Night Flight

The telephone call to alert me for my flight is due any minute, so I check my bags one last time to ensure that I have not forgotten anything. My duffle bag is larger than my daughter and it is stuffed to overflowing: personal clothing for hot and cold climates, running gear, and a spare flight suit. I put my backpack with my laptop in it by the door and check through another bag containing my flying gear: dog tags, flight line badge, gun card, passport, immunization records, electronic and paper flight publications, and my David Clark headset. My lunchbox is packed with enough food to get me through the day, including enough coffee to get me through the night. I’m sure I will forget something – I always do – but hopefully it will be something I can live without for the next two weeks.

The call comes, and I am soon dressed in my desert tan flight suit and heading out the door. It is one of those perfect Indian summer days in the Pacific Northwest as I drive to the base; the sky is a crisp clear blue without a trace of a cloud and the trees are showing achingly vivid shades of red, orange and yellow. I think wryly that when I return home, I will be raking up the dead brown leaves and wishing we had more evergreen trees instead of deciduous ones.

I unload my bags by the crew bus stop and head inside the briefing room. My crew soon gathers: Lt Col T and Capt K, my co-pilots; MSgt B and TSgt M, my loadmasters, and an active duty crew chief I have not flown with before. When we reach Germany, he will continue with the jet and a new crew to its final destination, but the rest of us will earn some time off. During the briefing, we discuss how we will handle various problems: aborted takeoffs, engine failures after takeoff, emergency ground evacuation, aircraft security, and other details we hope never happen. I sign off our paperwork and we are off to the bus.

After dropping off Capt K and MSgt B at the aircraft to start our preflight checks, we stop at the Crew Launch Facility, otherwise known as the One Stop. It is only a one stop shop for the active duty crews, since this is the second stop for my crew of reservists. While I am obtaining our flight dispatch paperwork, other crew members are picking up our helmets, weapons, E&E kit, tactics binder, three flight publication kits, and classified material. With our A-bags, trip kit, and mission kit we picked up at the squadron, we now have enough gear for an African safari or a Himalayan trek.

I file the flight plan and we are all off to the aircraft. Since our dispatchers did not include enough fuel for a weather alternate for our East Coast en route destination, we must add a little bit more. After checking the maintenance forms, I load the flight plan in the computer and verify the preflight is complete. There are a few maintenance issues that remain unsolved; the toilet seat in the lavatory is missing, and a minor brake issue. They cap the brake, but they balk at the toilet – can we take it as is? But we insist it must be fixed – this jet cannot be away from home station for a week after carrying numerous passengers and troops without a toilet seat. The entire aircraft would smell like a sewer. Supposedly, this aircraft has been a hangar queen for the last few weeks; we can expect more problems until we turn the jet over to a new crew in Germany.

We call for clearance, and run our checklists to start the engines. Another quick briefing by Capt K, who will fly the first leg, and we taxi toward the runway as the sun’s dying rays accentuate Mt. Rainier towering over the field a mere 50 miles away. Even though we will be a late departure, it is satisfying that we will soon be airborne. Getting everything to come together for a home station departure in a timely manner is like herding cats; there is always something you can never prepare for.

After being cleared for takeoff by the tower, we line up on the runway, its lights glittering like a Christmas tree stretching out before us as the sun descends beyond the distant Olympic Mountains. Capt K pushes up the power, releases the brakes, and calls for the autothrottles to be engaged as we quickly pick up speed. At 110 knots, I say, “Rotate”, and he pulls the stick slightly aft and we lift off into the still air of the evening. With a positive rate of climb, I raise the gear as the lights of nearby Tacoma flicker like amber gems. The headlights of cars on I-5 pass beneath us as we climb into the gathering night. We clean up the aircraft by raising the flaps and retracting the slats as Seattle departure control clears us to climb to 15,000 feet.

It is a beautiful night. The shadow of the earth arcs into space above us as we pass a nearly invisible Mt. Rainier. But it cannot hide from our radar and our Terrain Awareness and Warning System; it glows as a slowly diminishing electronic green blob on our flight displays as we continue climbing to the east. We level off at FL 350 (35,000 feet) and settle down for the nearly five hour flight to the East Coast while the nation sleeps below us. Cities and towns are fairly sparse in Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas, each easily identified by ocher grids of light in a sea of blackness. The radios are mostly quiet as we are handed off from one ATC facility to another: Seattle Center, Salt Lake, and Minneapolis. We query our controller about the Game 5 score; it's 2-2 in the 6th and postponed due to rain in Philly.

Minneapolis appears on the horizon as a vortex of light; it’s the largest city on our route of flight so far. Tendrils of light from suburban communities follow the interstates toward the Twin Cities like a spider web and we can almost make out the dark outlines of where the Mississippi River carves through the metropolis. Even in the dark spaces between the highways, there are thousands of lights, but they are scattered like stars fallen from the sky.

There are low clouds obscuring Milwaukee from our view as we approach Lake Michigan, but Chicago just to the south is clearly visible by the curve of its city lights along the lake shore. More clouds as we fly south of Detroit and Cleveland and soon there are no more lights from the ground at all. We are in a void, our radio our only link to the world beneath us. Soon, we are cleared for our descent. Since there are reports of icing below us, we turn on our anti-icing equipment and descend into the clouds.

Rain and snow fly past us; it is a nasty night. Our destination is reporting winds gusting up to 25 knots with rain, 1000’ overcast, and a temperature of 39 degrees. The landing data from the computer gives us a 23 knot crosswind, so Capt K will earn his paycheck tonight – our max crosswind is 30 knots. We are vectored to an ILS final, and as we descend down its glide slope, the airbase appears from the storm. But K puts in his crosswind controls and makes a nice landing. We taxi to the ramp and shut down the engines.

It’s nearly 0400 (4 am in civilian speak) by the time we turn the jet over to maintenance, turn in our equipment for overnight storage, and arrive at our rooms for the night, that is except for the crew chief, who must stay at the jet to pin a thrust reverser that won’t work. Everybody is tired, but we stay up for a few beers and maybe a snack – it’s our informal debrief. Yet we don’t talk shop, we talk football, baseball, politics, and perhaps a little about trips we’ve flown together in the past. We’ll try to sleep during most of the day, given we have another night flight tonight, our oceanic crossing to Europe.

Then we’ll do it all again.