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No contest, really.<br />
BY THE SPRING OF 1986, I’D COMPLETED A FIVE-YEAR COLLEGE degree in four years so<br />
I could be commissioned on time and keep my “slot” for Undergraduate <strong>Pilot</strong><br />
Training (UPT). This is Air Force basic flight school and is only open to<br />
commissioned officers who’ve been physically and mentally screened to absurd<br />
levels. In the late eighties, there were five air bases devoted to washing out future<br />
pilots, and I’d been given a choice: to wait nine months and head off to beautiful,<br />
sunny Williams Air Force Base in Arizona or go in five months to Vance Air Force<br />
Base, Oklahoma. With the eagerness and ignorance of youth, I chose Vance. You<br />
know that “nowhere” place everyone is always in the middle of That would be<br />
Enid, Oklahoma. A small town right out of the movie Footloose. No kidding. They<br />
legalized dancing there in 1987.<br />
UPT was generally composed of guys like me: newly minted second lieutenants<br />
fresh from a university, the Air Force Academy, or Officer’s Candidate School.<br />
We’d been selected by several different boards, who minutely examined the sum<br />
total of our lives up to that point. That included background checks, grade-point<br />
averages, sports, letters of recommendation, extracurricular nonsense, and probably<br />
how we parted our hair. There were physicals, eye exams, psych evaluations,<br />
interviews, and a comprehensive qualifying exam. This was just to get<br />
commissioned as an officer. The vast majority of the seventy thousand Air Force<br />
officers stop right there and enter one of the mission-support fields, like personnel,<br />
maintenance, or supply. There are additional batteries of tests designed to trip up<br />
prospective pilots, make you feel stupid, and, yes, specifically test your aptitude to<br />
enter the flying world. Only about ten thousand of the seventy thousand officers<br />
eventually become pilots, and less than three thousand have what it takes to<br />
become active fighter pilots.<br />
So, assuming you pass all that with high enough scores, you get past the gate<br />
and up to bat. For your efforts, you’re guaranteed nothing except a shot at the<br />
silver wings of an Air Force pilot. Everything that comes later is up to you.<br />
Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t matter where you came from, who your<br />
daddy knows, or what university graduated you. Air Force pilot training is an<br />
equal-opportunity destroyer of hopes and dreams. I saw all types wash out.<br />
Academy guys, 4.0 GPA engineering types, and men who arrived with a thousand<br />
civilian flying hours who couldn’t fly formation or land a jet.<br />
You’ve either got it or you don’t.
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