A-10s, unlike the StrikeEagle, did not have radar, could not see me, and probably were not thinking about me down in the dirt with them as I buzzed confidently eastward in my tube and fabric-covered taildragger.
The 23rd Fighter Group, known as the Flying Tigers, had two squadrons of these ground support jets at Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville, and were administratively attached to my base, Seymour Johnson, some 60 miles north east. Constantly training at low altitude, the Fayetteville airspace was their home and I was crossing one of their low level training routes. Right now, all I knew was they were out here and they were a threat to me as I flew along at the bottom of their altitude limit, and mine, on my way home from Spartanburg.
The smell of a hog farm.
The smell of a hog farm. I rocked the plane left to glance down through my open sliding window at a lagoon, reddish-brown with barns full of hogs adjacent- an occasional pungent North Carolina interruption from the usual colorful fall panorama.
As I rolled back level, I reached up to confirm my strobe light switch on and blinking as I caught the lead of a four ship of A-10s, in a box formation coming at me from left 10 o’clock.
“They are as slow as me,” I thought as the first Hog swept by my left wing, the second directly in front of me. I caught the trailing two-ship behind them, apparently unable to see me as I rocked my wings.
No change. Hard to see a small plane like mine.
I rolled hard left with rudder to kill the lift and jammed my stick straight forward, diving sideways towards the orange tree in front of me as I saw the wingman abruptly roll left away from me and pull up, and then his flight lead followed as I looked up through my greenhouse glass on top of my cockpit at his cross-shaped form fly over the top.
As I transitioned from the dive and pitched up hard right, putting the trailing hog in the pipper of my imaginary HUD, I watched the flight lead gather his scattered jets back into a box and proceed southwest towards whatever training objective they sought.
No comments:
Post a Comment