

Perhaps, he said, it has to do in part with the enormous pile of grief that awaits pilots who lose airplanes through flying errors. The government does not take lightly the loss of $40-million machines. There are inquiries, demotions and, worst case, the end of one’s flying career. Given the choice of scorching death or reassignment to the public affairs office . . .

Also, he said, the cockpit is a “familiar, safe environment.” High-speed ejections are a rough, risky adventure, and so unpilotlike. More than anything, though, he believes it has to do with essential pilot ego.

“The pilot says, ‘It’s my nature not to fail. I can fix it. I’ve got to look good. I can’t look bad. I can fix it.’ ” This no doubt has been many a fighter pilot’s last thought on earth. They don’t expect us to understand. If they thought like the rest of us, they wouldn’t be flying in the first place.