Blue Sky Dream Read Free Page B

Robinson, the commander who “never did anything straight,” who had flown a small float plane off battleships, landing in the open sea to pick up downed U.S. pilots during World War II.
    What Jerry Robinson appreciated in young Hal, though, was not heroism but a certain straightness, a personal philosophy, in my father’s words, that “flying was to be approached as a science.” Jerry Robinson noticed that my father had taken the initiative to work out the F9F-8 Cougar’s fuel consumption rates and make charts for all the squadron to strap to their knees when in the cockpit. It was an “aero-weenie” thing to do, says my father now, but it was something his flight commander saw and liked, and that, probably, is why out of a group of twenty flying officers, Jerry Robinson had chosen my father to join his run at a speed record.
    With good fortune so easily wafting his way, there seemed to be no hurry to think creatively about life past one more day aloft in the F9F-8 Cougar. There were not yet any air combat veterans over Vietnam, though a squadron mate would go on to be one. There were not yet any astronauts, though a fellow naval aviator, John Glenn, would become the first American to orbit Earth. Perhaps Hal would remain in the Navy and be another Jerry Robinson. Perhaps he would move to the controls of the coming commercial jet airliners. If my father had any favorite notion of his fate, it was that he would live the aero-weenie’s ideal as a troubleshooting test pilot. Anyway, why worry about it? The options all seemed so good and readily in view and directly in his flight path.
    H ere is how a cumulus cloud is formed. A bubble of warm air meets cold and up it rises, cooling as it expands, eventually reaching dew point and condensing its moisture into steam, a processthat releases heat and causes the cloud to rise, releasing more moisture and lifting it all the higher. The aero-economy of the Cold War was beginning to be like this. A bubble of government money sucked away from other places and warmed by competition with the Soviet enemy had become a cloud of self-perpetuating steam enfolding millions of lives and livelihoods. That billowing economy had created the F9F-8 and paid for my father to be in its cockpit, had allowed my father to believe that he landed in that cockpit by just being himself.
I liked it. I was good at it. And it was my own idea.
    This, then, is what it meant to be a twenty-three-year-old naval aviator in 1956 if you were my father. It meant to consider oneself a fact of progress waiting to be established. Hadn’t Jerry Robinson seen that in young Hal, just as he’d seen it in the new F9F-8 Cougar? Wasn’t that why my father had been selected to be here, safely off from Olathe, Kansas, buoyed by an updraft of national will to an altitude of 40,000 feet, an altitude at which visibility appeared unlimited?
    “S o away we go,” my father tells it, “the four of us, and we’re in a little tighter formation this time, but I’m basically alone—it’s not like you’re snug up against another airplane. And there’s Chicago over there to the left. Cleveland’s up ahead. Louisville is down there to the right. It’s just a gorgeous day. You could see forever. And as I’m gazing around at the scenery I look over at my left wing and I notice the trim tab is deflected quite a bit. Now, the trim tab on your wing trailing edge is meant to correct any left wing/right wing heaviness. That is, if one wing has more fuel in it than the other, that wing will be heavy. And the way you correct for that is you deflect the trim tab a little bit to pick that wing up. You do this with a button under your thumb on the control stick, and you manipulate that button almost unconsciously, reflexively, whenever you feel a pressure under your thumb, the pressure caused by a wing dropping. Turns out I hadbeen clicking the button over and over without even realizing it, until the left wing trim tab was very much