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Down on h was strapped the map with my course charted on it in blue ink, but I did not need it I knew the details by heart, worked out earlier with the navigation officer in the nav hut Turn overhead Celle airfield onto course 265 degrees, continue cliht, maintain course and keep speed to 485 knots Check in with Channel D to let theht run over the Dutch coast south of the Bevelands into the North Sea After forty-four e to Channel F and call Lakenheath Control to give you a “steer” Fourteen minutes later you’ll be overhead Lakenheath After that, follow instructions and they’ll bring you down on a radio-controlled descent No proble tih fuel for over eighty minutes in the air

Swinging over Celle airfield at 5,000 feet, I straightened up and watched the needle on rees The nose was pointing toward the black, freezing vault of the night sky, studded with stars so brilliant they flickered their white fire against the eyeballs Below, the black-and-whites into the white expanses of the fields Here and there a village or saily lit streets the carol singers would be out, knocking on the holly-studded doors to sing “Silent Night” and collect pfennigs for charity The Westphalian housewives would be preparing haeese

Four hundred miles ahead of e but many of the tunes the saoose But whether you call it Weihnacht or Christood to be going home

Froet a lift down to London in the liberty bus, leaving just after ht; from London I was confident I could hitch a lift towith my own family The altimeter read 27,000 feet I eased the nose forward, reduced throttle setting to give rees Soloo away, and I had been airborne for twenty-one minutes No problem

The problem started ten minutes out over the North Sea, and it started so quietly that it was several minutes before I realized I had one at all For soh my headphones into ness of total silence Iof ho I knehen I flicked a glance doard to checkrock-steady on 265 degrees, the needle was drifting lazily round the clock, passing through east, west, south, and north with total impartiality

I swore a ainst the compass and the instrument fitter who should have checked it for 100-percent reliability Coht such as the one beyond the cockpit Perspex, was no fun Still, it was not too serious: there was a standby colanced at it, that one see wildly Apparently so had jarred the case—which isn’t uncommon In any event, I could call up Lakenheath in a few ive me a GCA—Ground Controlled Approach—the second-by-second inst

ructions that a well-equipped airfield can give a pilot to bring hiress on ultraprecise radar screens, watching hi his position in the sky yard by yard and second by second I glanced at my watch: thirty-four minutes airborne I could try to raise Lakenheath now, at the outside lie

Before trying Lakenheath, the correct procedure would be to inform Channel D, to which I was tuned, of my little problem, so they could advise Lakenheath that I was on my ithout a compass I pressed the TRANSMIT button and called:

“Celle, Charlie Delta, Celle, Charlie Delta, calling North Beveland Control …”

I stopped There was no point in going on Instead of the lively crackle of static and the sharp sound ofback into en ain Same result Far back across the wastes of the black and bitter North Sea, in the warm, cheery concrete complex of North Beveland Control,their stea coffee and cocoa And they could not hear me The radio was dead

Fighting down the rising sense of panic that can kill a pilot faster than anything else, I sed and slowly counted to ten Then I switched to Channel F and tried to raise Lakenheath, ahead ofin its forest of pine trees south of Thetford, beautifully equipped with its GCA syste home lost aircraft On Channel F the radio was as dead as ever My own enrubber The steady whistle of ine behind me was my only answer

It’s a very lonely place, the sky, and even le-seater jet fighter is a lonely hoh the freezing eth of six thousand horses every second But the loneliness is offset, canceled out, by the knowledge that at the touch of a button on the throttle, the pilot can talk to other hus, people who care about him, men and women who staff a network of stations around the world; just one touch of that button, the TRANSMIT button, and scores of them in control towers across the land that are tuned to his channel can hear him call for help When the pilot transht streaks from the center of the screen to the outside riures, froht hits the ring, that is where the aircraft lies in relation to the control tower listening to his they can locate his position to within a few hundred yards He is not lost anyhim down

The radar operators pick up the little dot he makes on their screens froive hiin your descent now, Charlie Delta We have you now …” Warm, experienced voices, voices which control an array of electronic devices that can reach out across the winter sky, through the ice and rain, above the snow and cloud, to pluck the lost one fro him down to the flare-lit runway that means home and life itself

When the pilot transmits But for that heChannel J, the international eative result, I knew my ten-channel radio set was as dead as the dodo

It had taken the RAF two years to train hters for the precisely for e, they used to say in flying school, is not to kno to fly in perfect conditions; it is to fly through an e to take effect