Fini Flight

A muddle-headed morning here at Tara.

I started out on the wrong foot, after struggling with the espresso machine.

Peg rolled out of bed and tried to be a team player, little bare feet padding down the creaking back stairs to turn on the machine, which needs a few minutes to warm up before it is capable of generating a latte.

The thing has gotten temperamental of late, perhaps because Corning has amazingly hard water and we never learned how to descale it. This morning it would pull shots, but there was no hot water or steam wand. I groused and cursed, committing heresy by suggesting we get a Keurig. I feel sheepish even airing these complaints lest I hurt Issac and Olivia's feelings, seeing as how they gave us this amazing device.

Well, it turns out the espresso maker is fine--Peg just pushed the boiler button while randomly pressing things trying to turn it on in the dark. I figured that out after returning from dropping her off at work, then compounded the issue by letting her know in a text that her inadvertent poke at the boiler button was the source of this morning's coffee crisis. I may need to give an extra foot rub this evening to make up for the transgression.

Meanwhile, the assembly of furniture here continues apace.

Peg's living room selections arrived yesterday morning,

as did her new bedroom suite.

We are driving up toward Rochester on Saturday to pick up her Victorian dining room set, and perhaps an old church pew to put in the mud room. At that point the large furniture purchases will be mostly complete, and we'll move on to small stuff like lamps and wall hangings. And minor renovations P has in mind. And fixing the backyard. And installing a hot tub.

Let's face it, we'll never quite finish this little project, so long as we have the liquidity to play the game.

But this morning my head is in another world, thinking back twenty-seven years to August 5, 1994, the date of my last flight in the F-15, my "fini flight". I was an instructor pilot in the 95th Fighter Squadron, the "Home of Mr. Bones", at Tyndall AFB. When I arrived there in 1991 we had an actual human skeleton in a flight suit lying in a coffin in the bar; that is, when we didn't pull him out of the coffin to sit at the bar with a lit cigarette dangling from his lipless mouth, Ray Bans covering his eye sockets. Our flight surgeon finally convinced us this was a desecration, so in '93 or so we held a military funeral for Mr. Bones and buried him in his own little plot in front of the squadron offices, complete with a headstone bearing our squadron motto, "Death With Finesse".

In February of 1994, I told my boss Bubba Edmonds that I had decided to leave the Air Force and go to law school at the University of Georgia. The whole existential crisis leading up to that moment is fodder for some future essay, but basically I felt at twenty-nine years old that I had fought in the last great air battle of my generation, which turned out to be true, and couldn't bear the thought of spending the rest of my adult life flying practice sorties or engaging in multiple three year tours of booger-eating at someplace like the Pentagon. I was going to try something different, stretch a little, and see where this new path led.

As soon as I announced I wasn't hanging around, I was stripped of all those additional duties with which I'd been saddled as the Air Force groomed me for promotion. I was no longer the chief of scheduling, arguably the hardest job in a training squadron as I managed perhaps five different syllabi at the same time. Someone else became flight safety officer. Basically, all I did was drive my Jeep into work mid-morning most days, fly a mission as a training bandit or as a flight examiner on a checkride, then go to Tyndall's fabulous bayfront golf course to hit an bucket of balls and play 18 holes before going home to play with my one-year-old on the dock. If I flew a late afternoon mission, I'd hang around the squadron to play foosball and drink beer with the guys.

It was one of the happiest times of my life. Having little or no responsibility is highly underrated.

But all good things must come to an end, I guess. One of the great kindnesses bestowed by Bubba was that I kept flying right up to the end--the Air Force had a bad habit of immediately grounding guys who dropped their papers, basically leaving them with nothing to do for months before their separation date. Bubba didn't do that--my last flight, on this date, was a bare ten days before law school orientation at Athens.

My fini flight would be a two vs. two against a pair of Hornets from Cecil Field over in Jacksonville, whom we'd meet out over the Gulf maybe thirty miles south of Apalachicola. My wingman would be Tom Cucchi, "Cooch", one of those rare polymaths who was not only a fine fighter pilot but a concert level viola player in our local orchestra. No wonder he ended up retiring as a general, like so many other of my Eagle driver colleagues.

The weather was standard Florida-in-August sauna bath heat and humidity under gray, threatening skies. "Hotter than two rats f*****g in a wool sock," as I've heard it described. I took off in full afterburner, and Cooch rolled fifteen seconds later, rejoining on my left wing as I made the long, climbing arc away from Panama City and out over the water. We walked through a routine I'd led hundreds of times before, but this would be the last time. Push the wingman out to spread with a raised palm, then out to tactical formation that had us line abreast and 9,000 feet apart. Two descending ninety degree turns as we entered the warning area, to make sure our g-suits were working. Master arm switches on, weapons systems checked, AIM-9s cooling in a cloud of argon gas over the seeker head.

And here came the Hornets, two blips on our radar entering from the northeast. We established radio contact with them in the back radio, and set the front radio so we could talk among ourselves.

Both sides called "ready", and I turned us toward the F-18s forty miles to our north.

"Fight's On."

These mock air battles are a carefully planned affair. I had called the Hornet flight lead the day before, and we agreed on what was a typical set of presentations-- first there would be a full ensemble of weapons on both sides, meaning we could fire AIM-7 Sparrows at maybe twenty miles then chase the survivors with heat-seekers or the cannon; then "heat and guns", with no radar missile kill capability, making for a lethal range inside of five miles; then "Papas and guns", in which the AIM-9 could only be employed within a thirty-degree cone of the tail of the target. That last scenario tended to turn into a knife fight in a phone booth.

The other flight lead knew this was my fini flight, and promised a fun, challenging day. He didn't disappoint.

As usual, the first scenario went well for us. We climbed into the high 30s, plugged in full afterburner, and in the process increased the range of the missle (the "WEZ", or weapon employment zone) a few miles past theirs. First shots for us meant the Hornets could fly straight ahead and die, or begin evasive manuevers and lose the initiative in the process. They chose the latter, and we killed one and blew through the merge at supersonic speeds, leaving the survivor in the dust before he could get his nose around to shoot back. "Straight lines and little hooks," as we taught for years. Don't turn. Don't get slow.

I don't remember much about the second setup, except that we basically killed each other.

The last setup was the most challenging for us. The Eagle is superb at shooting from long range and going fast, and holds its own in low speed combat with its massive wings and independently maneuvering horizontal stabilizers. The Hornet, with its leading edge slats, owns that arena however. F-18s would routinely show up at the merge against us at 350 knots to our 425-450, looking to turn and burn. No straight lines and little hooks for these guys.

Our plan for this final setup of my career was to hit the merge at around 425, our best turning speed, and use our power advantage to make a very high-G turn and gain angles on the Hornets before they did the same to us with their superior nose authority. We would try to force a two-circle fight, while they no doubt would try to force a single circle where their power disadvantage would matter less, and their ability to point and shoot would allow them to engage with the gun at close range.

Things started out well, but eventually I found myself in a single circle battle with one of them as Cooch tangled with the other. It occurred to me that my last dogfight might end with me getting gunned by some Navy puke, as we entered a scissors, with both jets at the edge of a stall, hanging in the air at 140 knots and gently easing left and right to force the other out front and into gun range.

It was obvious that I wasn't going to get behind this guy, who was playing the game perfectly, so the only thing I could do was work on my escape. Because the Eagle has a higher thrust-to-weight ratio than the Hornet, I could out-climb him, creating a little distance between us with me on a perch maybe 3000 feet of slant range and 1500 feet above him. Once I established enough spacing, I performed a pirouette manuever, unloading the angle of attack by pushing the stick forward while kicking right rudder. It is a thing to behold--the jet basically stops in the air, rolls and drops, ending up beak-to-beak with its attacker and too close to shoot with a missile and too skinny to kill with the gun.

Then I blew past him at the edge of the 500 foot "bubble", diving and accelerating away before he could do the same thing and send a simulated AIM-9 up my tailpipe.

My very last move as a fighter pilot, an escape. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

At this point we were bingo fuel, so we turned off the master arm, rejoined, and performed a battle damage check as St. Vincent Island passed below us, then the tip of Cape San Blas where in the old days there was supposedly a nudist beach. Then up initial in tactical spread.

I was feeling a little emotional about then, sort of on mental autopilot. I pitched out over the numbers, racking the jet into six Gs or so, then threw down the landing gear as I rolled level.

Damn. Ten knots fast. I'd just oversped the gear doors. I hoped no one would notice.

Then an uneventful landing, then into de-arm to pin the jet, then to my parking space.

There is a tradition in the fighter community of having a fire truck waiting at one's parking space on a fini flight, to hose down the now-ex-fighter pilot. I knew that was coming, and stripped off my flightsuit in the dearming area so I was down to the swimsuit underneath. Then I put the helmet back on, thereby creating the illusion of a naked man in a flight helmet taxiing a 31 million dollar airplane down the ramp. I was a lot funnier back then.

Man, that seems like several lifetimes ago. And I guess it has been. Ten days later I was sitting in a classroom at the beginning of a new adventure, not having much idea where it would lead but figuring it might bring some relief from the ennui of the previous few years. As it turns out there was a lot more to that unhappy feeling than vocational boredom, but I'd have to walk a very long road to come around to that truth.

But I'll always have that day.