Wing Men

If yesterday’s first takeoff was a little wobbly, today’s is rail-straight—but the landing is downright harrowing. Just before touchdown, a gust catches the A-10’s double rudders and yaws it sideways. The plane veers to the left, then back to the right. As the tires catch the pavement, the plane darts toward the edge of the runway, where Davidson is videotaping the flight. Davidson keeps his cool as Johns works the stick frantically and gets it redirected, and the A-10 skids sideways to a bootlegger’s stop a few feet from Davidson. There’s a long silence. “You had me holding my breath,” Selby says finally, letting out a sigh. “And I think you had Bill wetting his pants.”

Heavy Lifting:  John B. Carnett

Smoothing it Out

After the day’s first flight at Bang Nam Prio, Selby and Johns decide to wait out the crosswind gusts and do some troubleshooting. On his control console, Johns modifies the A-10’s stick movement to “soften up the middle” and make the controls less touchy. Selby and Saechour try to figure out why the nose wheel keeps fouling on its hatch when retracting, and eventually trace the problem to the fake hydraulic cap on the side of the nose structure. “You get so involved in putting these little tchotchkies on to make it look real,” says Selby, as he lies down on the cement floor under the landing gear, “that you can forget that it needs to reliably function and fly.”

The A-10 takes off again and, as it climbs, the landing gear functions flawlessly. Johns sends the A-10 into a steep climb and then pulls it into a half-loop and rolls it 180 degrees—a rapid-reverse maneuver known as an Immelmann turn. Johns brings the plane around for a low-level pass over the runway. As it roars past us at palm-treetop level, it couldn’t look or sound any more realistic. Standing in his jeans and topsiders, Selby smiles and whistles, starting to relax.

On the next flight, the A-10 carries four fiberglass “bombs,” but during the bombing run, they fail to release. For Selby and Johns, the situation brings back memories of the 2006 Top Gun competition. “We were sitting in first place with our Vindicator when Ray brought it in for the run. He called out, ‘Bomb drop.’ But nothing happened. We would have won overall Team, but we came in second—only two tenths of a point behind the winner.”