The Sky Is Blue

You're about to launch on the last leg of a long cross-country trip, and it won't be long before you reach your final destination. Then something unforeseen happens that threatens to mess up your best-laid plans. What do you do? Go or abort? Veteran airline pilot and instructor George E. Nolly recalls a time early in his flying career - as a fighter pilot in Vietnam - when he learned a valuable lesson about

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T-39I had just returned from my second tour in Vietnam flyingfighters and was spring-loaded to the “go” mode. Now here I was, a “staffweenie” in a fighter wing at Kadena, getting checked out in the base flight T-39Sabreliner. Although I’d had a lot of quality flying experience in a short time period, Iwas at the point that I didn’t realize how little I knew.

This was our cross-country training flight, from Yokota Air Base, Japan, to Osan AirBase, Korea, to Kunsan Air Base, Korea, then return to Yokota. The mission was goingflawlessly, and we arrived at Kunsan ahead of schedule. My Instructor Pilot (IP) was also an ex-fighterpilot, a lieutenant colonel on the colonel promotion list. He showed me all there was tosee at Kunsan (base ops and the snack bar) and I was anxious to get back to civilization.

Uh Oh!

I’d zapped through the preflight and gotten down to engine start. But when I pressedthe starter button on the first engine, nothing happened. We rechecked the switches andtried again. Nothing. Transient Alert (maintenance) checked under the cowling anddetermined that the starter was bad on that engine. Naturally, there were no parts atKunsan, and we would be stuck there for the night.

Then I got a brilliant idea. I knew my Instructor Pilot (IP) would be impressed with myknowledge of aircraft systems, as well as my resourcefulness. “Why don’t we start theother engine, then fast taxi down the runway? When we get enough windmilling airspeed, wego to AIRSTART on the bad engine and get it lit. Then we can take off and fly back toYokota and get it fixed.” The IP took a long draw on his cigarette, looked up at thesky and then leveled his gaze at me.

“What do you see when you look up?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I replied, “just blue sky.”

“That’s right. The sky is blue, it’s a beautiful day, and we’re in perfect health.We don’t have a mission that requires us to trade that for an uncertain future andneedless risks. The base isn’t under attack. We’re not taking a critically ill patient toemergency surgery. We’re not even carrying passengers. We’re on a training mission, andwe’re stuck at a place that really doesn’t have a lot to offer, but that’s the breaks -no pun intended. It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than in theair wishing you were back on the ground.”

That statement gave me a lot to think about. We spent the night at Kunsan, and bymorning the airplane was fixed. We got back to Yokota uneventfully, and I went on tocomplete my training, and eventually, to become an IP myself. That mission to Kunsanhappened in 1973, but it still stands out as one of the most memorable of my career. Onthat mission I learned a lot more than how to do a flight plan for a T-39. I learned avaluable lesson about “get-home-itis.”

Doing It vs. Doing It Right

I discovered that being a steely-eyed fighter pilot, while great in certain areas,isn’t the orientation you need to perform a peacetime airlift mission. Having a”can-do” attitude doesn’t mean leaning on the bar with 6 Gs. It means gettingthe job done properly and safely, within prescribed limits and specifications, using theapproved procedures. It also means using the appropriate channels to get the procedureschanged if they are wrong.

In the intervening years, I’ve been in several different types of flying operations andaccumulated several thousand more flying hours. I can’t remember ever seeing a missionthat ended in tragedy because the pilot “wimped out” and canceled. If theprimary factors – the man, the machine, and the weather – aren’t perfect, you simply getthem fixed or abort the mission and wait till they are fixed. But I’ve seen a lot ofmissions that went wrong because of get-home-itis, or its variant,”get-the-mission-done-itis.” I’ve seen instances when the crew thought the opsofficer would probably want them to take a bad airplane because it would get the missionairborne, no matter what the cost. Well, I was an ops officer, and I can tell you, it’snot that way. There just aren’t that many missions that can’t wait till the weather getsbetter, or till the plane gets fixed. If the mission were that critical, you’d probablyhave both the ops officer and squadron commander breathing down your neck to see that itgets off on time; you’d probably be getting more supervision than you want.

There are undoubtedly dozens of times during an aviator’s career when he/she is placedin an awkward position and must choose between taking an aircraft with minor problems orcanceling. You can almost always rationalize taking the airplane, but that’s all it is,rationalizing. You will almost always feel bad if you scrub the mission. But that’s theresponsibility that goes with flying.

Deja Blue

As a sort of postscript to this story, I found myself in the same theater ofoperations, in the same type aircraft, a dozen years later. I was at Nagoya, getting readyfor a dusk takeoff to fly 20 minutes to Yokota, right at the end of my 16-hour duty day.In fact, I would be landing 10 minutes shy of the limit. I really wanted to get home,having a list of personal commitments as long as my arm. When we started engines, the leftgenerator wouldn’t come online.

My copilot and I initially started down the primrose path of rationalization: It wasonly a short flight; we could get it fixed at Yokota, whereas it would be a bear to getparts to Nagoya; the weather was good, the sky was clear and blue….

Wait a minute! The sky is blue! What could I have been thinking? What was so criticalabout this mission? My personal commitments could wait. We aborted. Once the abortdecision was made, we stayed with the airplane to run the engines so our flight mechaniccould troubleshoot to determine what parts we’d need. Ten minutes into the engine run theright oil pressure went off-scale high, requiring an immediate shutdown. It hit me like ablast of cold air. Had I taken the airplane, we would have found ourselves ten minutesinto the flight with an engine shutdown, no operating generators, running on batterypower, at night.

I shut down the airplane and stepped out into the gathering dusk. I looked up. The skywas indeed blue.

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