The long-distance flying posed practical problems for Israel as well. The country was only 210 miles long and 45 miles wide at its narrowest. That meant the pilots could not complete their long-range training flights within the nation’s secure borders. Instead, Raz and his men had to begin their runs above the Mediterranean island of Cyprus and then follow the coast of Israel south, past the Gaza Strip and the Sinai to Sharm al-Sheikh at the southern tip of the peninsula, and then fly back the same way to Ramat David. The training flights to expand the long-range capabilities of the F-16s began at shorter distances and grew longer until matching the mission profile of 1,200 miles. Sometimes the flights were only an hour; other days they extended to three or four hours.
As far as the pilots were concerned, the majority of work was training their bodies. They were not prepared for the unexpected difficulties of long-distance flying. In the Mideast, enemy borders were dozens of miles away, not the hundreds or even thousands of miles distant they were for U.S. or British pilots. Damascus was only sixty-eight miles from Ramat David. In combat situations Israeli pilots had their weapons systems activated as soon as they were wheels-up. At the time the long-distance record was held by the IAF squadrons that had bombed the Suez Canal in ’67. Most of Raz’s pilots had never flown longer than an hour. Much of the initial training entailed building endurance, getting used to the bodily stress caused by extreme-range flying.
One of the pilots, Rani Falk, had just returned from Hill. An F-4 instructor at Hatzerim, Falk, along with Ilan Ramon and Relik Shafir, was among the youngest of the pilots. He had grown up in a farm village in the Jezreel Valley, not far from Raz’s kibbutz, and like Zeev had spent days watching the planes soaring overhead to the nearby air force base. He was tall, broad-shouldered, open, and easygoing with a quick grin. He and Raz became close, perhaps because both men came from the same small village life and retained the same simple, straightforward values—honesty, hard work, and above all loyalty. Like Yaffe, Falk was a born pilot who had an instinctual ability to feel out his aircraft, to anticipate its response. But even for Falk, the long-distance flying could be brutal. He would return from his flights exhausted, grimy, clammy, and cranky, then have to attend debriefings to go over problems and mistakes. Sometimes the debriefing took longer than the mission.
Falk’s first long-distance flight was a shock. When he reached Sharm al-Sheikh after what seemed an eternity, he was amazed to look up and see his INS (inertial navigation system) read just six hundred miles—only half the flight distance. After being cooped up in a cramped cockpit for hours—flying low-level, keeping eyes fixed on the wing leader, watching out for a sudden ridge or hill while continually checking instruments, maintaining distance and altitude, and flicking back and forth to the glass HUD as he also thought about fuel, risk, and the target—Falk’s body felt as though he’d been beat up. Later the pilots learned that they burned so many calories, they lost from one to four pounds per flight.
Yaffe and Shafir quickly discovered another worrisome drawback. Flying in the 30-degree-tilted cockpit with knees pressed nearly to head level made trying to answer the call of nature impossible. For one thing, gravity worked against them. The urgency was made all the more pressing because the pilots were required to drink a great deal of water to stay hydrated. Since the fly-by-wire control stick was on the right side of the cockpit instead of in the middle, Shafir discovered that he was forced to try and open his pants zipper, already encumbered by a flight suit, with his left hand—a challenge he found impossible. Eventually he surrendered to the inevitable and urinated in his pants. As if that were not bad enough, the air-conditioning vent was exactly at crotch level, quickly chilling Shafir’s wet lower parts to an excruciating degree.
At the end of one run, after he had touched down, Nachumi watched with alarm as Shafir came in fast at an unusually steep angle, hit the runway hard, threw on the afterburners, and jammed on the brakes, trailing a blue cloud of smoking rubber. He popped the cockpit, jumped down, and ran to the side of the runway. Nachumi, thinking the plane was on fire, radioed for an emergency vehicle and quickly climbed out of his plane. Bounding down the runway, he arrived to find Shafir stooped down in the weeds, surrounded by the emergency crew.
“Sorry,” Shafir said, looking embarrassed but relieved. “I had stomach problems.”
Hagai Katz, ever thorough and organized, took the time to assemble a homemade instruction manual for the pilots. Included were checklists of everything the pilots might need during flight—how to adjust the weapons systems, the radar functions, the navigation instruments. He made photocopies of the lists, then inserted each list into its own plastic sleeve and gathered them all in a notebook, like a photo album. He gave one of these notebooks to each pilot to use as a quick reference guide in flight.