Combat Ready: Lessons Learned in the Journey to Fighter Pilot Read online

  One late spring day, I was flying the Stearman around my grandparent’s small town of Monett, Missouri and decided to buzz my old flight instructor’s house. I made two or three passes as low as I could stand and he came out and waved, so I climbed up and performed a few aerobatic maneuvers for him. All was well and I was having a great time back in the airplane for the first time in months. But someone at the airport came over the radio asking for “the person flying the yellow biplane,” saying the sheriff was at the airport and would like to talk with me. The fun quickly subsided as I nervously turned back toward the airport, landed, and pulled up to the hangar. Not exactly sure what this was concerning, I started rehearsing excuses the entire flight back for any violations he might bring up.

  After I landed the sheriff approached the plane, chest puffed, as I was climbing out of the cockpit and said, “You were flying pretty low over by the high school weren’t you?”

  I replied, “I was in that area, yes sir.”

  “What is the legal limit for aircraft altitude?”

  I confidently replied, “500 feet.”

  With a tone knowing he had me, he said, “Well you were not 500 feet!”

  I paused, reflecting on my flight instructor’s advice to never actually admit fault unless they could prove it. “Sir, I don’t know how much experience you have judging aircraft height, but my instruments said I was at 500 feet.” Considering I’d been maybe 50 feet over my instructor’s house, I had no idea what his reaction would be but I was damn proud of the answer I’d improvised.

  He skeptically said, “Well, I guess I am just a little nervous with it being graduation week that someone is going to pull a prank at the high school.” I reassured him I was not doing anything of the sort and we both moved on. I am to this day the only pilot I know who has been pulled over by a sheriff from the ground.

  My grandfather’s 1942 Boeing Stearman

  A lot of flying can be learned from textbooks but experiencing things in the plane is always the best teacher. It is the screw-ups that really stick with you and I will share one of them.

  This event occurred during one of my first instrument flights—a type of flight where you rely entirely on the instruments in the plane without looking outside. This allows a pilot to safely fly in clouds. My grandpa, having been an instructor in the Air Force and throughout his civilian career, knew tricks to confuse and test students. One afternoon, while I was under goggles that block out the windows of the plane, simulating being in a cloud, he asked me to climb to 2,800 feet at a very hectic time during the flight just after takeoff. Unfortunately, when the airplane reaches 1,800 feet, the thousand-foot pointer is basically pointing at the two on the altimeter. (An altimeter looks similar to a round clock.) Under the stressful environment, I make a rookie mistake and read this as 2,800, even though I was 1,000 feet short.

  Fortunately for me, we were in Missouri where there is nothing to hit at 1,800 feet, until we started a simulated instrument approach to land. In the real world, the air traffic controller would have probably said something to me because he can see my altitude on radar most of the time. Still wearing my vision-limiting goggles, I couldn’t see anything and was expecting to descend to 1,700 feet, but I was unknowingly beginning a descent to 700 feet. This is a real problem when the ground elevation is 1,300 feet. We were at about 1,400 feet above sea level, just 100 feet above the ground and descending, when my grandpa asked me to take the goggles off and have a look. We were seconds away from crashing into a forest.

  As I corrected my descent, a rush of confused adrenaline raced through my body. This moment, which was the only time in my training I would have killed myself and everyone involved, definitely had an impact on me. After we landed, my grandpa explained how he was able to confuse me but didn’t say anything further, allowing me to deal with the mistake on my own terms. I remember being very down on myself right after the flight but not much past that. Whether that is good or not is debatable but I have always been good at putting negative events behind me. You need to learn from the mistakes you make but not dwell on them as they can detract from your confidence, and ultimately performance, on future flights.

  I also had a fair share of minor emergencies but nothing ever ended with serious consequences. I had my alternator and battery fail while flying in clouds and rain with my dad one afternoon. This means I lost all ability to communicate and navigate except for the old magnetic compass. Had this occurred in a mountainous area, it would have been far more serious as determining the location of mountains while in the clouds would have been nearly impossible. Fortunately, in Missouri there isn’t much to hit except cell phone towers, as long as you have a decent idea of how low the clouds go. I just cautiously descended through the clouds, and once below, simply looked around for an airport to land.

  The closest I was to ever having a serious problem was when my carburetor was icing over. I was flying a little Cessna through heavy rain in the clouds and noticed the RPM slowly wind back. This decline in power without any inputs from the pilot is not normal and I couldn’t explain it. I kept pushing the throttle forward until it was all the way forward, yet the RPM continued to slowly roll back. Furthermore, there was weather all the way down to the ground, including fog, making a forced landing in a field very difficult. I never thought carburetor icing was possible at full power and when I added carburetor heat as one of the last things I could think of doing, for a moment the engine continued to decrease power output even further. My heart skipped a couple beats until the engine roared back to life—after melting the ice that was choking it.

  I think the importance of my civilian experience was the lack of any formal courses. I was very fortunate to have access to a range of planes, instructors and a variety of experiences but I never attended a flight school—something I feel very fortunate to not have gone through. It allowed me to progress at my own pace and learn without large bureaucratic constraints and rules inherent within any larger training organization. I would go on to experience these limitations and rules in military training but learning without them gave me a different attitude from most, which would help me throughout my future military training.

  The Application

  Growing up and hearing fighter pilot stories from my grandpa and his friends captured my attention from an early age. As I was learning to fly and get my various licenses during high school, the idea of the Air Force Academy was tossed around. I spoke to a recruiter a few times and he informed me the Academy was the best route if I wanted to fly a fighter jet. However, I had noticed one of my eyes becoming slightly worse and he said without perfect vision, I had no chance. I didn’t even go to the optometrist, I just assumed this was accurate and moved on with my life. Being intimidated by the military culture also kept me from pursuing it further. So I quit trying and attended Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. It was one recruiter, who didn’t know much about the Air Force Academy and the process of becoming a pilot, who changed my entire future. He had no clue that perfect vision was not a prerequisite. It was my immaturity and lack of investigating further that ironically allowed me to stumble upon a coveted fighter slot.

  Moving forward three years, I was a senior at the University of Missouri, majoring in Finance and Real Estate. Flying sporadically when I went home for various vacations, aviation had taken a backseat in my life and I was in the process of applying to various schools to get my Master’s degree in Business. One evening, Eli Bozeman, one of my best friends from Missouri and a fellow aviation enthusiast, called and asked if I had heard of the Air National Guard. Negative. He had just moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma where an F-16 guard unit was stationed and had come across something seemingly too good to be true. The F-16 is a multirole fighter jet, meaning it can accomplish a variety of missions from attacking other airplanes to supporting troops on the ground with bombs. It is an awesome machine with a huge afterburner, creating enormous amounts of power. Fighter jets had always been the pinnacle of aviation in my mind. It was a job of honor and it seemed like an amazing experience. Fight for your country in one of the most powerful, most advanced machines man has ever built, all while dancing through the sky. Damn.

  Eli said something to the effect of, “Man, I may be wrong but it sounds like if you apply to a certain Guard unit and they accept you, you get to fly their plane. Further, you might get to have a real job and just fly on the weekends or something.” Full of excited skepticism, we both had hundreds of questions. To be able to join a part of the Air Force and ensure I would fly a fighter jet sounded like heaven on earth.

  The alternative was to go through flying school via the active duty Air Force, but the fear of doing this and then getting stuck with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assignment or, as they say in Top Gun, “fly a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong” was too much for me. The military was intimidating and I had heard too many bad stories about promises gone awry. Let me point out there is absolutely nothing wrong with either of those jobs, cargo or UAV. They are essential to the US Air Force mission and some things about those careers are arguably better than of a fighter pilot. However, we all have various personalities and mine doesn’t seem to fit anything but a fighter.

  The next few months became a quest to find out as much as we could about the validity of what we’d heard. I kept thinking this concept of being a part-time fighter pilot flying an F-16 couldn’t be real. But we interviewed a few people, tried to call units and I made sure the eye situation was fine. As an aside, most people believe Air Force fighter pilots must have perfect vision. False. 20/70 correctable to 20/20, or LASIK and various other surgeries are acceptable, just requiring more extensive testing for those candidates.

  Through all of our research, it appeared this ‘too good to be t
rue’ option was legitimate. One day I was able to call a couple former Air Guard pilots who flew F-15s (the F-16 counterpart focused only on shooting down other airplanes) to learn about the process of getting selected.

  I learned it is easier to get a pilot spot in the active duty Air Force, but you don’t know what plane you will fly. There is a “drop” night during pilot training where the “needs of the Air Force” (which planes are available) are put on a board and the top of the class gets first choice and down the list they go. Depending on the needs of the Air Force, there may not even be a fighter available. In the Air Guard however, it is harder to get a pilot spot, but once you do, you know what you will fly. I didn’t want to join the Air Force to fly a tanker or cargo plane. I wanted to fly fighters.

  Unfortunately, the Guard spots are tough to get. I summarized the process for Eli: “We have to drive to these units, buy them beer, spend the weekend there and do this numerous times all while there are 150 other people trying to do the same thing to get that one spot. Even if I am the best of the 150 candidates, odds are still not in my favor. The guard is essentially joining a fraternity.”

  This revelation took a lot of the wind out of my sails. The closest unit to me was six hours away. Not only would this mean a significant amount of time spent “schmoozing” these guys, but also a significant amount of money for a very small chance.

  Accepting a position with the Guard can also put guys in a tough spot. While you will have a full time job for three to four years during training, after that you might essentially be thrown on the street. There might be a full time job at the end but if none were available, you’d have to fly about one week per month with the Guard and then figure out another career willing to accommodate that difficult schedule.

  Further, I was in line to start my MBA so I was anticipating having other promising options in life. It was at this point, early 2009, my senior year of college, I quit pursuing the fighter pilot dream for a while. I hate to use the word quit, but the demands to get a spot appeared too difficult at the time. Life is about calculated risks and in my logical business mind, a lot of luck was required for something that would command a lot of time and resources, things I didn’t have much of.

  We were nervous about many factors which now just seem ridiculous but at the time limited our motivation to continue. I remember being at various bars in college covering my “better” eye, trying to read signs and being depressed because I could only read them with my good eye. I also thought about not applying because my right elbow clicks when I do pushups. Clearly there could be no way I’d even get through boot camp.

  These minor concerns almost kept me from doing the coolest job in the world. In hindsight, they are all absurd and embarrassing to even consider but that was my mentality at the time.

  But then came June of that same year. Ky Miller, a 16 year old aspiring pilot, called me up regarding flying to Dayton, OH for an airshow with The Thunderbirds and to visit the National Museum of the United States Air Force. We started with the Air Force Museum. From using pistols to duel another biplane in the sky, to stealth aircraft firing missiles from miles away and dropping bombs on targets through clouds to within a foot of the target, the rapid evolution of aviation is amazing. It made me want to be a part of it, to be an instrumental part of history, all while doing something exhilarating and badass. Then we met the F-16 pilots of The Thunderbirds and watched their demonstration. They sold me on something for which I shouldn’t have needed selling. Seeing an afterburning engine at near-supersonic speeds and rolling inverted was more than enough. Leaving that airshow I was going to give the application process a shot. I would at least take the tests and see how I performed.

  Each Guard unit has different application requirements, but they all require a candidate to take the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT), a standardized test similar to the SAT and ACT. It has verbal and mathematical sections but also a pilot and navigator section. In a decision made from ignorance, I only studied for the pilot section for fear I would end up looking like a better candidate for a navigator position. Complete ignorance. While I scored pretty well on the other sections, I scored a 99 on the pilot section and almost jumped through the roof when I received my score. Now it felt like I had a chance. A candidate must also get a Test of Basic Aviation Skills (TBAS) score. This combines your total number of flight hours with a score on a computerized test that measures a variety of skills using a control stick and rudders. After getting a 98 on this measure, I now had confidence and was ready to start applying.

  Unfortunately, applying was not easy. They don’t need pilots—they have hundreds apply for every spot so there is absolutely zero time spent on recruiting or providing material on what is necessary for an application. I generated a spreadsheet of every Guard fighter unit in the country flying F-15s and F-16s. It took me weeks to even get phone numbers for these places. I had no clue how the military worked or what the proper etiquette was. The first couple of units I called reestablished my discouragement. They would say things like, “oh, we aren’t hiring for 10 months,” “we don’t accept people off the street,” “we don’t accept people out of our state,” or even, “we are switching airframes this year.” Just as soon as I had gained momentum from my scores, I had tried to get ahold of every unit yet had no applications to even send in.

  Finally, one day I got a call saying the 187th Fighter Wing in Montgomery, Alabama was accepting applications and they gave me a list of all the requirements. After submitting all of the necessary material, a variety of transcripts, letters of recommendation and medicals, I got a call a few weeks later saying I had earned an interview.

  My grandpa, cousin and I hopped in our Bonanza and flew down for the three-day interview process. The candidates hung out in the pilot’s bar, went out to eat, watched the jets take off, did a physical test and had a formal interview. 140 people applied for one spot and twelve of us even made the interview. They told us a few different times how difficult it is to get one of these spots. They said more people become football players in the NFL each year than fighter pilots. Not only that, but you must pay your way to each visit and interview. Go to one or two interviews and it is not that big of a deal—each trip is probably $5-600 if done cheaply—but I knew people who had made it to interviews 10+ times and never got a spot. Quite a significant expense when you are in your early twenties.

  I scoured the Internet for any tips on what interview questions would be like. Here are a few examples from my research and how I prepared to answer them.

  How do you feel about killing someone?

  It is not something I would look forward to but I also realize it could be a part of the mission. I would have no problem killing someone in order to defend the United States and carry out the mission objectives.

  We know you want to fly but what other reasons brought you to making this commitment?

  They say to be happy and effective, do what you are passionate about. This often conjures up selfish images but with the Air National Guard, my profession will be my passion, with the best equipment and eventual peers in the world, all while serving my country. Doing the thing I love most while helping and protecting those around me seems to be the pinnacle.

  How much flight time do you have?

  880 hours or so. About 120 in a Boeing Stearman, 120 in Citation Encores, Beechcraft Bonanza and a few with a variety of other planes. I have a decent amount of aerobatics training and competed in a couple contests, and have eight hours or so of formation experience.

  Give us an example of when your integrity was challenged?

  Every moment in golf. You enforce the rules on yourself leaving many opportunities to take advantage of the game. I saw instances when people cheated and were caught cheating. There is something about that clean feeling of living a good life that is great.