Linda was on her annual six-week-long Grandmom and Grandpop trip, staying with Ian’s parents in Plymouth, Michigan, an upscale suburb of Detroit. Linda was eleven years old and this was the first year that she had made the trip alone, escorted on the flight by an airline stewardess. After making the trip for several years in a row, accompanying their daughter, Blanca decided to stay home and relax and do some oil painting and pastels. “She’s old enough to fly up there herself,” Blanca had told Ian. “There’s no connecting flight. It’s a direct shot from Phoenix Sky Harbor to Detroit.”
When class was over, Ian drove home to Buckeye, a thirty-five-minute commute from the base. It was originally a farming town, but it had gradually become a commuter bedroom and retirement community. The housing developments were an odd mix of 1950s and 1960s one-story houses with composition roofs, interspersed with neo-southwestern developments of earth-tone stucco three-thousand-square-foot McMansions built in the 1990s and in the decade of the aughts, just after the turn of the century. Interspersed between these developments, there were still many fields, mostly cultivated with cotton and alfalfa. There were also a couple of large dairy farms that produced milk and cream for Glendale and Phoenix.
The rent in Buckeye was just half what it would have been in Glendale. They also had benefited from a lower crime rate and much less smog. Ian had picked their house because it had an extra deep garage that had room for his hobby airplane, a Laron Star Streak, which was normally kept in its trailer with the wings removed.
The night before, Ian had had a lengthy discussion with Blanca. They were horribly worried about their daughter.
“I think that on Saturday I should fly up to Detroit personally to get her.”
“But, Ian, all of the flights are cancelled.”
“No, I mean a cross-country, in a D-model Viper. They’re two-seaters. I can zip up there to get her and be back all in a day-that is, if my dad drives her down to meet me at the airport.”
Blanca frowned and shook her head, but Ian continued in rapid fire: “Wayne County Airport is too big and it’s close to Toledo, so that’s too risky. The Canton-Plymouth airport is only two miles out of town, but it’s only a 2,500 -foot strip. I’m sure you remember, an F-16
“Are you crazy, Ian? You’ve got sixteen years in. Just four years to go until you qualify for retirement. You steal a plane-”
“
“-you’ll get court-martialed.”
“I’ll just log it as a cross-country,” Ian argued.
“You put a civilian passenger in a fighter, it’s a court-martial offense. You file a false flight plan, its at least an Article 15, maybe a court-martial. You make an unauthorized landing on a civilian strip of insufficient length, also probably a court-martial. Some busybody writes down the tail number with an ‘LF’ prefix, and the finger is pointing right at you. No way! You cannot play ‘You Bet Your Bars’ when you’ve got sixteen years in.
Doyle meekly dipped his head to his chest. He said, “Look, I also thought about flying the Star Streak up there, but that would take at least six hops each way: there’s only two seats. It would be a six-day round trip for one of us. I can’t get that much leave on short notice.”
“I agree, the Star Streak is out. With that many hops, I don’t know where for sure you’d get avgas. You could get stranded in the middle of nowhere with no fuel.”
Blanca went on: “We just have to wait until the riots die down in Detroit, and wait until they start up the commercial flights again, or you take a couple of days leave, and one of us-or maybe both-drives up there and back.”
Ian frowned. “Do you know how many cities we’d have to drive through to get to Plymouth? The rioting is too unpredictable. We’d have to zigzag up there. And how will we get gas to get that far and back?”
Blanca hugged him, and said, “Look, this is just a temporary thing. Your parents, they live in a very safe neighborhood. The riots and lootings, they are just in Detroit, not any further. We wait until things calm down. If need be, we dip into our savings and we pay a charter pilot from one of the General-A strips in Michigan to fly her down here. If things keep going like they’re going, the money will be
“Okay. Tomorrow is Tuesday, and the stupid course ends on Friday. But here’s another idea: How about we rent a Cessna 172 or maybe a Beech Bonanza from the Glendale airport? We fly out at oh-dark-early on Saturday, we take turns on the yoke, with the other one napping, and in about four hops we fly straight to the Canton- Plymouth airport. Then we do a four- or five-hour RON and we get back here either late Sunday or early Monday. After all, I still have my civilian ticket. Your ASEL just lapsed, but who’ll be looking if we rent the plane in my name?”
Blanca smiled. “With
Major Doyle’s unit was one of the last operational units in the active component of the U.S. Air Force still equipped with F-16s. The 56th Fighter Wing had just begun a rotation to Saudi in its first overseas deployment since its TO&E began the transition from a tactical training wing to a tactical fighter wing two years before. This change was necessitated by the simultaneous downsizing of the Air Force overall, the ramping-down of the F-16 fleet, and the emergence of the pitifully few “re-scoped” F-22 squadrons. Three years earlier, for political reasons, F-22 transition training had been shifted from Luke AFB to Shaw AFB in South Carolina. As it was explained to Doyle, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee was a third-term South Carolina Democrat. Some last-minute petitions before Congress saved the 56th from extinction. It would go back to being equipped with all F-16s, with nearly all of them in operational squadrons. But the Armed Services Committee chairman made it clear: “Once F-16s are obsolete, so will be the whole 56th and its support groups.”
Doyle came on board just a few months into the shift from pilot training to an operational wing. In the first staff weenie position of his career, Doyle was assigned as the wing maintenance officer. In recent weeks his duties necessitated spending most of his time doing paperwork at either the 56th Operations Group (OG) or the MXG hangars. It all seemed rather pointless, since all but a few members of his own wing were in Saudi. He expended many hours writing maintenance training plans and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for notional units that would be needed for a theater-wide war contingency. He realized that his unit would never get the funding for F-22 Raptors and that they were indeed doomed to eventual deactivation. His work seemed absolutely pointless.
Doyle had orders to catch up with the wing in Saudi in late November, but he dreaded doing the rotation. It would take him away from Blanca and Linda. With the current economic meltdown, he worried about their safety in his absence. Several times Ian thought out loud, “What if things get even worse?”
On one of his class breaks, Doyle used his cell phone to call one of the civilian technicians at the 56th OG headquarters who always had his finger on the pulse of the organization. The news startled Doyle. “The chief of staff of the Air Force is working up contingency plans for the emergency redeployment of almost all of the close- air-support aircraft in the Air Force inventory back to the States. Some know-nothing at the White House must have dreamed this one up! Rumor has it that our whole Wing will deploy to Hurlburt Field.”
“Florida? What for?”
“Get this: ‘riot control and looting suppression.’ They want to be able to use close-air-support planes.”
Doyle was flabbergasted. “What kinda bad weed they been smokin’ at the White House? Use C-A-S planes against rioters? The collateral damage would be hideous!”
Doyle paid little attention to what was presented in the class for the rest of the day. His mind was racing.
When he got home, he found Blanca in tears. She ran to Ian’s arms, sobbing. “Commercial flights are all still grounded. I spent the whole day on the
