There is a small clock on the right side of the cockpit console in an F-16.
The timepiece is almost lost amid the array of instruments and controls. It's not even electric - you have to wind it. And oddly enough, an old fighter-pilot axiom says the first thing to do in a flying crisis is "wind the clock," even if it is only wound figuratively.Lt. Col. Tom Ward survived a near head-on crash with another F-16 six years ago. He'll tell you he not only wound the clock before ejecting, he remembered a couple of movies.
"Winding the clock" is pilot talk for taking time to think before reacting. If the answer to the emergency isn't immediately evident, winding the clock is a physical action that reminds the pilot to clear his head and consider his options before reaching for the yellow, rubber ejection handle between his knees.
A pilot's first action in some cases is deciding whether he has time to wind the clock.
In 1990, Ward, then a major, was on a night intercept training mission 26 miles southwest of Wendover with the 466th Fighter Squadron, the flying element of the Air Force Reserve's 419th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base. So was Maj. Ronald Zimmerman, who was then a captain. Both pilots are still with the squadron, with Ward being its commander.
Flying directly toward another airplane is something pilots avoid in civil aviation but is part of the training in tactical aviation. Regulations say fighter pilots are to turn away from each other when they're at least 500 feet apart. That's almost two football fields but with a combined speed somewhere between 600 and 1,000 mph, two planes can cover that last 500 feet in a hurry.
"All the rules in the world sometimes don't help you when you're walking down the hall toward someone and you both start to tap dance trying to get out of each other's way, and you have to stop to keep from running into each other. That's exactly what happened to us," Ward said.
Only stopping wasn't an option.
Ward relates some of his own experience in the "This could happen to you" narrative he uses when teaching other pilots.
"There is an instant in your mind when the (other) airplane is going right underneath you where you think `Did we miss?' and the time compression and extrapolation begins and your mind begins to work at what appears to be a much faster rate. And there seems like an extremely long heartbeat and you hear this sickening `whomp' and the airplane goes head over heels out of control and you know `No, we didn't. We hit and we hit hard.' The next thing you realize you're upside down, you're hanging in the straps. As you look out of the airplane around you, you see nothing but fire everywhere," he said.
The ultimate decision for Ward was obvious. "I am going to have to leave this airplane."
"Your training says to you, `Do I have to pull the handle right now?' " That's where the movies come in. Your experience clicks in and you suddenly say, `I have seen this movie before.' "
Case studies from previous F-16 mishaps fill 150-pages in the emergency procedures section of the Dash-1 technical manual. Training sessions, which Ward teaches, present scenarios both real and imaginary. Even the "There I was . . ." stories at the bar help build a bank of knowledge pilots can draw on - a "movie" pilots can remember to guide them to the end of an unexpected scenario.
The important thing is remembering how the movie ends.
"The simple-minded fighter pilot approach is `I've seen this movie before. It had a happy ending - that's the way I want to go.' Or, `It had a sad ending. It's time for me to get out of Dodge, separate from this fight, get away from that airplane, get away from that thunderstorm, whatever the case may be. Those experiences, and that base of corporate knowledge, makes making any decision, including an ultimate decision to get out of an airplane, much more automatic.' "
Ward's jet was still spinning out of control, bouncing his head off the canopy in lateral "G," meaning it was throwing him from side to side.
"Is it time to eject in the midst of all this? Your training says, `Wait a second.' And although you don't go through the entire process, in just that instant you have said, `I have seen this movie and it had a sad ending.' Because what that is telling you in fighter pilot cryptic-ese is that I've seen those safety reports where an individual ejected under lateral G. Because his head was over here and his body was over there when he pulled the handle, he went out and broke his neck, or he ruptured `X' number of disks, whatever. And your brain says to you: `Not under lateral G if I don't have to.'
"Then your training says, `Am I going to die in the next two seconds if I don't eject?' As I look out the window, all I see is fire. And I'm upside down. But is there fire in the cockpit? No. And your training says, `Wait another couple of seconds.' And you wait another couple of seconds."
Time to wind the clock.
Zimmerman's situation was different. "He had fire in the cockpit. Some of the fire and flame actually came through the environmental control system ducting, and he had some flame in the cockpit that he saw. That changed his movie. It became an `I can't wait another couple of seconds. This is imminent.' And he pulled the handle and got right out.
"How long did I sit with the airplane? I can't tell you because of the time compression. Any estimate that I give you would probably be bogus. But I sat there long enough to know that upside down . . . lateral G . . . wait a second . . . wait a second . . . the side-to-side motion stopped . . . from hanging in the parachute straps, meaning negative G, meaning upside down, I fell back into the seat. At that point I knew, `OK, I am somewhat right-side up.' The lateral G was gone. I'm sitting here in a relatively good ejection position. At that point the fighter pilot brain says: `I've seen this movie before, and it had a happy ending, and I pulled the handle.' "
Ward was not hurt. Zimmerman suffered second-degree burns to his neck and first-degree flash burns to his face from the cockpit fire. Both were treated at the Hill hospital, and Ward was sent home later in the evening of the crash.
Part of being a successful fighter pilot is knowing when there isn't time to wait.
"If you're out there on the defensive and you're looking over your shoulder at some guy and you're pulling the airplane around at 6 or 7 G's, and your head instead of weighing 40 pounds weighs six or seven times that, and oh, by the way, he just shot something at you because you just saw it come off the rail, you don't do your most creative thinking in that situation. So you better have thought about it beforehand so that the decisions that you make at that instant, though they may appear to be snap decisions, are actually previously made based on thinking about it, based on training."
The crash involving Ward and Zimmerman made them a liability to the Air Force Reserve. Two $16 million airplanes were now smoldering scrap scattered in pieces in the desert. But the military saved two pilots who have probably cost the military $6 million apiece in training and salaries - maybe more.
The value the pilots would be as teachers would be realized later. Moral support would come from comrades - but not immediately. The focus, at first, was on the liability.
"There's a period when you have to concentrate (on the investigation) and you can't really sit down with the rest of your fighter pilot brethren and say, `Let me tell you the whole story,' " Ward said. So there is a period where, in spite of your best efforts, this process generates speculation, generates rumor, that sort of thing."
Fortunately for Ward, there were other pilots who knew what he was going through.
"Shortly after I had my mishap, 10 days or two weeks or something like that, I got two or three pieces of mail, out of the blue, all of them from people I'd never seen or heard from or anything. One of them was a little card from an individual who had jumped out of a plane before. And it said something along the lines of `Sorry to hear about your mishap. Extremely glad to hear that you got out of it in good shape. You're going to be wading through the swamp for a few weeks, but keep your chin up. Don't worry about it. Life goes on. It'll look better in a few weeks.'
"Boy, I needed that."
Most of the fighter pilots in Ward's Reserve squadron fly for one of the airlines. Ward flies for Delta.
"I called Delta the next day (after the crash) and said, `Um, I'm supposed to go out on a trip today. Although I'm probably physically well enough to do it, it probably wouldn't make good sense at this point. How about you take me off that trip and give me a couple three, four days to get my mind spun back down to normal speed?'
"The reaction I got from leadership down there was `Yeah, OK. That's no problem. Fine. Are you OK? Do you need anything? Can we do anything for you?' "
Three or four days later he got a call back. "Are you ready to go back and fly? Yes? Feel good about it? All right come on, we need you."
"I went back flying with Delta about five days after the accident. What I got from them that I needed was: `You're still a pilot. You're still a good pilot. We still need you in this operation. Come on and go to work.' "
The military investigation into the crash lasted almost three months. Neither pilot was blamed.
Down the road, pilots tend to seek out others who have had to make the ultimate decision to bail out.
Capt. Scott O'Grady was on patrol over Bosnia when his F-16 was hit by a surface-to-air missile, and he bailed out over hostile territory last year. His bailout, survival on the ground in hostile territory and rescue made him America's most recent military hero.
O'Grady moved from active duty to the Air Force Reserve and is now in Ward's squadron. Ward said he hasn't had a chance to talk to O'Grady yet, "except on a very general nature," but he plans to.
Ward said his crash experience made him a more effective trainer of pilots who have a tendency to feel invincible.
"An individual who wants to be a fighter pilot has to have a number of things he does well," Ward said. "One of the things, however, that he must have, is he must have an aggressive nature. And every time he straps that airplane on he better be convinced he can beat anybody he comes up against, or he's no good to me, he's no good to this nation.
"However, this invincibility can also be a liability. The liability side of it is that we do generate a certain bullet-proof atmosphere," he said.
The first thing Ward was able to tell other fighter pilots after his crash was, "It can happen to you."
"They'll listen because it's happened to an individual that is close to them, that they have flown with. They know that individual. They know his capability. They know his reputation. They know his desire to do it and do it right.
"It puts the right type of a chink in invincibility armor. It makes the fighter pilot re-evaluate, momentarily or however long it is, the realization that what we do is dangerous. And that in spite of his best efforts, he could just as simply and easily be in the situation where he might have to jump out of the airplane."
Once a pilot knows he's not invincible, the teaching can begin.
"There's a period after that `It can happen to me' realization, I think, where just simply the retelling of the war story helps generate the experience base we're talking about - another movie that he can put in his bag of tricks."