Free Way the Crow Flies by Ann-marie MacDonald Page A

and Michigan. The world is changing rapidly and the military, beingamong the largest corporations in the world, can either lead or lumber behind like a dinosaur. Leaders today have to understand teamwork. That’s the key to all the latest advances in science and technology. We’ve virtually wiped out serious infectious disease, we’ve got satellites orbiting the earth, you can’t open a newspaper without reading of another breakthrough. And we do it without enslaving people—that’s why thousands of East Berliners voted with their feet before the Wall went up.
    Jack is not alone in believing that the military chain of command is not simply a series of orders and knee-jerk responses, but a model for the flow of information and accountability. Air force types—especially if they are veterans—tend to share this thinking. But it’s important to codify and teach it so that it’s not dependent on unwritten traditions and individual temperaments. He tosses the old textbook into the wastebasket.
    A cool head and a light hand are as important in an office as they are in a cockpit. A man who can’t keep his cool can’t make a good decision. So Jack’s management style is relaxed, but when he makes a “suggestion” it is rarely mistaken for anything but an order.
    This is something he learned from his flight instructor years ago, right here in Centralia. Simon was famous for his suggestions. In the air, from the instructor’s seat beside Jack: “You may want to try stalling the engine.” And after seconds of deadly aerial silence, “Shall we see if you can roll out of it?” The cool Queen’s English, coming out of a spin: “Good, now I wonder if you can land without bending the kite out of shape.”
    In April 1943, Jack and the rest of his class already had their wings and were embarking on advanced training. They were cocky, eager to go operational—to fly ops. Jack was not quite eighteen, none was over twenty. Simon entered the classroom, his RAF cap pushed rakishly back on his head, its sides permanently bent in the “fifty-mission crush”—the long-term effect of wearing a radio headset in the cockpit, a badge of operational status. His tie loose, moustache pencil-thin, he sat on the desk, lit a cigarette and addressed them, wearing his upper-class accent like an old scarf.
    “I know you sprogs think you know how to fly. You, and most of the great apes at the stick of any given aircraft, haven’t a bloody cluehow to fly, and it’s not my job to teach you. It’s my job to teach you sorry bastards how to stay in one piece long enough to bomb the
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out of the Germans like gentlemen. Questions?”
    “Squadron Leader Crawford, sir …?” one skinny boy ventured.
    “My name is Simon. Life is too short—especially yours, especially mine once I climb into the seat next to you—to waste time with a lot of syllables, so call me by my fucking name, there’s a good lad.”
    They called him by his first name and revered him as an elder because, at twenty-three, Simon was an old man. A living exception to the rule “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.” One of the few to fly both fighters and bombers. A decorated Battle of Britain ace who had requested reassignment from Spitfires to big lumbering Lancaster bombers “because being in a Lanc makes me feel more akin to a tin of Spam, and what’s lovelier than Spam, really?” A different sort of risk, the opportunity to fly with a crew; Simon needed to keep himself interested. He came to them having survived a full tour of duty overseas: thirty bombing missions.
    Simon was a great flight instructor because he never took control too soon. He waited to see if his pupil could handle it first, because once you went operational, nothing would happen according to Hoyle. Jack’s hand shaking on the control column, head bursting on the verge of red-out after a steep dive at eight thousand feet, recovery at six