Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

close, his dive angle’s too steep, and he’ll hit the ground while trying to pull up from his firing pass on the target.

That day there was a ghibly blowing — a sandstorm. Visibility was bad, less than a mile, which meant each pilot could see where he was in relation to the ground and could sometimes dimly spot the location of the aircraft ahead of him, but it was next to impossible to see the target itself or determine how the aircraft were spaced in relation to each other and the target. In other words, it was a day they shouldn’t have been on the range.

According to the procedure they normally followed, when a pilot made a turn, he’d call it over the radio —“turning in,” “turning off,” “turning downwind,” “turning base.” Most of these calls were for the information of the other pilots, to let everyone know where he was. But the “turning base” call was more serious. That call let the safety observer in the tower know he was about to approach the target. When the observer heard that, he would be watching the aircraft ahead of the caller making his firing pass, which meant he was also ready to hear the next pilot’s turning-in hot call. Then he would give the pilot, or deny him, clearance to fire. For instance, if another airplane was in the way, he would say, “Make a dry pass” or “You’re not cleared.” And then the pilot would break off his attack, fly through level, and resume the correct spacing.

At Wheelus was a nuclear target circle, next to the conventional bomb circle and strafe targets. This circle had a long run-in bulldozed in the desert that served as a guideline about where to fly when the fighters were in the strafe pattern. On the run-in line was a smaller bulldozed line, more like a short streak across it, that was located 13,000 feet out from the nuclear bomb bull’s-eye. This mark was exactly the right place to start the turn to base leg to set up a pass at the strafe target. Normally, pilots making the gunnery run would turn base over that same streak. On this day, though, the pilot (number two) ahead of Horner got lost. Instead of turning base over the bulldozed lines in the desert, he kept flying away from the target and the proper place to begin his base leg turn.

Horner, meanwhile, was waiting for him to call base, as he himself was closing in on the base turning point. Finally, the call came, “Turning base.” Meaning: Horner was looking for him on base to his left front, expecting him to be moving toward the final attack roll-in point. Of course, he wasn’t anywhere near there; he was in front of Horner, far from the base leg and the target.

As Horner searched the roll-in point ahead, he had to watch his airspeed. If he got too fast, he would overrun the man he thought was ahead of him; and if he got too slow he wouldn’t have the right airspeed (about 400 knots) for shooting his guns — the sight picture was based on airspeed and the angle of attack of the airplane. Still, he had no other choice; he slowed down, slowed down, slowed down… waiting for the other pilot to call “turn in.” Finally, Horner turned base — since the other guy had to be pretty close to his turn in by then — and hit the power, still waiting for number two to call his turn in to the target. A moment later, at last, number two called, “Turning in.” Horner scanned out toward the target, looking for him. He’s got to be shooting, he thought. He’s got to be shooting. By then, he’d reached the point where he himself had to turn in, still staring out left in the direction of the target. Out of the corner of his vision to his right, he saw something screaming toward him fast and close.

“Shit!” Horner cried out, instinctively pulling hard back on his stick; his F-100 went nose up and slowed — the way a hand does if held flat outside a car window with the wind slapping against it — and the other guy blasted through the space Horner’s aircraft was about to occupy. There was Horner, mushing ahead with his nose high, his plane acting like a water skier when the tow-boat slows down too much. But that didn’t last long, because the nose snapped through and the airplane flipped. Now he was staring at the ground, 3,500 feet below, his airplane in a stall.

Super Sabers were equipped with leading edge slats that worked by gravity; at slow airspeed they came out and gave the aircraft more lift. However, one of his slats had stuck — sand had clogged it — while the other one had deployed. As a result, one wing had a lot more lift than the other, which caused his aircraft to snap-roll and enter a fully stalled condition where there was insufficient airspeed to make the flight controls responsive. His aircraft had just become a metal anvil heading toward the earth. At normal flying speeds, the tail should have provided sufficient control to recover from the dive he had entered, but at his now-slow airspeed, the elevator surface in the tail was not effective.

He said to himself, Okay, pull up. The stick went all the way back to his lap. Nothing happened. The nose didn’t move. He glanced over to the airspeed indicator, and it read close to zero — fifty knots. For all life-supporting purposes, that was zero. He said to himself, Screw me. I’m out of here, and reached over to grab the ejection handles. But then pride took over.

You know, he told himself, if you eject from this airplane, you will never be able to drink with the guys in the bar again. You owe it to yourself to try and get it out. You always do.

When a pilot breaks a stall, he puts the stick all the way forward in order to pick up airspeed, and that way get some control surfaces working for him.

Horner did that, then tried to bring the nose up… and nothing happened.

Meanwhile, all he could see was ground screaming up at him, surrounding him, all about him. It was too late to punch out with the ejection seat. And nothing he had done was bringing the plane under control.

At that moment, he went through the death experience. I’m going to die, he said to himself. There is no way an airplane will recover from this shit. It’s not capable of doing it. I’m going to die out here in the shitty, nowhere desert, splattered like roadkill on the ground, and I’m not going to get out of this.

Two things happened then, both of them a normal consequence of the sudden onset of adrenaline pumping through one’s system as death nears:

First, outrage. He was filled with fury that his wife, Mary Jo, was pregnant with their first child and he would never see it. Second, time slowed. The fire pulse — the adrenaline — was pushing him to high speed. The data in his head was spinning through like mad. Even so, he was preternaturally calm. It was like one of those old science fiction stories, in which somebody takes a potion that speeds time up. An hour in speeded-up time is a second in the world’s time.

There he was, not far from the ground, certain he was about to die, feeling simultaneous outrage at dying and absolute peace and surrender, and time had slowed to a near stop. He had never felt so calm and serene in his life.

Somewhere in this timelessness, he somehow rose out of the top of his head and was suspended there, looking down at himself, sitting in the cockpit. As he stared down at himself, he thought, What can I do to get out of this? I don’t really want to die here.

Meanwhile, the airplane was sinking to the ground, at something like 150 to 200 miles an hour. He tried again to pull the nose up, but the nose rose only a little bit, an inch at a time. He was still going to hit the ground.

A memory came to him. He was sitting in the coffee bar back at the squadron in Nellis AFB in Nevada, where he’d spent three months in top-off training and nuclear certification before assignment to a fighter wing. As he sat with his cup of coffee, two instructor pilots were talking about a student in an F-100 who’d been turning base to final on a landing approach. At 300 feet above the ground, he’d let the nose of his aircraft get above the horizon, thus producing adverse yaw, and the plane had snapped over. By then, of course, the airplane had used up all its energy, which meant there was not enough airspeed to recover.

“What about the afterburner?” the instructor in the back cockpit had asked himself, and instinctively slammed the throttle into it, knowing that was their only chance to live.

The F-100 engine was not supposed to light in afterburner at slow speeds; and ordinarily it wouldn’t. Instead it would shoot about twenty feet of flame out the air intake in the front of the jet, and there’d be a violent explosion that would physically knock one’s feet off the floor. This was called a compressor stall, which — though it might seem odd — didn’t harm the engine. If a pilot happened to cause the engine to compressor-stall, he then pulled the throttle to clear the engine, then brought the throttle back up as he got more airspeed and more air going through the engine. Once he had these, he could try lighting the afterburner again.

Back at Nellis, when the instructor had thrown his throttle into afterburner, the engine shouldn’t have lit. It should have experienced a compressor stall. But it hadn’t. It had lit, and given him half again as much thrust. And that thrust had saved his life.