Your Weekly Lex, For Strength

Fear of flying

Every job has its aggravations of course, but apart from specialized jobs within the services, firefighters and police, there are few, I think that require the daily mastery of physical fear. Carrier aviation certainly does, at least in the beginning when an aviator is first building the shell of self-confidence to hermetically surround and enclose his anxieties. It’s really, really hard and you have to do it fairly precisely. Not everyone is equally successful. Not with the flying part. Not with the fear.  […]

 

Winning

A big congratulations to my good friend and Dangerous flights co-star Pete Zaccagnino for winning first place in the jet class at the Reno air races.  There a lot of really cool and manly things a guy can do in this world but racing your own jet at over 500 knots just 50 feet off the ground has got to be one of the best.  I have big case of speed envy.
Photo: Winning jet 24 with trophy girls!!! 521 mph lap today That’s Pete’s plane, look hard you’ll see it.

Dangerous Flights

As many of you know for the last two years I’ve been on a reality show documentary series called Dangerous Flights.  The show has been aired in Canada and 128 countries around the world but not in the US, much to the dismay of my friends who want to watch it and make fun of me.  Well their dreams have come true because not only has the show has been picked up by the Smithsonian channel, which will air it in November, but someone has uploaded a lot of the episodes onto YouTube.  So if you want to see some of the show and laugh at me go to YouTube and search for Dangerous Flights, you will be able to see almost all of season one there. Above is episode 2 where I am introduced to the show.  Enjoy and feel free to comment on how stupid I look!

Your Weekly Lex, For Strength

The power of saying “no”

Obviously the military places great store in obeying the orders of properly constituted authority – we can’t very well go around having a council of war at every different level once the whistle blows. But for all things there is a time, and for every rule an exception.
When I was a lieutenant I had a CO who used to warn us about the risks of ‘flathatting’ thus: “Don’t do it – if I catch you doing it I’ll kill you. If you’re going to do it anyway, then at least for God’s sake brief whatever it is that you’re going to do. I’ll still kill you if I catch you, but that’s better than having some stray wire cross inside your skull provoking you into an unconsidered act which not only kills you but also destroys one of my airplanes. If you at least brief it, think it through beforehand, you’ve got a much better chance of surviving – at least until you get home. You’ll be just as dead either way, but if I can’t make you think of your own life, wife, friends or family, I want you to at least think of the taxpayer.”
Clear guidance. Made sense.
The pre-flight brief, you see, is a binding contract. It’s what you say you’re going to do with the $40 million piece of equipment that government has lent you, and by implication, what you’re not going to do. If you find yourself having to call an audible in flight, it meant that the brief had been insufficiently thorough. Which is itself a “debrief point” – a rather benign sounding term which carries the connotation of having screwed something up.
Came to pass one night that I was up at beautiful Fallon, Nevada, getting a refresh ride in the FA-18 after my tour as an adversary pilot in Key West. I was all rigged out in my best go-fast gear and ready to rain death and destruction – well, 25 pound practice bombs with smoke charges anyway – on the circular bullseye at Bravo 20. High angle bombing it was, 10,000 foot AGL roll-in, 45 degree dive at 475 knots true airspeed and a 3000 foot AGL minimum recovery altitude.
The target was not so much illuminated – this was before night vision devices had become in vogue – as it was outlined by a cross-shaped series of lights. The trick was to roll in, hurtle yourself to the deck at ever increasing speed, align the dim symbology of your heads up display with the vertical axis of the target lights glimmering out of the gloom, place your weapons symbology at the theoretical intersection of the lateral axis and drop your MK76 into the pitch black hole in the middle. And then pull 4-5 g’s (which at night always ended up being more like 5-6 g’s – one each for momma and the kids) to avoid following your bomb into the target. Points on for accuracy, points off for breaking the minalt, game over for plowing in.
We tend to be simple people. We like simple rules.
Our flight lead and instructor pilot was a USAF major on exchange with the Navy. I was junior time-in-grade among the three mid-grade officers in my flight. Besides myself (dash-2) there was another lieutenant commander also on his way to a department head tour in dash-3. Since we were all relatively experienced pilots, the pre-flight brief was mercifully short: Start, taxi, take-off, rejoin, enroute, break-up, bomb, rejoin overhead, battle damage check and return to base for a 10-second break and landing. Emergencies and hung ordnance. Before too long we were airborne, joined and heading to the target.
Flight breakup, pattern entry and mud moving went exactly as briefed, with your humble narrator bearing away the prize for accuracy. Which it’s my story, innit? So I get to tell it any way I like, and that’s the way I remember it. As far as you know.
Rejoined overhead the target and checked my lead’s wings clear of ordnance. Three provided the same courtesy to me. Lead called on the radio to say that we should take cruise formation, since it was his intent to drop down to 500 feet AGL and surveil the lights around the target bullseye. On a dark night – darker than a hat full of *ssholes, as they say. Darker than six feet up a cow’s… well, you follow me I think: Dark.
In mountainous terrain. Without night vision devices. Did I mention that it was dark?
I briefly considered my options. The flight lead was in a position of authority, and he hadn’t asked us our opinion – he’d told us what to do. But this was not anything we’d even hinted at in the brief and suffice it to say it was a significant deviation from normal operations. I waited a bit for the more senior Navy guy in dash-3 to say something, but it remained quiet on the net. Finally I had to break the silence:
Your humble scribe: Do what?
Flight lead: You know, just drop down, take a look. Check it out.
YHS:
FL:
YHS: I’m detaching, I’ll see you guys back on deck.
FL: Say again?
YHS: We didn’t talk about this in the brief and I haven’t got the least intention of dropping down to 500 feet at night until I’ve got my wheels and flaps down on final approach to land. Good luck, though.
Now, I’ve always been a devil-take-the-hindmost kind of a guy, and nobody likes to be thought of as a “non-hack.” But neither are there any posthumous awards or citations attached to augering in on a training flight. I couldn’t order my seniors to abandon what I considered a stupidly risky idea with zero upside, but being in actual command of the aircraft I’d been loaned I could choose not to participate in it. In the end, the flight lead abandoned his scheme, I rejoined the flight and we headed back to the field for landing.
In the debrief I was fully prepared for some of that characteristic fighter pilot ululation, chest-thumping and high energy ego management, but as it turned out everyone was pretty thoughtful instead. It had been a pretty stupid idea.
I think maybe all of us learned about flying from that.

I Guess That’s One Way To Do It

Up and away! aviator attempts to cross Atlantic with 370 helium-filled balloons

An aviator has begun a world first attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean, dangling from 370 helium-filled balloons, in a real-life version of the Disney film ‘Up’.

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Update: He only made it as far as Newfoundland before chickening out being forced down by unspecified reasons. I know of quite a few aspiring ferry pilots who when confronted with the actual sight of the Atlantic they were supposed to cross, had a change of heart, left the plane on the ramp and went home.  It’s one thing to sit in your easy chair and dream of grand adventures, it’s another thing entirely to carry through.