“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!” I yelled, mashing down the comm button with a thumb slippery with blood. “This is Phantom 665. I’ve had a birdstrike. Canopy’s broken.” I couldn’t see well enough to change the radio frequency, and hoped the crew in the observation tower was still listening. The roar in the cockpit was so loud I couldn’t hear any response.
Alternately wiping the blood that kept filling my right eye socket and jamming the heel of my hand hard into my left, I found I could see enough to fly. I looked at the Chesapeake shoreline below me to get my bearings. The mouth of the Potomac was a distinctive shape under my left wing, and I used it to turn towards base, up the Maryland shore to the familiar safety of the runways at Patuxent River Naval Air Station.
The bird had hit the left side of the Phantom, so I knew some of the debris from the collision might have been sucked into that engine, damaging it. I strained to see the instruments—at least I couldn’t see any yellow caution lights. One engine’s enough anyway, I thought, and started to set up for landing.
When I leaned hard to the left, the slipstream blew across my face, keeping the blood from running into my good eye. I shouted again into my mask: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Phantom 665’s lining up for an emergency straight-in full stop, runway 31.” Hoping someone was listening, and that other jets were getting out of my way.
As Pax River neared I pulled my hand away from my left eye and yanked the throttles to idle, to slow enough to drop the landing gear. The airspeed indicator was blurry too, but when I guessed the needle was below 250 knots I grabbed the big red gear knob and slammed it down. The Phantom made the normal clunking and shuddering vibrations as the wheels lowered and locked into place. I reached hard left and slapped the flaps and slats down.
The wind in the cockpit was still my own personal tornado. I kept leaning left, took one last swipe at my right eye to clear the blood, set the throttles about two-thirds back, jammed my palm back into my bleeding left eye socket, and lined up.
The F-4 has small bright lights by the windscreen that glow red when you’re at the right angle for landing, and it also sounds a reassuring steady tone to say you’re on-speed. I blessed the McDonnell Aircraft engineers for their thoughtfulness as I clumsily set up on final. My depth perception was all messed up, so I aimed about a third of the way down the runway and judged the rate of descent as best I could. The ground on either side of the runway came rushing up and slam! I was down, yanking the throttle to idle and pulling up on the handle to release the drag chute, squinting like hell to try to keep the Phantom somewhere near the middle of the runway.
I pulled the stick all the way back into my lap to help air-drag the 17-ton jet to a stop, pushing hard on the wheel brakes, trying to bring the far end of the runway into focus. It looked like it was coming up too fast, so I stood on the brakes, yanking against the leverage of the stick.
And suddenly it was over. The jet lurched to a stop, the engines were at idle, and I saw yellow fire trucks pulling onto the runway, racing towards me. Someone must have heard my radio calls. As the trucks pulled up I swapped hands on my injured eye, reached down to the throttles, raised the finger lifts and shut off both engines.
I leaned back against the ejection seat and closed my good eye. As the adrenaline left my body, excruciating pain took over, a searing fire centered in my left eye socket. The rest of me was numb, nauseous, soaking wet, totally limp.
The fire chief ’s ladder rattled against the side of the Phantom. And then I heard his voice next to me.
“Holy Christ,” he said.
TO THE MOON
1
Houston, January 1973
Flat.
Flat, as far as the eye could see.
The plane had just descended below cloud and the hazy, humid South Texas air made the distances look shorter somehow. Kaz leaned forward to get a good look at his new posting. He’d been in the Boeing 727 seat for nearly four hours and his neck cracked as he craned it. Underneath him was a waterway snaking through an industrial maze of petroleum refineries and waterside cranes. His forehead touched the window as he tipped his head to track where it flowed into Galveston Bay, a glistening expanse of oily brown water that fed into the Gulf of Mexico, fuzzily visible on the horizon through the smog.
Not a garden spot.
As the plane descended towards the runway, he noticed each small correction the pilots made, silently evaluating their landing as the tires squawked onto the runway at Houston Intercontinental Airport. Not bad.
The Avis rental car was ready for him. He heaved his overfilled suitcase and satchel into the trunk, and carefully set his guitar on top. “I have too much gear,” he muttered, but Houston was going to be home for a few months, so he’d packed what he figured he’d need.