Remembering that, Horner said, “Let’s try the afterburner.” He moved the throttle up full, then pushed it outboard… and waited. He felt a shiver in the aircraft, and looked up.
The afterburner had lit after all, and the nose was actually coming up, though of course the tail was now probably inches above the ground. Behind him, the increased thrust hitting the sand looked like a Texas tornado. Slowly, the airplane staggered up out of the desert.
About that time, the tower officer, sensing trouble, put in a call: “Three, are you having a problem?”
“No,” Horner answered, “but I am returning to base.” And he flew home.
? Later, the events of that day hit him hard. He put the maneuver under his mind’s microscope, and he realized that the numbers didn’t compute. There was no way he could have recovered that airplane. It was physically impossible. The physics of the maneuver were such that it just wouldn’t work.
The answer wasn’t long in coming. What he’d just experienced out there over the North African desert was a message from God. Horner didn’t make a big issue of it, but he was a deeply religious man. God was saying to him, “Mister Fighter Pilot, you aren’t in charge of your life. I have a purpose for you, even though you don’t know what it is yet. So get on with your life and see what happens. And just remember: I’m the one in charge here. Any questions?”
It was as though God literally, physically, had kept his airplane from hitting the ground… at least that’s how he saw it. He had no other explanation that fit the facts.
After that Chuck Horner had changed fundamentally. Here is how he describes it:
INTO THE SKY
The Divine purpose is rarely easy to discern, but it is safe to say the obvious in Chuck Horner’s case: he was meant to be a fighter pilot. It might have come as a surprise, though, to anyone who had known him as a boy and young man, in Davenport, Iowa. They’d have had to look extremely close to see the few glimmers that showed before he fell into the Air Force ROTC during the course of slouching without much visible purpose through the University of Iowa.
When he’d gone away to college, he’d found classes a bore. He avoided most of them, and learned whatever he needed to keep a C average by picking the brains of anyone who actually attended. Otherwise, he worked at odd jobs, drank beer, sat around arguing with other students, and did his best to have a good time. Meanwhile, when the C average killed off what hopes he had of majoring in medicine, he needed to cast around for something to occupy his time after he graduated until he could figure out what he wanted to do with his life.
In those days, all male students at Iowa had to be enrolled in an ROTC program, and making the best of it, he’d opted for Air Force ROTC… they had fewer parades. As it turned out, he actually liked the experience, and even showed some leadership — he could drill the troops better than most, and he made marching fun for his guys by making it challenging rather than tedious. But the real pull of ROTC came to him almost out of the blue. He discovered flying.
Born on October 19, 1936, Chuck Horner was old enough for World War II to have made a strong impact on his young mind. The war had made aviation enthusiasts out of everyone, but for him it was more personal. His heroes were all pilots, especially his cousin, Bill Miles, the Jack Kennedy of the family — an all-state football player and straight-A student, tall and good-looking, with a winning smile, who always had time for little guys like Chuck. Everyone in the family looked up to Bill. When the war broke out, he’d joined the Army Air Corps and become a B-24 pilot.
One afternoon in 1944, when Chuck was eight years old, he came home from school to find his mother crying. Bill was dead, on a mission over Italy. A single 37mm antiaircraft artillery round had punched through the airplane’s skin beneath his seat and killed him instantly, the only casualty on the mission. The news devastated the whole family; and it left an eerie association in Chuck — death, heroism, and flying.
Later on, Chuck lost a second pilot hero.
Like Bill Miles, John Towner was a man young boys idolized. Handsome and self-assured, John had also been an all-state football player in high school; and he’d gone on to play football at the university. In 1952, when Chuck was a sophomore in high school, John had graduated; married the youngest of Chuck’s three older sisters, Pud[2]; entered the Air Force; and started fighter pilot training. Basic gunnery training was taught at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. Shortly after Christmas of 1953, John was killed on the air- to-ground bombing range at Luke, when his F-84 aircraft failed to pull out of a dive-bomb pass. Once again, the family was devastated; and once again came the eerie association for Chuck of death, heroes, and flying.
It didn’t turn him against flying, however. He already had the gift possessed by every successful fighter pilot — the ability to put death in a box, and keep it separate.
It wasn’t until Air Force ROTC, however, that he really got hooked. It was in ROTC that he first spent serious time in the air — first in a single-engine Ryan Navion piloted by one of his ROTC instructors (who, to Horner’s delight, liked to push the normally staid executive aircraft into loops and rolls), and then in a little Aeronca Champion, in which he learned to fly solo. Flying captured him then — he was
? Chuck Horner had met Mary Jo Gitchell, two years his junior, when they’d both been in high school; and they’d continued dating, with some ups and downs, in college. Though they were not at all alike, he knew from the start that she was the right woman for him. He was shy; she loved to meet people. He hated to talk; she could spin words out of the simplest event into rich detail, bubbling over with enthusiasm.
By the time he left college, Chuck knew he wanted to make the Air Force his life, but he also knew that such
