Viper Pilot_ A Memoi..

2
Cold War and Hot Times
“IF THE TREES ARE GETTING BIG, PULL BACK TILL YOU SEE BLUE.”
Those were the immortal first bits of flying instruction I received from my dad.
Followed shortly by “pull up now or we’re going to die.”
Dad was a businessman and a highly skilled engineer by the time I came along.
He’d designed cockpit instruments for NASA spacecraft and helped save the
Alaska pipeline by redesigning their flow meters. But he was also a retired Marine
fighter/attack pilot. Flying was something I’d always been around as part of a
colorful family. Ours is a lineage that includes several generals, one of whom was a
Confederate cavalry officer. I also had a great-grandfather who managed to charge
up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, and another who shipped off to fight in
France during World War I to escape a nagging wife.
Despite the family tree, Dad was never the Great Santini. He didn’t pressure me
to join the military, and, in fact, I went to college to become an architect. No, flying
was just something we did. It was fascinating to master a machine well enough to
get it off the ground, yank and bank through aerobatics, then bring it back to safely
land. Humans were never meant to fly, and most can’t learn, so I loved the special
freedom of it—and still do. Fighter pilots usually are too busy to appreciate the
miracle of flight, but it’s always there and I’ve been under its spell from the
beginning.
Later I found it was a great way to entice young ladies into a date. Suppose
you’re a girl and Bozo Number 1 asks you out to dinner and a movie. You’re
tempted but along comes Bozo Number 2, who says, “Hey . . . how ’bout going
flying with me before I take you to dinner”
Yep. Guaranteed.
During my second year at college, something clicked inside, drawing me to
become a professional pilot. I’d worked for architects the previous two summers,
seen the business, and I enjoyed the creativity of designing structures. But I had a
decision to make, because if I was going to seek an officer’s commission as a
military aviator, it had to be started then, since the whole painful process took
about eighteen months. So, it was wear a cloth tie and sit in an office for forty years
—or cheat death and fly fast jets.