Upt2

If you have read all my war stories you have seen me allude to this experience at least twice. I felt disbelief and a cautious rush that the Air Force would hand me the keys to a T-38 with orders to burn the gas out of it, but they didn’t mean all the gas. Here is how I wound up in my first low fuel situation, which is always scary no matter how it happens. I started to tell this story in my previous prose (fair enough, pontification), but I thought it was better to provide a brief understanding of the Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) environment first and I chose to separate them to keep the length under control.
Hopefully you got a chance to read UPT1 and came away appreciating the intensity of every task in UPT, why you could never let your guard down, and how that turned a fantastic opportunity that looked like play into a mind-game resembling work. By the way, I have never flown a jet that actually needed
keys; most could easily be stolen if you knew which knobs to turn.

There was a milestone in the T-38 syllabus beyond flying formation solo called “team”, which meant that one of your classmates would be observing from your back seat. On a “dual” ride an instructor might seem to let an advanced student make all the decisions, but that is just an illusion. Solo and team rides were not only confidence builders, they were the only way to accomplish true aircraft commander experience. My good friend Larry was the classmate assigned to my back seat on this day. The instructor in the other airplane was named Green, and he was. Freshly out of instructor
training as his first assignment, he was in his early twenties, not much older than us.

We did all the formation stuff of a typical sortie, including a fingertip takeoff , wingwork, echelon turns, rejoins, tactical, close trail and extended trail. As any Thunderbird airshow announcer will explain, their maneuvers are based upon training that every Air Force pilot receives, and these were those maneuvers. We were taught two types of close formation, both of which you have seen at the airshows; fingertip was just to the left or right of lead, and close trail was directly behind and under with barely any nose to tail separation. We practiced wingwork in each position where lead’s responsibility was to find a power setting to maintain energy level and smoothly maneuver throughout the flight regime, seeing as much as 120 degrees of bank and airspeeds from nearly supersonic to almost stall. The wingman’s job was simply to stay in position relative to lead, and the inputs to do that were the same whether upside down, right side up, or anywhere in-between. The wingman did not have to know, and often couldn’t know, what attitude he was in other than to deduce it by how many Gs he was pulling or other clues like seeing a small Mississippi town above the lead and blue sky below him. Likewise, he only had clues to guess his airspeed like firmness of the controls or the relative quiet of slow speed. Even the best pilots did not dare to take eyes off of lead long enough to check the gauges.

This was evidenced a year or so later on the sad and last day the USAF Thunderbirds used the T-38. Something went wrong with lead’s airplane on the bottom of a loop and the rest of the four-ship followed him into the smoking hole. Reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Thunderbirds_Indian_Springs_Diamond_Crash

All of our maneuvering was done at high altitude. Our practice areas were a bit like a life saver surrounding the base, meaning with nothing in the middle directly over the base. We would be assigned a sector with a floor and a ceiling to do our maneuvers and an Air Force radar controller would alert us
to any traffic that had the poor judgment to enter the military operating area (MOA), which was rare. We usually ended our workout with extended trail, which was a pure hoot. Unlike the maneuvers above, lead’s job was to be anything but smooth. We would take spacing to about 1000 feet behind, and
lead would try to shake us from his tail. My job was to maintain my spacing by using cutoff, or fly a smaller circle to close the spacing, or a larger one to back off. These were not ordinary horizontal circles, if he was pulling 3 Gs and I was pulling 4, mine would be a smaller circle. Pulling more Gs came at a price because it created more drag relative to the airplane you were trying to catch, so conserving energy level was part of the skill. Any aerobatic attitude was fair game with generally 3Gs or greater throughout the event. It was your basic dogfight, where the goal is to get into the bandit’s six o’clock position for the shot, while he is trying to get into your six with the same thing in mind. It was very high on the fun vs. difficulty scale; but it was at this point on this day where my troubles began.

There is a little more latitude to crosscheck inside the cockpit during all this and I happened to notice a yellow master caution light. I called for lead to “knock-it-off” because I had a problem and he quickly offered to rejoin on me while I took a closer look. The light had come on for low fuel, and what the
gauges told me really magnified my pucker factor; one of my two tanks was bone dry. I would not characterize my reaction as panic because I still think my analysis of the problem was valid, with three distinct possibilities:

It could simply be a benign indication problem, but it would be foolish to assume that.
It could be a leak in that tank and now I have lost half my fuel. If so, however unlikely, I better get this thing pointed towards home base right now.
It could be my worst fear that the fuel in the other tank was trapped, and the last 15 minutes of flight was fueled exclusively from this tank, and I was about to flame out.

Instinctively, I looked straight down to see what I would be parachuting into. I would know within seconds if my worst fear was realized. We were taught about a failure on the more basic T-37 that could result in trapped fuel with a double float-switch malfunction, and we learned a memory item to get easy
access to that fuel. They attempted to unteach this when we got to T-38 systems class by saying that there was no scenario that would cause trapped fuel. The engineer in me did not believe that any more then than it does now, maybe my situation was about to cause a re-write of the systems class. It was what it was, and the only thing I could do about it was to start improving my position by heading back to base. Larry was back there seeing the whole thing, but we both knew what the procedures were, and I was proceeding by the book. (Remember what Ernest K. Gann said, RULE BOOKS ARE PAPER). The first thing I needed to do was to obtain clearance back to the base. Per
procedure, I labeled my irregularity with the appropriate flag-word, declaring a “Precautionary” rather than “Emergency” for the moment; each had a defined meaning. After that I was assigned an altitude and a heading to fly. The next thing, I was supposed to do was to call the supervisor of flying (SOF) and
advise him of my situation. All frequency changes were more complicated in formation. Since we only had one transmitter with a “guard” backup receiver, switching the frequencies went something like this:

“Torch 12 flight request off frequency, monitor guard, report back up”
“ Torch 12 flight, approved as requested”
“ Torch 12 flight go button four”
“Two”
“Torch 12 flight check”

I don’t remember if he checked in, probably not based on what happened next, or maybe I purposely left him on the other frequency. The age-old joke proclaims that the only thing the wingman is supposed to say on the radio is “Two”, and “Lead, you’re on fire.” I began telling the SOF about my situation. By now the fuel indication on the empty tank was returning to normal, virtually confirming the more benign scenario. Meanwhile my wingman was off to
my right rocking his wings like he was about to fall off his tight rope. Next he started coming my way with his wings in full rock. I thought he was going to hit me and I broke mid-sentence with the SOF and said “Two, breakout!” ( a seldom used last resort maneuver to avoid collision); it turns out he was not on my frequency and I had told the SOF to break out. Instead, he continued his path to the left, passing right in front of me; I was looking right down his burners as he passed ahead of me! I screamed to Larry rhetorically with a voice that was elevated by a few octaves, “What the bleep is he doing?” (Lord forgive me for the bad word I said).

Now my wingman was forward of my position and off to my left, a very poor vantage to fulfill his duty of maintaining position off of me, but before I could formulate a plan for this very bizarre and unexplainable behavior, he started moving back to the right, with his wings still rocking wildly, and I had to devote my full attention once again to keep him from hitting me as his burners passed right in front of me, again! “Did you see that Larry? What the bleep is he doing?” (more bad words). The SOF must have really wondered what was going on up there with whatever I did say on the radio. Now I was truly agitated. As he stopped line abreast on my right side, he signaled me back to the frequency of the radar controller. Forget about any Air Force jargon, when I got there I simply gasped “What are you doing?” He responded with something about going across the T-37 areas. It took me a second to get it as I couldn’t imagine why I was having to devote my attention to avoid hitting my wingman rather than returning to base under these circumstances. After a short time, I began to understand that somehow he remained on the controller’s frequency a split second longer, in time to hear a change in our instructions to prevent our formation from blitzing right through the T-37 areas.

My reaction was a little bit like, so what? For all they knew, I had only minutes before being forced to bail out of the airplane due to fuel starvation. Probably not, and that is why I chose Precautionary over Emergency, but at this point nobody knew. I am not trying to claim that I had enough situational awareness to realize that I would be crossing the T-37 areas, but I had left the frequency with controller’s consent. That controller had the ability to alert the T-37s to the presence of a Precautionary aircraft, and unless I had a switch in the wrong position, the controller could have contacted me on guard frequency. I suppose there was a remote possibility that a mid-air collision with a T-37 could have happened despite all the redundancies, but is that any reason for my wingman to practically assure that fate by hitting me first?
Once we were all back on the same frequency, some measure of normalcy was restored. I probably didn’t attempt to get back to the SOF frequency to finish briefing him considering how it went the first time.

Soon enough we were back in the pattern. I would have been given priority over the other T-38s and there were no surprises. The normal pattern starts with the “Initial” leg, which was directly above final approach until halfway down the runway, followed by a 180 degree pitch-out using a maximum of
90 degrees of bank to “closed downwind”. Here is where I slowed, and extended gear and flaps. The whole time I was saying to Larry, “Did you see that?” “Do you think that was called for?” “He said I could go off frequency!” “What was he thinking?”, and so on. Half way around the final turn, just about the time that I normally would push the throttles up to stop the slowing, they came up by themselves! I was going to push them up, I can assure you. By now I knew just where to put them to get the desired power setting, and when.

So, hold that thought while we explore the implications of what just happened:
a) More pilots have died during the final turn in a T-38 than in any other maneuver, and that is by a wide margin. The airplane was designed in the early 1960s to train for other unforgiving high performance wings in the USAF inventory, like the long-gone F-104 nicknamed “Widowmaker”. Other airplanes will shake and buffet when approaching an aerodynamic stall, alerting the careless pilot to react aggressively to correct the situation. But buffet was normal and required in the T-38 all the way around the final turn and on final in order to fly slow enough, which was still around 170 MPH with full flaps. We were taught to distinguish between the desired amount of buffet and elephants dancing on the wings. Even with the desired amount of buffet, the airplane could be flown into an unrecoverable situation indicated only by descent rate. A careless pilot could be on-speed with a normal pitch attitude and a 6000 feet per minute (FPM) descent rate; this could exceed the ability to escape even with full afterburners without a timely and correct go-around. The ejection seat would be certain death in that situation because even if it shot you out at 1000 FPM, you would still be heading toward the ground at 5000 FPM, well outside of the ejection envelope. Believe me, I took every bit of the allotted time learning the final turn, but I did learn it, complete with a healthy respect for what could happen.
b) Next you must know that pilots are like lawyers in the sense that they are familiar with many past cases. Once a T-38 crew had reason to believe they had a broken flap-slat interconnect. This was a malfunction that would make it impossible to control the pitch while configuring to land. One thing led
to another resulting in one pilot pushing on the stick while the other was pulling. Of course they cannot see each other in the T-38 and they each thought they had jammed flight controls. They ejected safely out of a perfectly good airplane. Conversely there is Eastern flight 401, the L-1011 that crashed in the everglades because of a light bulb. Nobody was flying the airplane, everybody thought that somebody else was. The moral of this is that it is very important to know who is flying the airplane, and only one pilot
at a time should be manipulating the controls.

Now, Larry should have known this; but my throttles moved, and I didn’t do it. I interrupted my ranting about Lt Green and asked, “Larry, did you just move my throttles?” (his were interconnected with mine). His response was something like, “Well your mind seemed so preoccupied by what happened back there that I wasn’t sure you were going to remember”. In other words, “Yes.”

I assured him that I was just about to reposition them and let the whole event speak for itself. In his defense Larry would have certainly cited paragraph “a” for his lack of a wait-and-see attitude. There was enough learning to go around without adding my two cents on that one, including his point that I should not allow myself to be so rattled about something that was now history while I still have an important job to do. Save that for when the chocks are in place. I can’t resist putting down one other observation from that final turn that did not escape my attention. There was a time when I doubted that I was ever going to get it right, now I was doing it so mindlessly that I could carry on a separate conversation. Hiding therein, as improper as it might have been, was a very personal accomplishment.