A memory came to him. He was sitting in the coffee bar back at the squadron in Nellis AFB in Nevada, where he’d spent three months in top-off training and nuclear certification before assignment to a fighter wing. As he sat with his cup of coffee, two instructor pilots were talking about a student in an F-100 who’d been turning base to final on a landing approach. At 300 feet above the ground, he’d let the nose of his aircraft get above the horizon, thus producing adverse yaw, and the plane had snapped over. By then, of course, the airplane had used up all its energy, which meant there was not enough airspeed to recover.

“What about the afterburner?” the instructor in the back cockpit had asked himself, and instinctively slammed the throttle into it, knowing that was their only chance to live.

The F-100 engine was not supposed to light in afterburner at slow speeds; and ordinarily it wouldn’t. Instead it would shoot about twenty feet of flame out the air intake in the front of the jet, and there’d be a violent explosion that would physically knock one’s feet off the floor. This was called a compressor stall, which—though it might seem odd—didn’t harm the engine. If a pilot happened to cause the engine to compressor-stall, he then pulled the throttle to clear the engine, then brought the throttle back up as he got more airspeed and more air going through the engine. Once he had these, he could try lighting the afterburner again.

Back at Nellis, when the instructor had thrown his throttle into afterburner, the engine shouldn’t have lit. It should have experienced a compressor stall. But it hadn’t. It had lit, and given him half again as much thrust. And that thrust had saved his life.

Remembering that, Horner said, “Let’s try the afterburner.” He moved the throttle up full, then pushed it outboard . . . and waited. He felt a shiver in the aircraft, and looked up. Above him were sand dunes to his right and to his left. But he was moving ahead; and he realized that he now had the airplane, the controls were responding; and the jet continued to respond as he made small inputs to level off above the ground. He was flying it carefully, carefully, carefully. . . . If I screw this up one little bit, he told himself, then the aircraft is going to hit the ground.

The afterburner had lit after all, and the nose was actually coming up, though of course the tail was now probably inches above the ground. Behind him, the increased thrust hitting the sand looked like a Texas tornado. Slowly, the airplane staggered up out of the desert.

About that time, the tower officer, sensing trouble, put in a call: “Three, are you having a problem?”

“No,” Horner answered, “but I am returning to base.” And he flew home.