Lower than a Snake's Belly in a Wagon Rut
On a particularly hot day, a Royal Australian Air Force English Electric A84 Canberra bomber drops to within 25 feet as thrill-seeking mechanics get ready for the visceral experience of 13,000 lbs of Rolls Royce Avon power full in the face. RAAF Photo
By Dave O'Malley
Along the sunny Gulf Coast of Mississippi runs a VLA route (low level, high-speed flying) frequented by American military fliers for decades. Back in the early nineties, on a dock on Davis Bayou, with a cold St. Pauli Girl beer in my hand, I would sit with my face towards the southern sun and my feet dangling over the receding tidal waters brimming with shrimp and watch as pairs of A-7 Corsairs from the Oklahoma Air National Guard or RF-4Fs from Meridian Mississippi would thunder along the very edge of the horizon following this timeworn route. The “Sluffs” and “Rhinos” came from the Air Guard deployment camp at nearby Gulfport, where they would spend a week practicing being "deployed” at a base far from their home.
These weekend warrior guardsman as well as regular force fighters would follow the barrier islands from west to east – Chandlier Island, Ship Island, Cat Island, Horn Island. All uninhabited, all bereft of antennae, chimneys and tall trees. My best friend, Greg Williams, whose dock I was sitting on, was one of those Mississippi Air Guardsmen who had flown this route many times. Living across Biloxi Bay from these islands, he knew them like the back of his hand.
In those early days, he would take a lone Phantom and a back seater, and push himself down low over the Gulf side beaches, ripping from one island to the next heading east from Gulfport. As he came to the eastern end of Horn, the eastern most island, he would bank hard left and run like a scalded dog, low and north, to the wide estuary where the Pascagoula River dumped its brown water into the blue sound.
About a mile inland, Highway 90 crosses over the bayous and the snaking Pascagoula on a slender bridge. A few miles farther north, the four lanes of Interstate I-10 also leap over the two miles of marshland. For years, ass-kicking redneck pilots from Mississippi would approach the Highway 90 bridge from below, climbing to cross the bridge at extreme low level. Complaints from startled citizens in cars and trucks, who had nearly been blown from the road deck, caused the rules to change. All inbound fighters would be required to be at 1,500 feet as they crossed the bridges.
Williams, a long serving and proud recce pilot, and the only Voodoo-qualified, college-educated, shrimp boat captain from Bayou Labatrie, Alabama to Boca Chica, Texas, had thousands of hours flying RF-101s and RF-4F Phantoms down where the crawdads live. Flying low was his passion. His favourite thing to do, when flying in the mountains out west, was to run up the face of a mountain, roll inverted over the top, pull down the other side, roll wings level and toboggan the far side. He was used to it, he loved it, but he admitted once to me that he lived so long on the edge, that from time to time, he toppled over it.
One day in the late eighties, Major Williams and his back seater Major Bernie Cousins streaked at fifty feet down the Gulf side of Horn Island, scattering pelicans and egrets - “lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut”. Nearing the island's slender, curving eastern end, Williams rolled hard left, then level again, heading for the mouth of the Pascagoula. To his right he could see the massive Litton Shipyards, to his left, the small town of Gauthier, Mississippi shimmered in the summer heat. Approaching Pascagoula Bay, he climbed from 50 to 1,500 feet to clear the Highway 90 bridge at the authorized altitude. At 1,500 feet he streaked like an arrow north to I-10.
At the moment the I-10 bridge passed beneath his nose, Williams rolled inverted and snatched the stick back hard to dive for the deck. Flying aggressively for his entire military career, Williams realized immediately that he had pulled too hard and had "buried" the nose of the massive Southern Grey Rhino far past the right line for recovery. It was one of those “oh, shit” moments in a pilots flying career when he realizes that he has made a possible fatal mistake.
It was time to employ all his skill and all his physical strength to overcome his error. Instinctively, Williams released the stick, rolled 180 degrees and pulled as hard as he possibly could on the pole. There was nothing else to do but hold on and ride the Phantom out of the mess. Cousins, in the back, having no way to prepare for the maneuver, blacked out immediately under the massive g-load. Pulling for all he was worth, Williams experienced tunnel vision as he grayed out. He never really saw anything on his periphery, describing the effect of tunnel vision as looking through a toilet paper tube.
At zero feet, the sagging Phantom blew swamp water, mudbugs* and sea grass out from behind as she staggered upward in the humid air and climbed for the heavens. He had overstressed the jet and his own body and very nearly killed himself and his back seater. When I spoke to him about it the other day, he said, "You know, I got complacent and I am not proud of that, it was one time I almost lost it.” It takes a good pilot to admit it, and learn. To this day, Williams says that if you look carefully, you will find two deep parallel grooves in the muddy bottom where he dragged his burner cans though that bayou.
Williams' story of joy, error, terror and redemption illustrates all that is found in low level flight in any aircraft – the extreme sensation of speed, a breathtaking sense of your own powerful abilities, the risks of complacency and deadly danger waiting only feet away for the pilot who makes a fatal mistake.
There are two types of flying that are for the skilled and the experienced only - aerobatics and low level. A show of aerobatics is a beautiful thing indeed, poetry in motion. If aerobatics are ballet, then low level flying is slam dancing - violent, aggressive and heart stopping. Firewall the throttles of a Phantom and drag a cranked wingtip through the mesquite at the bottom of some gulch in the high Colorado desert and you have a YouTube video gone viral.
Despite all the risks associated with the practice, it is in fact a safe and critically important skill when practiced by military fliers. The British Ministry of Defence lists some of the key benefits of training their RAF fliers at low level:
- Is an essential skill that provides aircrew with one of the best chances of survival
- Is a highly demanding skill which can only be maintained through continuous and realistic training
- Is conducted with the safety of people on the ground, our aircrew, and other airspace users as the overriding concern
- Is rigorously controlled and continuously monitored
- Has reduced since 1988 - the total number of sorties by a third and those by jets by more than half
Over the past five years I have been sent links to hundreds of low level flying videos... and only four aerobatic ones... and they were all model airplanes flying in a gymnasium. That tells you a lot about the visceral appeal of the low level flight. There is no fighter pilot alive in North America who has not used the old saw "I feel the need for speed”. Blowing through Mach 1.5 at 30,000 feet, you are indeed fast. You would only know it..., but never feel it. You want to feel speed? Slow down and get down, way down where the trees rise above you, where men crap their pants when you pass, and the dust and water spray mark your passing.
In the world's best film ever, Dr. Strangelove, George C. Scott's character, General Buck Turgidson, when asked if the rogue B-52 can get through the Soviet defenses, spreads his arms like wings and proudly expounds in the War Room "If the pilot's good, see. I mean, if he's really... sharp, he can barrel that baby in so low... you oughtta see it sometime, it's a sight. A big plane, like a '52, vroom! There's jet exhaust, flyin' chickens in the barnyard!". Right on Buck!
For the past few years, I have dumped any good shots of low level that I came across on the web into a folder on my hard drive, never knowing what to do with them. Last week, my great friend Ian Coristine sent me an e-mail with a collection of low level photos someone had put together. Many were already in my folder. So, here finally is the contents of my folder, in tribute to my friends Greg “Hard Deck” Williams, whose aggressive attitude once made him engage a pair of A-10s in ACM with his Moonie (and win) and Ian Coristine, who never felt he was flying unless his floats swished in the long grass in a morning sunrise.
Ian Coristine inspects the alfalfa in his Quad City Challenger ultralight.
• Crayfish, crawfish, crawdads
I guess you could say that the first flight in history was in fact a low level flight. Ever since, men have dreamed for higher altitudes, but did all their showing off right down on the deck.
A Douglas A-20G Havoc night fighter of the 417th Night Fighter Squadron does a little daylight low flying down in the weeds possibly near the Orlando, Florida base where they were formed. Their first deployment was to Europe where they immediately re-equipped with Bristol Beaufighters. Today, the unit still trains for a night time job, but flying the F-117 Nighthawk or so-called “Stealth Fighter”.
A P-40 flies down the beach at extreme low level, as Marines practice an amphibious landing somewhere in the Pacific. In order to get this photo, the photographer standing on the beach would have had to have his back to the oncoming P-40 trusting that pilot would do a “buzz job” of the beach and not his hair. Photo via Project 914 Archives, Steve Donacik
A squadron of Luftwaffe Ju-52 Junkers stream low over the Russian countryside near Demjansk, south of Leningrad. In February to May of 1942, the Germans were surrounded by the Red Army. Supplying the Germans during and after the "Demjansk Pocket”, was the role of the air force. Here, low flying in the slow transports was more a survival tactic than a joyride. Photo via Akira Takaguchi
Thought to have been taken in the region of Canterbury, New Zealand in 1944, this shot of an Airspeed Oxford scaring the beejeesus out of half the waiting airmen while the other half remain calm, is a beauty. Photo via Joe Hopwood.
A USAAF P-47 Thunderbolt at extreme low level. Note that the sweep of the camera's pan has bent the buildings in the background
Disregarding the hazards involved, a USAAF 8th Air Force P-47 attacks a flak tower at a German airfield in occupied France.
Another shot that has the same effect of bending the buildings in the background (see previous photo). Like our own Spitfire XIV RM873, Griffon-powered PR Spitfire XIX PS890 was sold to the Royal Thai Air Force after the war. She is seen here with 81 Squadron markings and being put through her paces down low at RAF Seletar, Singapore in the summer of 1954 just before her sale. In 1961, PS890 was donated to the Planes Of Fame Museum in California. It was eventually restored and took to the skies again in 2000, albeit with clipped wings and contra-rotating props. It was then purchased by Frenchman Christophe Jacquard and taken to Duxford for the wingtips to be added and a single 5-bladed propeller installed.
A pair (if you include the photo aircraft) of Italian Savoia Marchetti SIAI SM-79s scares the ravioli out of a group of Italian airmen in North Africa in 1942
Interesting photo. The B-24 in the foreground is possibly the first B-24A. Then there is the group of A-20's doing a low fly-by at Langley Field in 1942 and being followed by what appears to be Navy Wildcats.
An American P-38 Lightning pilot makes sure of his shot as he lines up a ground target in a Panamanian range during the Second World War
A P-38 Lightning buzzing the field at Lavenham, England which was the home base of the 487th Bomb Group.
An A-20 Havoc beats up sand dunes at Benghazi in 1942.
Westland Whirlwind twin-engines fighters of the RAF buzz a couple of squadron pilots. Photo: Flight Global
A Lockheed Hudson screams in low over assembled photographers and squadron pilots. Photo: Flight Global
A flock of Mitchells head to the target low over the water.
Blenheim aircraft from 60 Squadron RAF level out for the "run in" to make a mast-head attack on a Japanese coaster off Akyab, Burms in 1942.
Showing off your extreme low level flying skills at an air show or in peace time takes balls, but flying low level at chimney top height through oily smoke with flak and machine gun fire trained on your ass... well that takes big clanging balls. Here, we see a B-24 Liberator named Sandman, among the last through on the raid at the Ploesti, Romania oil refineries, piloted by First Lieutenant Robert Sternfels. A photo taken of his battered bomber, climbing hard to barely clear the smoke stacks of Astra Romania oil refinery after dropping its bombs, would become the trademark photo of the mission so often thereafter associated with the deadly low-level mission against Ploesti. 
While researching images for our P-40 stories over the past year I came across a massive collection of marvelous wartime photos - mostly of P-40s collected by Steve Reno. This P-40 pilot is risking his life only a little less than the man taking the photo of this ridiculously low level pass across the runway. He’s not much higher than he would be if he was standing on his landing gear! If you trace the invisible line of his prop arc, this skilled numbskull’s tips are only about 4 feet off the ground. Photo via Project 914 Archives, Steve Donacik
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