Do you read?” “Five by five, Scratch One. Go ahead.” “Request permission to land by vectored thrust option.” “Roger, Scratch One. Land your victor by vectored thrust on designated flight line and coordinates.” The plane dipped out of the sky, plummeting. Six hundred knots dropped to zero in 15.4 seconds. The engines groaned—not a promising sound—as the plane hovered as if levitating, then began to lower elegantly to the aluminum-treated asphalt. When Colonel Jack Wentz landed the YF-61 on Runway 4 of Andrew’s Tango-Delta site, he fully expected to die. It was a mind-set, it was necessary. The VDU and temp gauges read normal—nevertheless, he expected to die. In fact, of the thousands of times he’d landed planes during his career, he expected to die every time. That way, he reasoned, if he did die, he wouldn’t be surprised. The wheel springs grated when he set down, then Wentz commenced with the proper system shut-downs. The Lockheed YF-61, though highly experimental (its turbines ran on hydrogen rather than conventional JP-6) looked just like an F-5E.
