Most mornings if I'm going to talk about my military flying days I write something about the Eagle. I loved the Eagle--easy to fly, powerful enough to moose you out of most bad situations with sheer thrust, a solitary flying experience for a guy who treasures solitude. No wonder so many of my old Eagle Driver friends spend a chunk of their remaining consciousness on earth trying to crawl back through that portal to a time three decades ago when their world revolved around that magnificent machine.
But this morning, as I was watching the dawn slowly break between my toes, my thoughts were of other cold, dark mornings in my youth. As a young man, so many of our rites of passage happen there. I recall pulling into my high school parking lot at 5:30 in the morning for off-season football workouts before class, a miserable but necessary ritual that paid big dividends in the fall (or so we were told).
Those weren't the most grueling mornings, however. Around this time, 34 years ago now, I would be in a line of red glowing tail lights pulling in darkness into the parking lot of the 37th Flying Training Squadron, Columbus AFB, Mississippi.
The 37th was my entry point into military aviation, and my home during the first half of Undergraduate Pilot Training at Columbus.
I'm pretty sure the image on the patch is suppose to evoke a mama tiger holding her cute little cub, who's trying to roar and come into his own. Rather than maternal protection and care, however, life in the 37th felt like the mama cat was always about to bite your head off. Maybe that was the inside joke the patch was meant to convey.
We would arrive in cold darkness, shivering in flight suits and jackets that were too thinly made for these frigid north Mississippi mornings. There was no conversation as we shuffled across the parking lot, into the squadron, and making a hard left into Thunderbolt Flight, our home for the next twelve hours.
"The Bolt" was commanded by Captain Turbo Ted LaPlante, an effusive upstate New Yorker whose trim, short frame reminded one of a high school wrestler. "Because I fly jets, I envy no man," he had written across one half of the blackboard in the front of the room, with student chairs arranged in a horseshoe facing the board and the lecturn at the front. Behind our chairs were the instructor pilots' desks, empty now as the cadre were in their faculty office drinking coffee and occasionally bursting into laughter, no doubt at the expense of some student who'd flubbed a ride the day before. Most of these guys were "FAIPs", or first assignment instructor pilots, lieutenants and junior captains who'd performed well enough to be qualified for single seat aircraft ("FAR'd", for "fighter attack reconnaissance"), but caught in this purgatory of instructing for up to five years because they weren't ranked highly enough to have been assigned a line fighter out of pilot training, or low enough to be assigned to a second-tier high performance aircraft like an OV-10 Bronco or an F-111 Aardvark ("Scum-FAR's", they were called--a lucky bunch indeed).
Turbo Ted had been a B-52 aircraft commander, and loved his job, both in SAC and here at Columbus. His cheeriness was a welcome counter to the bitter sarcasm of most of the rest of the instructors. He was one of those rare teachers who understood his job was as much to model what a cocky Air Force pilot should be, as to show us how to fly a jet.
It was still dark outside at 5:30 on a February morning, but we wouldn't have known in that windowless room. We made our way to our seats, sat in silence with hands on each knee, one grasping a checklist, when the room was called to attention and the instructors marched in. We were told to sit, and the XO gave a short brief on weather, NOTAMs, and general announcements. You could feel the tension building as LaPlante strode to the lecturn and invited Stan Eval to come forward.
That would be "Standards and Evaluation," "SEFE", the bane of the student pilot. These were the guys who administered the checkrides that would either usher you into life as a pilot, or start you down that garbage chute that led to a job as a ground-pounder somewhere, a statistic, a person whose professional career started with an epic failure you'd have to explain forever.
Our Stan Eval guy was Randy Fopiano, "Fop", a tall, handsome guy with a thick head of curly black hair who'd remind you of a varsity baseball player, maybe shortstop or second base. Fop walked up to the lecturn, and began:
"You are on a contact ride, solo, after lunch. You are in one of the working areas twenty miles north of the field, coming over the top in a loop, at mil power, when you hear a loud 'bang' and the aircraft rolls to the right. There is a warning horn and a flashing light on the instrument panel."
"Lieutenant Dickey, you have the aircraft."
Shit.
I stand, making a sweaty handprint in my checklist.
"Sir, first I would maintain aircraft control. I counter the roll with left rudder, and draw back the stick to the horizon and roll level."
Fop responds. "The jet levels, but there's vibration coming from the right side."
"Next, I assess the situation. What warning light, and what tone?"
"You have a flashing 'engine fire' light on the right, and aural tone."
I won't bore you from here, because it's a pretty easy emergency to resolve. Just run the boldface checklist, by which you'd activate the fire control system and shut down the engine. Then you'd fly home, praying the fire didn't burn through a hydraulic line leading to your flight controls over on the right side of the plane. Easy peasy.
But not so easy for some--if you blew the EP ("emergency procedure") at stand-up, you were grounded for the day, and would sit for twelve hours at your desk studying as penance.
And once you busted one of these, Fop would come back. And come back.
I never busted one, but a lot of friends at the time did. Some soldiered through all that and got their wings, but for some the experience would burrow deeper and deeper into their heads. Fop would call on them and they'd shake and stammer, mis-quote the checklist, visibly sweat on this cold morning. Finally, Fop would pull the plug.
"Lieutenant Watson, sit down. Lieutenant Tenlon, you have the aircraft."
And that was that.
Once the instructors got into someone's head, it wasn't long until the poor student started tubing rides in the actual jet--getting lost, losing control during a spin recovery, trying to land in the overrun because they couldn't master the mantra of "aimpoint/airspeed" as they came down final. Then one day we'd walk into the flight room, and Lieutenant Watson's seat was empty. Then another. Then another. Until by the time we finished our time in Thunderbolt, roughly half the seats were empty, a stark reminder of the fate that awaited any of us if we had a bad week. Because that was all it took--three failed rides and you're out. No quarter.
Then you'd see these poor lost souls at the BX, feeling like Dante walking through the first level of hell, failed aviators trapped in limbo and wearing fatigues rather than a flight suit as they awaited re-assignment to a desk at Bumfuck AFB, North Dakota. Or some got to be navigators if they were lucky. We avoided eye contact. I feel a little guilty about that, but if some of their karma stuck to my clothes like pollen, the disease of failure might take hold and I'd be next. And I was determined not to be next.
After surviving stand-up, it was time to fly or go to the simulator. Those mornings are what crossed my mind as I awakened today. Walking out onto a flight line stinking of jet fuel and diesel from the auxiliary power units, bitter cold and dimly lit in the insipid winter light, to the mighty T-37 Tweet.
The Tweet was an unlovely product produced by Cessna in the 1950s, capable of maybe 250 knots at altitude, and fully aerobatic. The Continental jet engines gave off a deafening shriek that accounted for the hearing loss one found among instructors who'd been there a while--hence the "6000 pound dog whistle". It was the only aircraft in the USAF inventory certified for spins, which our instructors made us repeat over-and-over on those early flights until I could perform a spin recovery in my sleep.
The downside of spin training for me back then was that I'd had motion sickness throughout my life, puking on my dad on long car trips, over the gunwhales of fishing boats--I could go on, but you get the idea. I'm not sure why I thought that would change in this vomit-scented, claustrophobic trainer.
It was the single biggest crisis I experienced in pilot training. I'd fly us out to the practice areas, put the jet through its paces with stalls, spins, chandelles, clover leafs, and the like, then hand the controls to my instructor and promptly throw up as soon as we were back in level flight and headed home.
Pukers did not graduate from pilot training, as you might expect. We did, however, get the benefit of one last attempt to save us, through a prescription for an antiemetic that we'd take for a couple weeks to see if we could break the cycle. If I kept getting sick after the meds ran out, I'd be that guy at the BX on his way to a desk job.
Mercifully, that didn't happen, I didn't wash out, and I ended up one of the lucky, lucky few who did well enough to earn an assignment flying the Eagle, the premier air superiority fighter on the planet. That felt awfully unlikely as I was yacking into a bag somewhere over Caledonia, Mississippi.
I don't look back on that first phase of pilot training in the Tweet with any fondness. The brutal attrition, the instructors who didn't want to get to know you because you'd likely be gone soon, the mornings walking in darkness into the windowless building, the frigid preflights and missions where every move was critiqued and graded. I understand the necessity of it now, how it was part of what made us the best Air Force on earth. I just wouldn't want to relive it, not for anything.
Mike's out there unloading another roll of hay for the cattle this morning. Still only two calves. Wondering if we'll see another before it's time to go back to New York.
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