me like a layer of foam seeded with large and small bubbles. Cold air caressed my shoulders as cockpit pressurization failed and the outside cold air penetrated. Still, I was not afraid. Soon I would initiate a restart, but I began to feel uneasy when my repeated emergency calls on the radio brought no answer.
Okay, down to restart altitude, twenty-five thousand feet. By now, the clouds were closer, a landscape of individual lumps and crevices, with no ground visible. The Earth hid from me beneath the clouds. Now I was in a hurry to restart. First one attempt, then a second one, but no sound whatsoever from the engine and no response from the instruments. Looking back, I noticed a long white trail behind me. That meant that fuel was spilling into the exhaust behind my plane. This was really bad, and restarting attempts had to stop. I had to find a place to land, and fast.
There was only one airport in the vicinity, Ramat-David, Israel’s northern fighter base. I searched my documentation and found the frequency of Ramat-David’s control tower. Thank God, somebody over there was alert. The controller updated me on the situation there. “Low clouds, low visibility in the whole valley,” he said. “Scattered showers in the whole area around Ramat-David.” Winter had returned to the north of Israel.
It all began to look pretty grim. My dead Super Mystere and I were already shaving the pink off the cloud tops. Among the peaks there were gray depressions, and I peered into them. The color inside them was the color of evening, gray-blue. One after the other, I could see no hole through which I could catch a glimpse of the ground. I flew the vectors I received, but all beneath me was obscured. I had no way of telling where I was.
Where the hell was Ramat-David down there?
Now I thought, maybe I should enter the clouds and descend through them? Not a good idea. I remembered that Ramat-David is in the Izreel Valley, but this valley was surrounded by hills. And there was also one pretty high ridge—Mount Carmel. It might be touching the clouds. If I happened to come out right there…
What now?
I tried again to restart the engine; perhaps this time it would work. Once and twice, and now I had to force my fingers to be steady. But no luck: the engine wouldn’t start. And all the time my Super Mystere continued dropping like an elevator. No doubt, in such conditions the right thing to do was just to bail out.
I began moving in my seat, pulling here and there, tightening seat belts.
And then, suddenly, magically, I saw a hole ahead of me among the clouds, perhaps the one and only hole in the entire cloud cover. I glided there, passed over it, and lowering a wing, stared down it as into a deep well. Way down—between the vertical gray-blue walls—I could see the slope of a mountain, black and wooded. And this sighting would have been of no use had there not been glaring, from the side of the picture, lit by a red ray of the setting sun magically shining through the fog, the one and only building that cannot be mistaken, because there is none like it: the monastery on the Mukhraka, on top of the Horn of Carmel.
Now I knew where I was in relation to Ramat-David. The airport and indeed the entire valley were very near, at eleven o’clock, just left of my aircraft’s nose. The hole was passed and gone. Should I descend into the clouds?
My body acted for me.
It was my body that left the seat straps alone and decided on its own to land, and my Super Mystere followed, veering a little to the right, to open distance from the base, and then lowered its nose into the clouds, accelerated, and turned left in the direction of the valley. And when this had been done, here I was, driving the aircraft in the clouds, flying on instruments.
In the dense fog I made one important decision: if at two thousand feet on the altimeter we were not out of the clouds, I will pull up and bail out. Again I tightened my belts, and mumbled words of farewell to my Super Mystere. I hoped that if I ejected it wouldn’t hit a populated area.
At 2,500 feet the clouds around me thinned, and instantly the air cleared. Close on my left side, I saw beyond a screen of drizzle, a runway, glinting like polished silver. Ho, Ramat-David.
And immediately a tight turn toward it. My speed slowed in the turn, and I lowered the landing gear. Clunk, and another clunk, in maddening slowness, the three wheels lowered one after another and locked. Three green lamps on, and the runway was already very near. Eucalyptus trees passed on both sides.
And so, still in the turn, my number 35 hit the runway heavily, wheel after wheel after wheel, and rolled to a stop.
When I opened my canopy and the cold drizzle caressed my face, a small Citroen Deux Chevaux car beeped at me from below. A heavyset man in pilot’s jacket came out and waved both hands at me.
I slid down the aircraft’s side, and he caught me like a bear and stood me firmly on the tarmac. Major Kvody, the base maintenance officer, a warm-hearted guy, enveloped me in a hug.
“You are not leaving before you have a drink at my place!” I didn’t know yet that he wasn’t talking about a cup of tea. “Then we’ll find a car and send you home to Hatzor.”
“Where is everybody?” I wondered, searching around for firefighters, ambulances, tow trucks, people, anything.
“Where is everybody? Sleeping,” the nice man said, dismissing me. “Come on. Your aircraft will be taken care of tomorrow. All in good time.” And suddenly he added a sentence from Ecclesiastes, totally unexpected from the muzhik he was: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
5
Doubletalk
AS ALL FIVE OF US WERE good enough, we soon found our niches in the Scorpions. This squadron had something unique and special. ZBB defined it as “another world,” and we, the five trainees, had fallen in love with the Scorpions, and together we wrote a song of praise that we sang loudly at the next air force’s Independence Day party: “Every Country Has a National Squadron, but the Scorpions Is International!”
Naturally, that song became the anthem of the squadron.
THE MOST PROMINENT DIFFERENCE was that in the Scorpions they flew speaking Hebrew.
Before, in flight school, the language was a pidgin aviation English built on terms and figures of speech left by foreign volunteers. Those volunteers came to Israel in 1948 to help in our fight for independence. They came from all over the world, mostly America, England, Australia, and South Africa, and at that time no one could fly speaking Hebrew. After the war most of them returned to their homelands, but some remained for a few years. And some of them—all World War II veterans and very respected—were still training cadets at Tel Nof. So it turned out that the actual language in use was aviation English. As a consequence, we were split in two; at ground school we were taught in Hebrew, but once we climbed into the cockpit, all the terms changed into foreign ones. This mixture of languages and terms caused many misunderstandings and a lot of confusion.
In one of the flights on the Harvard, my compass stopped functioning. My flight instructor in the backseat, Tsutsik, wanted to know what was going on. He roared at me, “Hey, is your compass US?”
“You—what?… I didn’t understand what you said, sir,” I mumbled.
The name “Tsutsik” was an affectionate nickname, one with an ironic twist. Not small (
“Look at your compass,” he said hoarsely, “and see whether it is US or not!”
I looked carefully on the compass and didn’t see anything. I felt like a complete idiot.
“Well?” the booming voice in my earphones made it clear that his patience was nearing an end.
Then I had an idea.
I loosened my seat straps and bent down forward, twisted around the stick, and stretched my neck forward ahead between my knees. Turning, I squeezed my head into the dark niche under the instrument panel and looked, squinting, at the underside of the instrument panel. The backs of the instruments were all there, looking like small black barrels. Fumbling with my hand, I found the compass box. An electric cable emerged from it like a pig’s tail.
