On a particularly hot day, a Royal Australian Air Force English Electric A84 Canberra bomber drops to within 25 feet as thrill-seeking mechanics get ready for the visceral experience of 13,000 lbs of Rolls Royce Avon power full in the face. RAAF Photo By Dave O'Malley Along the sunny Gulf Coast of Mississippi runs a VLA route (low level, high-speed flying) frequented by American military fliers for decades. Back in the early nineties, on a dock on Davis Bayou, with a cold St. Pauli Girl beer in my hand, I would sit with my face towards the southern sun and my feet dangling over the receding tidal waters brimming with shrimp and watch as pairs of A-7 Corsairs from the Oklahoma Air National Guard or RF-4Fs from Meridian Mississippi would thunder along the very edge of the horizon following this timeworn route. The “Sluffs” and “Rhinos” came from the Air Guard deployment camp at nearby Gulfport, where they would spend a week practicing being "deployed” at a base far from their home. These weekend warrior guardsman as well as regular force fighters would follow the barrier islands from west to east – Chandlier Island, Ship Island, Cat Island, Horn Island. All uninhabited, all bereft of antennae, chimneys and tall trees. My best friend, Greg Williams, whose dock I was sitting on, was one of those Mississippi Air Guardsmen who had flown this route many times. Living across Biloxi Bay from these islands, he knew them like the back of his hand. In those early days, he would take a lone Phantom and a back seater, and push himself down low over the Gulf side beaches, ripping from one island to the next heading east from Gulfport. As he came to the eastern end of Horn, the eastern most island, he would bank hard left and run like a scalded dog, low and north, to the wide estuary where the Pascagoula River dumped its brown water into the blue sound. About a mile inland, Highway 90 crosses over the bayous and the snaking Pascagoula on a slender bridge. A few miles farther north, the four lanes I-10 also leap over the two miles of marshland. For years, ass-kicking redneck pilots from Mississippi would approach the Highway 90 bridge from below, climbing to cross the bridge at extreme low level. Complaints from startled citizens in cars and trucks, who had nearly been blown from the road deck, caused the rules to change. All inbound fighters would be required to be at 1,500 feet as they crossed the bridges. Williams, a long serving and proud recce pilot, and the only Voodoo-qualified, college-educated, shrimp boat captain from Bayou Labatrie, Alabama to Boca Chica, Texas, had thousands of hours flying RF-101s and RF-4F Phantoms down where the crawdads live. Flying low was his passion. His favourite thing to do, when flying in the mountains out west, was to run up the face of a mountain, roll inverted over the top, pull down the other side, roll wings level and toboggan the far side. He was used to it, he loved it, but he admitted once to me that he lived so long on the edge, that from time to time, he toppled over it. One day in the late eighties, Major Williams and his back seater Major Bernie Cousins streaked at fifty feet down the Gulf side of Horn Island, scattering pelicans and egrets - “lower than a snakes belly in a wagon rut”. Nearing the island's slender, curving eastern end, Williams rolled hard left, then level again, heading for the mouth of the Pascagoula. To his right he could see the massive Litton Shipyards, to his left, the small town of Gauthier, Mississippi shimmered in the summer heat. Approaching Pascagoula Bay, he climbed from 50 to 1,500 feet to clear the Highway 90 bridge at the authorized altitude. At 1,500 feet he streaked like an arrow north to I-10. At the moment the I-10 bridge passed beneath his nose, Williams rolled inverted and snatched the stick back hard to dive for the deck. Flying aggressively for his entire military career, Williams realized immediately that he had pulled too hard and had "buried" the nose of the massive Southern Grey Rhino far past the right line for recovery. It was one of those “oh, shit” moments in a pilots flying career when he realizes that he has made a possible fatal mistake. It was time to employ all his skill and all his physical strength to overcome his error. Instinctively, Williams released the stick, rolled 180 degrees and pulled as hard as he possibly could on the pole. There was nothing else to do but hold on and ride the Phantom out of the mess. Cousins, in the back, having no way to prepare for the maneuver, blacked out immediately under the massive g-load. Pulling for all he was worth, Williams experienced tunnel vision as he grayed out. He never really saw anything on his periphery, describing the effect of tunnel vision as looking through a toilet paper tube. At zero feet, the sagging Phantom blew swamp water, mudbugs* and sea grass out from behind as she staggered upward in the humid air and climbed for the heavens. He had overstressed the jet and his own body and very nearly killed himself and his back seater. When I spoke to him about it the other day,he said, "You know, I got complacent and I am not proud of that, it was one time I almost lost it.” It takes a good pilot to admit it, and learn. To this day, Williams says that if you look carefully, you will find two deep parallel grooves in the muddy bottom where he dragged his burner cans though that bayou. Williams' story of joy, error, terror and redemption illustrates all that is found in low level flight in any aircraft – the extreme sensation of speed, a breathtaking sense of your own powerful abilities, the risks of complacency and deadly danger waiting only feet away for the pilot who makes a fatal mistake. There are two types of flying that are for the skilled and the experienced only - aerobatics and low level. A show of aerobatics is a beautiful thing indeed, poetry in motion. If aerobatics are ballet, then low level flying is slam dancing - violent, aggressive and heart stopping. Firewall the throttles of a Phantom and drag a cranked wingtip through the mesquite at the bottom of some gulch in the high Colorado desert and you have a YouTube video gone viral. Despite all the risks associated with the practice, it is in fact a safe and critically important skill when practiced by military fliers. The British Ministry of Defence lists some of the key benefits of training their RAF fliers at low level: Is an essential skill that provides aircrew with one of the best chances of survival Is a highly demanding skill which can only be maintained through continuous and realistic training Is conducted with the safety of people on the ground, our aircrew, and other airspace users as the overriding concern Is rigorously controlled and continuously monitored Has reduced since 1988 - the total number of sorties by a third and those by jets by more than half Over the past five years I have been sent links to hundreds of low level flying videos... and only four aerobatic ones... and they were all model airplanes flying in a gymnasium. That tells you a lot about the visceral appeal of the low level flight. There is no fighter pilot alive in North America who has not used the old saw "I feel the need for speed”. Blowing through Mach 1.5 at 30,000 feet, you are indeed fast. You would only know it..., but never feel it. You want to feel speed? Slow down and get down, way down where the trees rise above you, where men crap their pants when you pass, and the dust and water spray mark your passing. In the world's best film ever, Dr. Strangelove, George C. Scott's character, General Buck Turgidson, when asked if the rogue B-52 can get through the Soviet defenses, spreads his arms like wings and proudly expounds in the War Room "If the pilot's good, see. I mean, if he's really... sharp, he can barrel that baby in so low... you oughtta see it sometime, it's a sight. A big plane, like a '52, vroom! There's jet exhaust, flyin' chickens in the barnyard!". Right on Buck! For the past few years, I have dumped any good shots of low level that I came across on the web into a folder on my hard drive, never knowing what to do with them. Last week, my great friend Ian Coristine sent me an e-mail with a collection of low level photos someone had put together. Many were already in my folder. So, here finally is the contents of my folder, in tribute to my friends Greg “Hard Deck” Williams, whose aggressive attitude once made him engage a pair of A-10s in ACM with his Moonie (and win) and Ian Coristine, who never felt he was flying unless his floats swished in the long grass in a morning sunrise. Ian Coristine inspects the alfalfa in his Quad City Challenger ultralight. • Crayfish, crawfish, crawdads They loved to fly low in World War Two 'One more beat-up, me lads.' Flying Officer Cobber Kain, DFC, a New Zealander and the RAF's first ace of the Second World War, is seen here in France performing a low-level flypast.