I’d seen the students in the ready room. They were already in VT-86, a couple of classes ahead of the students I was working with. I didn’t recognize the male students- their uniformly close cropped heads are
hard to tell apart bent over their maps and their flight books and regulations. But the female was easy to distinguish. There weren’t many females in the flight program so she kind of stood out. She was loud, funny and not shy- she couldn’t afford to be. In flight training, you make as many friends as you can, as fast as you can because you’ll need to depend on each other throughout the entire rigorous program.
We heard about the crash that afternoon. Flight ops were suspended for the rest of the day. All the birds that were in the air were called home to the nest.
Two days later, after operations had resumed (there was a production schedule that must be met. We trained replacements for the fleet squadrons and they’d had their own doses of destruction), word came down that the new class would proceed as directed and be issued their flight equipment as scheduled.
The airplane was spread out over the entire hangar. There were rolling ladders here and there throughout, spaced between big chunks of downed aircraft. They’d recovered as much as they could find. There were these steel hoppers where workers were sorting out pieces- avionics here, hydraulic equipment there. In some of the bigger self-dumping hoppers there were larger sections of sheeting, like metal layers of an airborne onion.
Of course the pieces were heavy, so workers used these special forklift attachments to lift and carry them over to another side of the hangar where they could be pieced together and the flight crews’ last moment could be deduced from a couple of cracked instruments and blood-stained wires.
I found the contractor we were looking for. He was on a rolling warehouse ladder peering down into the cracked open ribcage of the T-39 Sabreliner whose heart had exploded and scattered pieces of aviation instrumentation and the students and pilots who had manned them across a dense patch of Appalachian forest. I told him I’d brought these students with me to get fitted for their helmets and flight gear. He looked down from his industrial ladder, his eyes blinkered. He nodded, climbed down and walked over to his office to get someone to open up the gear issue.
I walked the new class across the hangar. They studiously avoided looking at what remained of the last students who hadn’t pushed through what could be called a ‘training obstacle.’ Instead it had pushed through them. ‘Hey, Jervais. Watch out for that rolling ladder.”
A forklift driver backed out of a cubby hole where he’d set his load down. We paused to watch the forklift wheel agilely backwards and slide its tines into the waiting sleeves of an industrial hopper about 10 yards away. With a quick hydraulic hiss, it lifted up its bloodied cargo and bore the evidences of the latest aviation mishap away.
We stepped outboard of the rolling stairs and continued on our way. There was some quiet joking in the back; they would remember the smell of the burnt metal and the blistered paint. It was at least 10 weeks before they’d be gearing up for their own low level quals and boning up on formation flights.
We threaded our way between another Cotterman and a couple of piles of scorched debris, and continued on our way.
