Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

4
Fly Like an Egyptian
THIRTY MINUTES PAST SUNRISE, THE FIGHTER’S WHEELS RETRACTED and the F-16 was
airborne over central Egypt. It was 0601:45 on a Wednesday in January 1992.
I glanced rapidly between the outside world and the HUD’s green digital
airspeed reading. A ruined Soviet-era bomber, a fence line, and even a small
crumbling pyramid all flashed past as the dirty runway unrolled beneath the
speeding jet.
This was one of the beautiful moments of being a fighter pilot. Thundering down
a piece of concrete in the calm, cool, early-morning air. Strapped into an intimately
familiar cockpit filled with warmly glowing displays. The metal around me
throbbed with the power of forty thousand angry, charging horses, and I held the jet
perfectly steady at twenty feet off the ground. The runway was 12,000 feet long, a
bit over two miles, and I’d covered most of it with twenty seconds of full
afterburner. As the little green number reached 510 knots, I took one more glance
at the engine instruments, stared straight ahead, and smoothly pulled back on the
stick at 0602:03.
Bursting free, the fighter surged upward, gulping thinner air, mixing it with jet
fuel, and shooting the exploding mix out the back. Egypt fell away beneath me,
and, within seconds, all my eyes could pick up was the distant horizon. Bunting
forward slightly, I held the climb angle at sixty degrees and rocketed into the
brilliant morning. The F-16 ejection seat is tilted back to counteract the tremendous
G forces of dogfighting, so, combined with my climb angle, I was sitting
perpendicular to the earth. The air-conditioning vent between my legs coughed and
spit out a stream of misty, smelly air; dust from the Egyptian morning, hot plastic
canopy baked in the sun, jet fuel, and a faint whiff of burned oil.
I frowned. Hot oil wasn’t normal, but this aircraft had just come out of
maintenance after having the engine changed. It was also an Egyptian F-16.
Anything was possible, which was precisely why I was flying it this morning on a
functional test flight. This was a combination of specific maneuvers, called a
profile, designed to thoroughly and brutally punish the aircraft before it was
returned to normal flying with squadron pilots. The Egyptians always refused to
take the chance of a test flight, so it fell to the Americans. I didn’t mind—it was