High Adventure

Tomorrow, if scientists have their way, Air Force heroes may all be ground-bound, button-pushing missilemen. Today these heroes are still the crinkle-eyed young men wearing silver wings, the plane jockeys who earn their day's pay at a high scream--somewhere around the speed of sound. Their quick, death-weighted decisions would scare a six-gun cowpoke back into the saloon, and the wonder is that their work is still a rarity on television. But last week televiewers had their fill of flying--in both fact and fiction. And even when Air Force technical advisers were looking the other way, neither overexcited writers nor overemotional actors could corn up the show.

Numb. With admirable attention to the truth, the Goodyear Theater (NBC) presented The Obenauf Story, the heroic accomplishment of Lieut. James Edward Obenauf, who saved himself, a fellow officer and a $2,000,000 airplane when he landed a crippled six-jet B-47 at Dyess Air Force Base near Abilene, Texas (TIME, May 12). As Obie, the young father, Actor Kerwin Mathews was at first quietly convincing. Later, when Obenauf found himself at 34,000 feet in command of a burning plane, all the rest of the crew except a navigator bailed out--and the navigator dying of hypoxia--Mathews was embarrassingly frightened. He was a phrenetic caricature of the real-life lieutenant, the professional flyer who said when he got home, "You're so numb, I don't think there's any fear at all. You're just numb."

But the slipstream knifing through the battered B-47 cockpit was bitterly convincing. Obie's agony as he tried to open his eyes against the blinding force was painfully evident. And if old airmen winced when the flight control officer yammered and yelled into the tower microphone, broke in on the G.C.A. operator in hammy confusion, the G.C.A. operator himself was superbly true to life. Calm, careful, his every tone reassuring and reliable, he was just the man to bring a pilot home.* The true Lieut. Obenauf was surely willing to overlook the utterly silly last lines that the show put in his mouth: "Hey, I gotta pick up all that baby stuff from the Maxwells'." In real life, temporarily blinded though he was, he had jumped from the plane and run until someone tackled him.

Neat. The next night, the latest episode of the Steve Canyon series (NBC) demonstrated that even a fictionalized story based on Milton Caniff's comic strip can hardly outrace reality. It is, after all, possible for a carelessly fired deer rifle to damage the window of a parked B-47. The damage could very well spread under the stress of flight. And when a window blows out at 46,000 feet, pilot and copilot alike might just possibly be too stunned to nose down to safety. Granted those coincidences, the rest of Operation Intercept was a neat exercise in airborne shock.

Command Pilot Stevenson B. Canyon (Dean Fredericks) climbed aloft in his F-102 to examine the flying derelict, and Canyon's first sight of the frozen, frost-covered pilots, still strapped in their seats, added up to terrifying snapshots of disaster. After that, Canyon's shooting the B-47 down with rocket fire--because a tail wind might possibly push it all the way to Russia--seemed reasonable. For the peacetime Air Force is a weapon in the cold war, and an unarmed plane might easily be mistaken for a belligerent.

Now and then in the series, Canyon flies through some far-fetched excitement. Most of the time the planes, the Air Force chatter, and the Air Force atmosphere make it all seem real, even if the fadeout is melodramatic. Back on the ground after his harrowing mission, Steve Canyon wondered whether the date he jilted for his unexpected flight was still waiting. "Ten years," said he solemnly, "is a long time to keep a girl waiting."

*He was, in fact, a man with an intimate knowledge of his job. The part was played by an Air Force G.C.A. operator, Tech. Sgt. Arthur Sloan.

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