The Nation's Youngest Service Has Entered the Supersonic age

TO the U.S. public, which pays for it, the $16 billion-a-year U.S. Air Force is almost a phantom military organization. The planes fly at altitudes where they are not visible, and they fly singly or in small groups rather than in the thundering formations of World War II. Most big Air Force bases are located in desert wastelands or on backwoods plains, where remoteness helps soundproof their shrieking engines from the civilian ear. Seldom do airmen wear their uniforms in bars or rub shoulders (and tempers) with civilians in off-duty hours. Today's airman has become a solid professional man; he stays near his base and works in or around a cockpit, described by a top air general as a "damned laboratory."

The U.S. Air Force is far from a phantom. It is one of the world's biggest businesses-in-being. And it is, as Air Force Secretary Donald Quarles characterized it last week, "the most powerful striking force ever assembled on earth." From its polar icecap outposts to its underground operations center in the Pentagon (where a general officer is always on duty), from the Strategic Air Command, run from Omaha by General Curtis LeMay, to the Tactical Air Command, headed by General Otto

Weyland at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, to the $600 million-a-year research and development plan under General Tom Power, the range of Air Force activity has never been equaled by any military unit in peacetime history. And this year the Air Force has entered upon a fantastic new era of supersonic flight that dawned even before the fantastic old era of transonic flight seemed fairly begun. These are the keys to the U.S. Air Force today: its range and its change.

The Range. On a recent, typical duty day a wing of B-47s left Ohio for duty in North Africa; at almost the same moment a squadron of F-84s started from Virginia for Okinawa. Each flight stirred up a wasp's nest of Air Defense Command interceptors (practicing supersonic passes at the outbound planes in carefully planned defense exercises), air refueling tankers far-flung in Atlantic and Pacific bases, air traffic controllers, air detection and warning networks, air-sea rescue squadrons, and MATS units hauling spare parts, supplies and technicians.

That same day an Air Force plane flew a leukemia victim from Italy to Germany for treatment. Air Force instructors trained Brazilian pilots in the use of jet fighters. Air Defense Command officers at Colorado Springs, Colo, attended a class in public speaking (explains ADC Commanding General Earle Partridge: "One of our generals went to Washington last week on a project involving $80 million. He had 15 minutes to make his pitch to the Pentagon. I want to be sure that he knows how to make a sale"). In Texas airmen struggled through an obstacle course on which the final assignment, an exercise in crash rescue, was to lift a heavy stone from a burning cockpit. In Labrador airmen fed the dog teams used for rescue work. And off West Palm Beach, Fla. an Air Force crash boat pulled a pilot from the drink. When his engine flamed out, he had radioed: "I'm going to deadstick her down." Then, after a moment of mature consideration, he changed his mind, declared, "No, I ain't," and bailed out.

The Change. Like other men with a mission, Air Forcemen dismiss such a program as "just another day's work." Actually, hardly a day goes by without new techniques or new hardware (which may come wrapped in a black box from the electronics laboratories, or wrapped around a jet engine from the aircraft factories). Airmen say that there are only two types of combat planes--the obsolescent and the experimental. Air Force Chief of Staff Nathan Twining, 58, learned to fly at 70 m.p.h. in the Jenny biplane. Now he is presiding over the new era of the "century" series (TIME, Feb. 20), with its F-100 (now operational) and F-102 (which can maintain supersonic speed through long, steep climbs) and F-104 (which can cruise past a 16-in. naval shell in mid-flight).

No detachment or activity can escape the merciless requirements of change. In the area of pilot training, for example, only two years ago training officers strove to develop "tigers." The "hungry tiger," i.e., the highly competitive cadet, was thought to make the best pilot. But the tiger was too charged up; too often he flew his plane into the ground in air-to-ground gunnery or collided with other planes through his eagerness to tighten up his formation. Says an Air Force psychologist: "Emotionalism is not good when you're flying these fast airplanes. Today's generation is growing up with a lack of discipline in the homes and schools and churches. When they get into this airplane business, they are plunged into an environment which demands discipline. They've got to be disciplined by the environment before it kills them."

The Professionals. The new planes impose not only a new order of discipline on today's pilots, but a kind of precision that World War II pilots can hardly comprehend. For example, closing on an enemy plane at close to 1,000 m.p.h. at 50,000 ft., a century series pilot may be required to do these things:

1) Conduct a radar search to pick up the target.

2) Decide from the returns on his radarscope what he is up against.

3) Analyze the tactical situation.

4) Keep tracking the target.

5) Identify the target as friend or foe.

6) Lock onto the target with his electronic system.

7) Judge the rate of closure.

8) Switch over to optical tracking.

9) Convert to a lead pursuit course or a collision course.

10) Fire and break off.

To do all this, the pilot may have from 15 to 17 seconds (less time than it just took to read about it). Explains one Air Force officer: "The plane is a weapons system, and the pilot is a data link in that system."

Seventeen such "data links" fly F-100s in the 3594th Fighter Squadron at Nevada's Nellis Air Force Base (billed as the "busiest airfield in the U.S.A.F.," with a take-off or landing every 42 seconds night and day), where Colonel Bruce Hinton, 36, is the training group commander. Of the 17 pilots in the squadron 14 have Korean combat experience, 16 are married, the average age is 31. Says Hinton: "They're different, each of them. Away from airplanes they have their own brand of individualism. But they have no eccentricities when they climb into that cockpit. They're professionals.

"That is the thing to remember. Today's pilot is a professional. Like other professionals, he has a set of ethics. What are they? To press on to a target. He's not like a rifleman going over the top. where, if the social stimulus of the other men doesn't push him over, someone will carry him over. No, our pilots go into targets alone. It's a matter of ethics whether they press through the attack. I don't think many would poop out in what you journalists call the moment of truth."

The Way It Is. At California's Castle Air Force Base a World War II bomber veteran expresses the spirit of change as he tells of his new B-52, SAC's "Long Rifle." Says he: "Brother, this is the plane to end them all. It takes four railroad tank cars of fuel, flies at altitudes in excess of nine miles. It's as light as a feather to control, and yet it has a rudder four stories high, and it weighs 390,000 Ibs. at takeoff. I've got the power of 30 diesel locomotives out there on the wings." But had not he once described the old B-29 in similarly glowing terms? "Sure--and I meant every adjective. And when they give me the next plane, I'll get even more excited. That's the way it is."

Range and change have brought the Air Force a whole set of new problems, e.g., the low (11%) re-enlistment rate of desperately needed technicians (some of the F-100s, without enough trained men to maintain them, have been grounded ). But the new Air Force, in all its flux, is nonetheless sustained by a stable strength. In its short ten years of existence as a separate branch of the armed services, it has acquired tradition, theory, individuality, discipline and a high sense of mission--all while being constantly at work to meet the threat that the U.S. has never known before, intercontinental war.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.