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High Honor (part 2)

Curiously enough, for the first half of the history of flight, this now-ubiquitous formation was nowhere to be seen. Oh, there was the occasional fly-by: British squadrons on the Western Front in World War I sometimes overflew their airfields after combat, so the men on the ground could count the survivors, and King George V got a mass fly-over at his funeral in 1935. Then there Major General Oscar Westover, head of the U.S. Army Air Corps. When he was buried at Arlington in September 1938, no less than 50 fighters and bombers flew overhead, and the formation had "one blank file" of half a dozen aircraft--almost, but not quite, a Missing Man.

The first approximation of today's Missing Man didn't come until mid-century, and probably it was the inspiration of American pilots in the Korean War. An Air Force veteran: "In November 1951 at Johnson Field, Japan, one of the pilots of the 35th Fighter Group was killed and we flew the formation with three Mustangs." A Marine Corps pilot told me that he saw a similar tribute at Cherry Point, N.C., during a tour that ran from 1951 to 1953.

By the war's end, the Missing Man had entered the inventory. In April 1954, Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg was buried at Arlington with "several departures from the prescribed Special Military Funeral," in the words of The Last Salute, an astonishingly detailed book on the subject of graveside honors. The traditional horse-drawn artillery caisson was missing. Instead, Vandenberg got "a flyover of jet aircraft with one plane missing from the formation."

Also in 1954, Captain Joseph McConnell was testing a modified North American F-86 Sabre at Edwards Air Force Base, California, when he ran into trouble and was killed trying to save the plane. This was an era when Hollywood and the Pentagon were a team, and Warner Brothers immediately cranked up The McConnell Story, featuring Alan Ladd, June Allyson, a sonorous Air Force general, and not one but two Missing Man formations. The first takes place while the Korean War is hotting up in the summer of 1950. Ladd and Allyson are inspecting a homesite in Apple Valley, California, when a squadron of F-86 Sabres flies overhead in three flights of four. The leader of the second flight pulls up and away. Asks Allyson in her husky, house-wifey voice: "Why is that plane leaving the formation?"

Ladd: "You hear about the accident this morning?"

Allyson: "Yes."

Ladd: "It's a fly-by for Lieutenant Gordon. See that open slot? That's the position he used to fly. It's called [pause for effect] the Missing Man formation."

Those mid-century movies had their faults, but they seldom leave you wondering what was going on. (The second occurrence, of course, is at Edwards AFB, when the squadron leader comes over to tell Mrs. McConnell that her husband bought the farm.)

Jackie Kennedy must have been one of those who wept at The McConnell Story, for she gave the Missing Man a huge boost when she organized her husband's funeral in November 1963. The murdered president got both the horse-drawn artillery caisson and a Westover-style flypast: 30 Republic F-105 Thunderchiefs and 20 McDonnell Douglas F-4B Phantoms. Furthermore, according to The Last Salute, the jets "passed overhead in three V formations, one plane missing from the last V in tribute to the fallen leader."

Today, the Missing Man is usually flown as a finger-four, a combat formation developed by the Germans and soon adopted by all sides in World War II. The flight leader is at the point of the arrowhead, with his wingman following and to the right, as seen from below. Occupying the same position on the flight leader's left is the second-element leader, who in turn has a wingman behind him and to the left. In short, a V with the left leg longer than the right.

The leader of the second element is the Missing Man. Either this plane is absent altogether, or it leaves the formation in a spectacular pull-up. In the case of the Thunderbirds, the Blue Angels, and some civilian aerobatic teams, the Missing Man trails a plume of smoke to make the pull-up more dramatic, but this is never done by military pilots at a funeral.

Rehearsal? We don't need no stinkin' rehearsal! Military fighter pilots train constantly to fly low, fast, and close together; if you can't handle a Missing Man flight, you should find another line of work.

The three Hornets take off from NAS Oceana at ten-second intervals. They join up on the run, climb to 16,000 feet, and scream toward Washington at 400 knots. About the same time, their ground controller is getting in his car and driving out to Arlington with a hand-held radio.

Ben: "Along the way, we will talk to Oceana Departure, Norfolk Approach, and Washington Center, who will eventually switch us off to Andrews [Air Force Base] Approach, who will descend us down to about 3,000 to hold over Andrews awaiting the call. Andrews Tower is familiar enough with flyovers at Arlington that we don't need to ask for any special clearance."

The Hornets are now 20 miles south-southeast of Arlington, communicating with Andrews Air Force base on a private frequency called a "discrete." At the cemetery, the ground controller is tuned to the same frequency.

Ben: "Once we check in on the discrete, Andrews knows where we are, but it is the guy on the ground who is really controlling us. He'll tell us that the funeral is dragging on, or it's almost over, or whatever.... Usually, we will plan to fly at a suitable fast speed divisible by 60: that way you know how many miles per minute you fly and it makes it easy to do the math." Sailors have used this trick for centuries, and pilots for decades. (For my daughter on the sloop Ariel, the charm is 6 knots; for me in a Piper Cub, it's 60 knots.) If the controller wants the Hornets over the grave in three minutes' time, the arithmetic goes like this: 20 miles divided by 3 minutes equals--well, call it 7 miles per minute, or 420 knots.

Ben: "We get a three minute warning from the guy on the ground and start heading that way. Out of the turn, we take our exact positions [for the formation] and hold them the rest of the way. Ideally, we fly a little bit slower than necessary, so we're on a pace to be just a little late. Then, we accelerate just at the last second to be extra fast at the grave."

Their window is ten seconds, plus or minus. If they've misjudged and find themselves coming along too fast, they slow down and do shallow turns to kill a few seconds.

Ben: "The man on the ground can see us more easily than we can pick out the gravesite, and he gives last minute heading changes of a couple of degrees to talk us directly over the funeral. He also gives us a five-second countdown so we know when we pass over it. That way, the Missing Man can peel up out of the formation right on cue."

Today, of course, there are only three planes, and the Hornets sweep over the admiral's casket with a gap where the Missing Man would have been--second from left as seen from below.

Arlington National Cemetery lies inside the sprawl of metropolitan Washington, and a few miles northeast of Reagan National Airport. Out of deference to the folks living on the hill overlooking the cemetery--and also the Federal Aviation Regulations--the flyover is done at an altitude of 1,000 feet. (They are, however, excused from the FAR that limits low-flying aircraft to a speed of 200 knots.) In order to stay out of Reagan's airspace, it ends in a pull-up so sharp that some of the people on the ground imagine that they really have seen the Missing Man go zooming up into the wild blue. "The four Hornets made their characteristic sort of quiet high-pitched whine," recalled one of the mourners at the admiral's funeral. "As they neared," she went on, "one pulled up and away, and it was over in the blink of an eye."

The blink of a damp eye, no doubt. In any event, Ben Stone and his mates on George Washington will be gratified to know that the illusion was complete.

(A shorter and somewhat different version of this story appear in Air & Space / Smithsonian, April-May 2001, as "High Honor.")