Those who know me know that I’m not a morning person. That’s actually quite the understatement. I despise morning. Nothing good has ever happened to me in the morning. Mornings are when you went to school. Mornings are when you bitch slap yourself awake and go to goddam work. I avoid them. In fact, I’m so thoroughly nocturnal that it’s common for me to stay up until 5 AM (which is not morning, because it’s still dark and the wee hours are seamless with the time before midnight), and not get up until one in the afternoon.
Well, I was again up until five this morning, but I didn’t sleep until one, because a sound like the end of the world almost literally rolled me out of my bed just before noon. It was a noise like no other, impossible to properly describe really, coming from overhead, pitched almost high enough to make your fillings resonate, and simultaneously low enough to be felt in the chest as much as heard, changing frequency as the Doppler shift of something moving very, very fast kicked in. It’s as if the sky is a fabric, and something is ripping it violently apart. It’s like a clap of thunder right on top of you, combined with a howling gale, in the middle of an earthquake. It would be utterly terrifying if you didn’t know what it was, and maybe still is even if you do.
You see, an F-18 had flown over the house at low altitude. The Blue Angels had hit town. It’s Labour Day weekend at the Canadian National Exhibition, and jets are flying in for the traditional air show.
Here’s a still photo and then a video shot by my good buddy Leonard, who just happened to be out and about when one of the dark blue jets blasted over him at something less than a couple of hundred feet, going maybe 500 MPH, prompting him to stick around and see what else he could see:
There are many, I know, who viscerally hate the racket. Every year, the Toronto Star prints indignant letters to the editor complaining about how god-awfully loud it is, how it’s upsetting and downright scary, and how it’s an artifact of nasty military machines that kill people, weapons that ought to be deplored, not celebrated in some foolish and expensive testosterone-soaked flying display. It’s not environment-friendly, either, some are sure to add. Others have pointed out that for anybody who’s been in a combat zone, it’s also a noise likely to trigger a bout of PTSD; I don’t know how many people in Greater Toronto have experienced war up close and personal, but if that’s the reason you can’t stand the sound of an F-18 ripping by, then of course I can only sympathize. In fact, a thought that always occurs to me when military jets are roaring overhead is how horrifying it must be if such a thing means you harm, how frightened and helpless you’d feel, and how glad I am to be living in a peaceful place.
Still, I love that sound. Love, love, love it. A high performance jet makes the single most impressive and exhilarating noise ever registered by human ears. Well, maybe a Saturn V blasting off was even more compelling, so all right, there’s fast jets and big rockets, but that’s it. I guess it’s the little kid inside me. I’m enthralled. It just bowls me over, I mean, there goes an 80 million dollar machine that weighs 22 tons, but can easily break the sound barrier at sea level, and, depending on the jet, could hit anything from 1,200 to 1,600 miles an hour at high altitude. The person in charge of that thing can point the nose heavenward and climb at an initial rate of over 800 feet per second, between 50,000 and 60,000 feet a minute, and even though gravity will slow it down, it’ll still be about six miles high in sixty seconds flat. Whip a machine like that into a really tight turn and you’ll immediately be crushed into your seat by a centrifugal pressure equaling anything from seven to nine times the force of gravity, more than enough to drain the blood out of your brain and render you unconscious, if you haven’t been trained for it. Can you imagine? What must it be like to have such energy at your command, power that makes an Indy car look like a sad little electric golf cart? I can’t get over the wonder of it all, thinking about how incredible it is that these planes can even exist, and how it’s truly amazing that we were able to manufacture something like an F-18 only a few decades after humans first got anything heavier than air to fly. Step back and think about that for a minute: the morning of the very first powered flight, in 1903, the wood and fabric biplane cobbled together by the Wright brothers piddled along airborne for barely a whole minute, travelling a few hundred feet down range at a speed of maybe 15 MPH, flying only about twice as high as the average guy’s head. In 1974, not even one human lifespan later, a stripped-down F-15 climbed to a height of almost 100,000 feet, nineteen miles high, in a little over three minutes.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw an F-15 soar vertically into a cloudless sky, straight up, rolling around its axis like a spinning top, just for effect, climbing so fast it was gone, out of sight, in only a few seconds. You could still hear it long after you lost track of it. I stood there, my mouth probably hanging open, feeling something close to ecstasy. It wasn’t just breathtaking – it was intensely gratifying, as if the sight of that incredible machine vanishing up into the burning blue had satisfied some deep, fundamental yearning that I didn’t even know I had.
Yes, these airplanes are designed to kill people and blow things up, and that’s really quite ugly, if you think about it. Were I feeling argumentative, I could remind you that this is, after all, an ugly world we’re forced to inhabit. I could point out that we’ve no choice but to accept a geopolitical reality in which no sovereign nation, apart from anomalous little New Zealand, could possibly be comfortable having no way to police its own airspace, with no capacity to threaten lethal force if necessary. I could stress how it would have been a hell of a lot better if a few of America’s nasty fighter jets had been up on patrol, armed and better positioned to get in the way, when those doomed airliners were hijacked and weaponized on 9/11, and argue, even, that anybody who thinks there’s never a time when some people and things frigging well need to be killed and blown up, but good, is living in a fool’s paradise, and if you don’t believe me go ask somebody in Ukraine. All true, and easy enough to say. Still, I get it. I do. Warplanes of such devastating power aren’t built to do anything anybody should want to see happen. Their intimidating presence at low altitude, making that incredible sound, can serve as an unwelcome reminder of just how abysmally violent and essentially uncivilized our world remains, even if this time they’re only showing off to thrill an air show crowd, and even if you feel, as I do, that we very much need to own such terrible flying weapon systems, regrettable as that may be if you’re at all cognizant of the big picture.
I understand, but I can’t help myself. Fighter jets are literally awesome. For me, seeing and hearing them up close is like mainlining pure adrenaline, and is almost emotionally overwhelming, in a way nothing else short of a moon shot could ever be. The power of the things. The level of technological achievement they represent. The incredible speed and gracefulness of their maneuvers. It all gives me chills, and so help me, I love them. They’re beautiful to me, and whenever I hear that incredible, sky-ripping sound, it stirs my heart. Every time.
Long as I live, l’ll never get over it.
the needlefish 