Force of Eagles Read Free

three pilots would go to the backup mission of low level intercepts they had briefed in case Stansell aborted. They would drag the fight down to five hundred feet—exactly as in combat—into the environment where they excelled and none of their potential opponents ever trained in peacetime, making the first few days of any war that involved F-15s something of a turkey shoot until the opposition got the message. But at the moment neither Stansell, Snake or Donaldson knew how close one of them was to having a chance to show just how good the F-15s were.
    Stansell relaxed into his seat, drenched with sweat from the aborted engagement. He lifted the green tinted visor of his helmet and rubbed the sweat from around his eyes with the back of his glove. His right ear itched, demanding a scratching. The colonel fought the urge. After all, it wasn’t there. I’ve heard of that reaction he thought, but never believed it until now.
    The recovery into Luke AFB was uneventful, and Donaldson relaxed as he evaluated the way Stansell flew the graceful fighter down final. The colonel wired the airspeed at 145 knots and the Angle of Attack at twenty-one units. It was a smooth and relaxed approach and the colonel’s voice and breathing were as normal as an airline pilot’s. “A wonderful thing, the CAS. It made anyone look good,” Stansell observed, more to himself than Donaldson. The Control Augmentation System sensed pitch, yaw and roll rates; AOA, lateral and vertical acceleration. It then automatically adjusted the electrical inputs into the control surfaces commanded by the pilot, relieving him of the constant task of trimming for changes in control surface pressure when the aircraft’s speed or G forces changed. Stansell squeaked the landing.
    Captain Donaldson wasn’t flying with just any other newly-minted colonel who had grown rusty after serving time in some desk job in the Pentagon that guaranteed promotion. He was flying with Rupert Stansell, a former F-15 squadron commander, a blooded pilot with one MiG to his credit, and one of the three men lucky enough to have escaped from Ras Assanya on the Persian Gulf after it was captured. Donaldson couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the colonel.
    While Stansell debriefed Maintenance on the over-G, Donaldson headed for the personal equipment section of his squadron, the 555th Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, the Triple Nickel. He stripped off his G-suit before retrieving a wedding band and an Air Force Academy class ring from his locker shelf. Stansell, he thought, being an old boy from the Academy ain’t going to get you through this refresher course if you don’t have a clue. He decided it was time to talk to his squadron commander.
    Donaldson stood at the open door of Lieutenant Colonel “Buzz” Ruthaford’s office, waiting for his squadron commander to motion him in. The tall and lanky black L.C. waved him into a seat the moment he saw the captain. Rutherford continued to talk on the phone pulling faces to express what he thought of the caller’s message. Finally he hung up. “Same old bull,” he said. “Public Relations has another request to interview the only black squadron commander in TAC. Interviews aren’t my job.” He fixed on Donaldson. “You look like you’ve got a problem. Stansell?”
    “Yeah, he didn’t have a clue today. Little, almost no situational awareness. He was flying around out there with a great big question mark over his cockpit.”
    Rutherford waited, not about to say a thing until Donaldson laid it all out for him.
    “Over-G when he reversed-8.2—dumb. We had to make an early return.”
    “Wasn’t today his first two-vee-two ride?” Rutherford asked. “That’s an important phase of training.”
    “True. But he was doing the same thing when he was flying one-vee-one. Something’s blocking him, getting in the way. He can fly the jet as good as anyone, but when the fight starts to develop, he becomes mechanical and rigid.