Latest / So There I Was / Why’s There a Hot Air Balloon in the Traffic Pattern? Episode 50

Transcript

Why’s There a Hot Air Balloon in the Traffic Pattern? Episode 50 · So There I Was

• Transcript [0:00] Music. [0:11] Bit on the tanker through the weather. Oh, and to the tanker crew who did that, that's why we really appreciated that. [0:19] Music. [0:35] Well, there I was crossing the pond and you could see that I wasn't exactly. So there I was. Which is how all great aviation tales begin. Welcome. This is Fig coming to you from Kansas City. Where are you? Where's my co-horse today? Greetings from Seattle. Repeat here out in Seattle. Glad to be back with everybody. In fact, Fig, I want to just take a quick note of personal interest. We got some feedback on our Facebook page from a gent named Marcus in Westford, for Vermont. And he sent me a picture of his nine-year-old son, Sebastian, who listens to our show with him. And it says, Sebastian gets upset when I listen without him. He says, you guys are awesome. And quickly, this has quickly become my favorite podcast. Sebastian gets pissed when I listen without him as well. So keep up the outstanding content and you make my Thursdays great. And then he sent me a picture of Sebastian right after he got the helicopter ride to school on his ninth birthday. Whoa, whoa. Did you say helicopter ride to school? He did. He got a helicopter ride to school on his ninth birthday. So man, that is a family that's going to be dialed into aviation. Sebastian's one of our future aviators I can tell already. So, uh, yeah, so that's cool stuff. And another cool thing is our guests today, SLAF fellow Harrier pilot coming to us from the Dallas area. Welcome SLAF. Well, it's great to be here. [2:04] Glad you could join us. I don't know about you, but I always, I always like, um, I always like hearing stories from our fellow Harrier brethren. And I know, I know Slav's got some good ones. They're scarier. The Harriers are scarier. Only for the, only for the, uh, unannointed and uninitiated. That's right. There you go. Absolutely. So, so welcome Slav. We got to begin with the standard question. How'd you get interested in aviation and how is it you wound up in the Marines flying Harriers? [2:36] Wow. You know, my dad was a, uh, AvCad and, uh, he grew up in Midwest and he went into the NavCad program with just two years of college. And when he got his wings, they said, hey, we need some guys to go fly for the Marine Corps. And he and his buddy said, well, what are we flying? And they said, well, you're gonna, you're gonna, there's a squadron that's going to Med Cruz, 1957 Med Cruz, and you're gonna be flying Banshees. And originally, they were supposed to go on the forest stall, but then it got changed to the Lake Champlain, which was one of the last straight deck carriers. So, that was a really neat thing. And I know you just read that letter on one of the episodes about a very similar guy. 1954 is when my dad was an AFCAD. He was one of the first guys to go through the T28. So, all that was kind of in my my growing up years and. You know, his stories and everything. There I was 50,000 feet with nothing running but my wristwatch. [3:56] Took his banshee up to 50,000 feet and flamed both engines out. So, he has some great stories. He's still around. He lives outside of Tucson. But you know, when you're a kid, I wish I would have listened to my dad more because after he got out of active duty- It's amazing how much smarter our parents get after we turn 25 to 30. Right. That's right. [4:22] Well, he didn't have a, you know, a four year degree and he got off of active duty and he went to Purdue and worked his way through college at Purdue, where I was born in Lafayette, Indiana, flying for the air guard, flying F-84s for the air guard and telling stories about landing, landing banshees on the boat at night. And, and so I wish I would have listened to that part about the air guard a little bit, right? You care. I can't tell you how many people that asked me, you know, about essentially mentoring them, you know, what's my path. What's my best path. I hammer the air guard home so much. If I had known then what I know now, Hey, look, I love being a Marine officer. I love the opportunity to fly the Harrier. But if flying is your number one goal and flying cool airplanes, go air guard, beg, borrow, steal, do whatever you have to do to get air guard. Am I right or am I right? I mean, you guys know. Well, so I can't speak for what it's like right now, but I know, you know, back in the day, it's gotten, things are a little different now, but. Sure they are. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Well, I didn't listen to that part, but growing up, I was, I was, I was a motorhead. I was working on cars. My big plan was just to be an auto mechanic, you know, that was, you know, going through high school, that's what I wanted to do. And then I got mixed up working with this guy who owned a body shop. [5:49] And on the side, he was putting together a T-33, which is two seat, single engine, straight wing. And he was putting that thing together down in San Jose. And on the weekends, Saturday morning, I'd go over to his place. We'd load up the car with airplane parts and go work on the jet. And we finally got the thing flying and they flew it over to Oakland and the FAA, letter of agreement to fly it. We had to put 25 hours on this thing. And so it's flying. And my dad, by the way, said, do not, do not fly in that airplane. Don't do it. And luckily I was 18 and way smarter than anybody else. Right. Well, all 18 year olds are. Yeah. Yeah. Took that under advisement, but my turn for a backseat ride in that thing came up and we blasted off and flew over the Bay Bridge and out over the Golden Gate Bridge and up towards Point Reyes, the one of whiskey areas, the warning areas up there. And this guy, you know, we pulled six G's in a loop and it was like, holy cow. I mean, it just, I was like, my God. You're hooked. I have to do this. Right. [7:04] Okay. There was the body shop guy, the guy flying it? No. Okay. So he, there was somebody else that was qualified. Yeah. So, yeah, there was an old, and this thing, once we got the thing flying, boy, it attracted a bunch of guys that wanted to fly the jet. And the scheme with this jet to make money was he was going to make a T-33 flying club. And this is in late 70s. So for a mere, $3,000, you can join the club and you can fly it for basically fuel and tires. And the FAA wasn't really that happy about that. There's that whole type rating thing on a pure jet you need, but. [7:50] Yeah, yeah, and the training program. So anyway, that kind of went along, but it was really neat because it did expose me to a lot of really cool aviation. I mean, there was a guy that actually flew it that operated a P-51 out of Sonoma Skypark, which is up by Napa. And, you know, I got a ride in the back of that thing. There was another rich guy in Oakland that had a T-28 and, you know, rode around in that. And they're all flirting with me to fly this jet. Like I have any, like I have any input on that. So, yeah, so that's, that's what really stripped the trigger. And then I started asking guys, it's like, well, what do I have to do to go do this in the, in a service and do this, you know, the right way? Yeah. Oh, for your degree. It was like, Ooh, son of a bad word. Yeah. I had a three digit SAT score, like not low three digits, but it was not good. And, uh, Tanner Iskra Yeah. Well, you probably never applied yourself. [9:02] Dr. Jim Kramer Yeah. I wasn't that excited about that. I was, I think I was, I was marvelous. I was mildly dyslexic, like, like most pilots are, you know, we're mildly dyslexic, but good with our hands and spatial orientation and such, you know, for, so for anybody out there, like the young guy that, that wrote in and our future naval aviators are Don't let any of this stuff stop you. [9:26] Right. That's exactly right. This is a perseverance game. It is. And the service, my OSO, the officer selection office, he said, Scott, you know. [9:36] That door will just keep getting narrower and narrower as you progress. Just don't bump into the sides. Just try to stay in the center and get through it. And- Very nice. Yeah. We've all done that. We're lucky enough to have done that, you know, and Sometimes you bump into one like you did, repeat, where you had to delay to go to flight school. I don't know if I could have done that, but that's the perseverance. And sometimes those experiences really turn out to be maybe some of the neatest experiences that you have. Tavis Gunn, Jr.: I'll give you that. I was livid when I wound up having to go to the fleet for, for three years and then almost lost the flight contract completely. I was getting ready to get out when I managed to get orders to flight school back. Yeah. Then, you know, should I stay or should I go? And I'm like, yeah, you'll never have an opportunity like this again. You take it and go. So that's why I did. But I seriously considered not going to flight school, which blows my mind in retrospect. I look at that and go, man, that would have been a dumb mistake. But you know. It was spite. Yeah, part of it. Yeah. this effort in and got nothing out of it. It's like, why would I keep putting effort in? [10:51] But then I went, then the wiser of me, the other side said, hey, you are not going to get this opportunity again. You better grab it by the short hairs while you can. So, hey, I want to take a quick diversion, Slav, and ask, you mentioned your dad, your dad's still with us. Might we hear from him at any point? Yeah. You know, I've thought about that. I did introduce him to your podcast. Uh, he listened to, of course he knows law man. I know law man really pretty well. And he knew him from when I went through flight school, you know, in the same, same timeframe, so he listened to those episodes and also the latest one where the, you know, the flight of four took on the, uh, or the three, what was it? Three mid kills with four kills. [11:42] Yeah. Yeah. Which is, you know, he was about five years ahead of him, maybe 10 years, 10 years ahead of my dad. And, but yeah, that, yeah, I will definitely see if he's, if he's interested, which I think he would be. Be. To hear from some of that vintage of naval aviation is... Those guys are, are gods. Yeah. They really are. Yeah. Yeah. And that they survived. I mean, I don't think, I don't know if you remember when we did our 50th anniversary, was the first time I found out that, uh, our squadron lost four airplanes on its very first day of carrier calls. One day. And are you talking about the, the, uh, uh, Panthers? Yeah. The Panthers, they lost four Panthers in one day going to the carrier. The very first squadron got the 23, got the Panthers and they went to the carrier to do carrier calls and lost four airplanes that day. Yeah. And then they went to the club. Yeah. [12:46] Right. It was, well, yeah. Yeah. A different world. Yeah. It is a different world. Definitely. So you went to Kingsville for jet training And I saw in your email, was that Rosemary Mariner? Was that Tammy Jo's kind of a mentor? Repeat that. Yes. Sounded familiar. Yes. Well, yes. Yeah. Commander Mariner. And she was the OPSO of VT-23 when SLAP checked in there, I think. No kidding. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I guess she was a pretty sharp gal. She was the first, right? Yeah. She was the first female Naval aviator. And I didn't know that going through. She didn't wear it on her sleeve or anything. She was just, you know, nice professional Naval aviator as they should be. Tut was her husband, Tommy Mariner was the OPSO of ET-22. Okay. All right. I flew with Rosemary, maybe a couple of times when I was in 23, VT23 was just a blur. They put me on some kind of super fast track. They need one more guy to go to the boat. So, they just like. [13:57] Ran me through to get to go to the boat. And we went to the Kitty Hawk in the T2. Then I went to VT-22. Tut, tits up Tommy, is what his call sign is. Super nice guy. He was the opso. It was a good squadron. We had a good squadron. But, you know, you're just kind of a passenger as a student going through the squadron, but it's where, you know, it's your formative years where the, antics of the instructors are what's kind of forming your naval aviation flavor, I think. Right? They were fun loving guys. But one of the things, and I mentioned this in my email to you, Fig, was very early on, I remember waking up and it was Saturday morning and we got a call from a friend and there had been a midair at night FCLPs at Kingsville. Are you guys familiar with that, No. Yeah. I remember when that happened. My mother was actually an emergency room nurse at the Kingsville hospital when that happened. Yeah. Really? See ya. [15:12] Yeah, it was very sobering, like all mishaps are, but this one particularly because the Marine that was involved was a MESAP, you know, just walked on water. So MESAP is, what is it? Marine Enlisted Commissioning Program. Yeah. Commissioning Program. Yeah. It's the creme de la creme. [15:39] Yeah. engineer from Purdue. This guy was wife and young child and young boy, I think. He was flying the pattern where he was supposed to be. And the other guy took off, they turned off the runway lights. He turned downwind, couldn't really see anything, was somewhat disoriented, got way wide in the pattern. And he's flying his pattern and the guys in the shack are, he's calling out Clara because he can't see the ball. They're like, you're looking good. Keep it coming. They were looking at John Orlandi who was in the right place. And finally, this other guy took his own wave off right into the bottom of John's airplane. And they were both killed. But I kind of said to myself, this is a serious business. This can be a lot of fun. I get it. But this is a deadly serious business, not to put a damper on everything. You know, nobody's shooting at you, you know? So maybe I was a little bit more serious than I should have been through my. [16:44] Aviation career, but that's just what forms you and makes that part of your history. [16:51] Tom Hanks No, it is. And I think most of us in naval aviation, regardless of what fleet we went to, some more so than others, but most of us lost a lot of friends. It was tragic in that sense. To this day, it's a dangerous business. But man is it rewarding, you know, when you do get to do it. There's nothing like it in the world. So, yeah. [17:15] So, what was it like? So, you got winged down there in Kingsville and in your email you said, you had gone to see the senior Marine and the next thing you know, he had the Harrier RAGCO on the phone. Yeah. Something like that. How did that go? Well, you know, what is it? Yeah, I got winged and then I, and then the selection came up and I went, he was the senior Marine was the AMO at VT-22 at the time. I went down to his office and, you know, chatted with him and I don't know, maybe he gave me the news. I, it was kind of a blur there. He might've given me the news that I got Harriers and he goes, well, let's call up a Capito, up there at 203. So he calls VMAT 203 and, and before you know it, John Capito, Bambi's on the line and, and then he hands me the phone, you know, and it's like, ah, Caps was super gregarious and just a, just a great guy. Absolutely. We lost him in the last, it might be over a year now, just a little over a year. Yeah. But yeah, that was sad. [18:24] I was impressed by even getting to talk to him and he's like, Hey, get your butt up butt up here and we need you to start flying the jet. It was kind of late in the year. So, there was a little bit, you know, we had to go through the holidays and everything and, and got up there. And there was a little bit of delay before we started the RAG. And they had to get seven lieutenants together before we could start. That's what it was. Tanner Iskra, MPH Of course. You had seven lieutenants and a lieutenant colonel in your RAG class. John DeLillo Yeah. Yeah. So, we had Spike was a lieutenant colonel. And we had mags, spud, flat top, tron. [19:02] Skivvies. Skivvies. Yeah. Skivvies and myself. Is that seven? I think that's- Rum. Tom Rump. Oh, Rum. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we were waiting to start the rag and we, we all started the rag and went through, went through together and they called us Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs because. [19:21] Because Spike had gray hair and we were just trailing around like, like, you know, little puppies and everything. But I became really good friends with Tron and Tron and I, I remember we would, we would study together and we would sit and we would drill each other on the throttle box. The throttle box was still there where, you know, the throttle quadrant where you do all your procedures with the nozzles and everything. And I thought that, that was a, that was a good thing. One of the kind of of confession in the rag. I had my first operational navigation, right? Doing a low level through, North Carolina. And everybody's like, oh man, it's so easy. You got the INS, you know, just go from point to point, just plug them in, right? You're good to go. Easy. So, and I have a map and everything, and I studied it and plug all the points in, right? I get ready to taxi And I looked down and I taxied about a couple of feet and I'm like, shoot, I was still in a line on the nav switch. Hadn't gone to nav on my, uh, INS. You just introduced a little error in the nav. Yeah. And I'm thinking to myself, how bad can that be? Two feet? You know, a couple of feet. What could go wrong? [20:47] What could possibly go wrong? And, and, and Greyhound was chasing me in a two seater and it was just a fricking disaster I was, uh, yeah. So I got to do that one again. That was my first and only down. So I've got to do that one again, but you're, you're like one of just a couple of people that know the true story on that one, get Greyhound on. How about that? We're trying to get green. I've gotten Greyhound, the microphone and a headset. We're dying to get him on. He calls me with a funny story now and then I'm like, Greyhound, I'm just going to start recording our phone calls here because you have some amazing stories. We've got to get them down. Be prepared to wrap your ribs up with tape before you listen to that episode. Yeah, that's good. He was one of the more fun guys in the rag squadron. He was our XO when we checked into VMA 223. And if you walked into the ready room when he was in there holding court, you could just kiss the rest of your morning or afternoon goodbye because the stories were on. [21:52] I think that's everywhere that he was. Yes. I went to the, didn't go to this last reunion, but the one that was in Pensacola. I went to that. He was yucking it up there pretty well. And the, yeah, so the rag was a lot of fun. All the, all the seven lieutenants, we made it out, you know, pretty much unscathed. And then, in the group's infinite wisdom, they sent us all to 542. Tanner Iskra Wow. Michael Maloney 542 was just getting brand new airplanes. And Buck Tabor was the CO when they had the A models and he had just a super great squadron. And those guys came down, face, you know, face Fitzgerald. He was a WTI down there. Beans was down there, Samurai. [22:39] And Samurai was a rag instructor when we went to the rag. Yeah. So we all, we all walked down the street at, as you know, in mass, I don't know, in retrospect, if that was the best way to do things. Cause we kind of had our own flavor as a bunch of knucklehead lieutenants, you know, and we might've been a little bit difficult to get under control. Yeah. I remember I checked into the squadron and maybe the first day I was down there in the squadron, it was a Friday. We weren't obviously flying or anything and Face and Hawk were going out to fight with, you know, do some DACT dissimilar with Lancer in the warning areas. Lancer fighter pilots, fighter pilot, right? Right. So, let me back up so briefly. We get your thoughts together. DACT, different or differential air combat training. So, we would go out and fight another airframe. It wasn't another area we'd go out and fight. A4s. Dissimilar. Yeah, dissimilar. So, it could be anything. F-16s, F-18s, F-14s, whatever. But it was not a Harrier is the point. We went out and did air combat maneuvering against other airframes. So I relinquish my soapbox, sir. [23:58] So face goes down in the chalk so now it's 2v1 the hard way for Hawk right so he goes out there and maybe get Hawk on here too I mean I'm sure he's got some good stories. I think it was the first merge with Lancer and all sudden we get word back in the ready room that he's gone down out there. Hawk asked. And so, they launched a SAR and everything goes into motion and good shoot and SAR picks. [24:26] Him up in the water out there. Well, Lancer comes back and he parks his Hornet, which came up from Buford. So, he would frag a Hornet to come up from Buford and a tanker. And on Friday afternoons, he would go out there and he would go out there and line up fights up and down the street, right? And he comes into the ready room. remember Lancer comes into the ready room, he's holding that big VHS tape in his hand. I got it all on tape. I got it all on tape. And it's like, whoa, it was pretty exciting being in a fleet, just one day in a fleet, right? Tanner Iskra, this is day one. Michael Krasnoddy This is day one. I walk out onto the line to see his airplane. His airplane looks good, but the left horizontal stab looks like somebody took a band saw and cut off about maybe a third of it. Wow. The left horizontal stab, just a clean. [25:22] Chop. And what had happened, Lancer, according to Hawk, crossed. Crossed his nose. Hawk's nose a couple of times to the merge. Oh. And finally, Hawk nosed over, unloaded. Lancer's left horizontal stab took off half a hawk's right wing. And that was a kill for the Hornet, right? Yeah. Yeah. And Lancer thought he just- Sounds like the 500 foot bubble might've been slightly violated. I could be wrong. Might've been small. Well, Lancer said that he thought he just thumped him. And the tapes showed a little bit different story. They convened a board and there was a two star on the board because Lance was one star. They said, okay, don't do that anymore, you guys. Okay. And continue on. Right. Tanner Iskra Wow. now. [26:18] So that was pretty exciting introduction to welcome to the fleet. Yeah. So the progression, you know, we started flying and our first deployment, just Kona's deployment weapons, dead out to Yuma. We'll go out to Yuma and, you know, race around the chocolate mountains and got some live ordinance, lots of ranges. Yeah. Lots of ranges and everything. [26:46] So there I was on a really nice day. We're going to go out and shoot some rockets, just 2.75 inch Zunis. The lead is Striker, who was our Brit exchange guy, Striker Moran. Dash two was Rump and I was dash three. And we blast off and we head out there to the Rake Range. We shoot our rockets. Rump shoots both packs. Both Striker and I had a hung pack. Couldn't shoot the rockets. No rockets would come out. So, we had to come back in for a hung ordnance straight in and they're landing towards the north at Yuma or what is that? The kind of the northeast? Yeah. Northwest. Yeah. It was like runway three. So, we're coming back and we get all joined up and then we had briefed. We'll just take separation on final. We do that and I'd go down to 50 nozzles and start taking separation and Rump does the same thing. And we're all got a pretty nice interval and Stryker, he briefed. He said, Hey, land on the center line of the runway. Then when you have everything under control, just ease off to the side that de-arming's on and we'll get de-armed. [27:54] So, Striker, he lands on the, on the center line and I'm kind of watching this and just kind of 60 nozzles just moaning along at a hundred knots or whatever. Rump lands and I'm watching him and Rump lands and rather than pulling off to the right side of the runway, his airplane starts going over to the left side of the runway. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, man, this guy is always kind of always doing something different, you know, it was just like, okay. [28:21] Wonder what he's doing. And I'm watching with a little bit more intently. He's not really correcting back to the runway. It's heading off towards the side of the runway. And I'm thinking, Oh man. Well, to myself, these are all silent thoughts. I hope he gets the motor shut down so he doesn't fog the motor as he goes off the runway. There's no big threat there. The next thing, I better start going around. So I start coming up on the power and I look out my front windscreen and I'm thinking to myself, what? What is this hot air balloon? Doing in the airport traffic area. Orange, white, and green hot air balloon. And luckily, before I could key the mic, I see seat man separation. And I'm like, holy shit. And I transmit to striker, I'm like, rumps ejected. And now tower's going crazy. Crash, crash, crash, crash on the field. And they're like, everybody depart the airport traffic area. And they, you know, they call me to part the airport traffic area, you know, turn left, blah, blah, blah. I look at my gas and I got 1500 pounds of gas and I'm like, I'm not going anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. If you had another gas tower. [29:35] Yeah. So I say, I'll just go ahead and, you know, Delta overhead. So I'll just do, I'll just orbit overhead until they get this taken care of. I can take a couple of spins and the pattern, right? And they said, okay, yeah, do that. And I'm just still going around and I'm watching rumps airplane motocross through the desert and it's motocross and it's kicking up all kinds of dust. And then it starts turning back towards the East side of the field over where the hangers are. Well, we're on the West runway and there's quite a bit of terrain in between the two runways. I'm like, well, it'll never make it across all of that. [30:21] And then, unless it does, then it starts making another turn back to the left into the wind because it was a left to right crosswind and it starts heading towards the McDonnell Douglas test facility. McDonnell Douglas, I got a building, a big parking lot, you know, maybe a hundred cars. And I'm looking at now, I'm almost a beam, the jet thinking to myself, what can I do to stop this catastrophe that's about to happen? And I'm just, I am looking at it and it's like, it is gonna wipe out this building. It's headed right for it. Tanner Iskra, MPH, that's terrifying. It's like a car crash. I couldn't watch. I couldn't watch anymore. So I fly and I'm expecting, so now it's time to turn downwind. [31:23] And I turned down when expecting to see flames and people running out of the building on fire and everything. And I don't, I see the airplane, it's over next to the building and crash fire rescues right there and there's foam and everything by the airplane. And then I came back around and I landed, did a slow landing, probably the worst landing of my life and pulled off the de-arming. And what had happened was the airplane got wrangled by a chain link fence. One of the Laos sevens, like hit the back of a sedan. The other one hit the back of a van and it stopped and no stopped about six inches from the corner of the building. [32:06] Wow. It was miraculous. That was our first little deployment kind of exciting. So it's somewhat of a tradition when somebody jumps out of a jet and they survive it, right? They buy a barrel of beer at the club that evening. So, Rump had gone through all of his stuff and we all show up at the club that night and he buys a keg for the squadron and we're all there and we're talking. We kind of, you know, licking our wounds and talking about, the whole thing. The end of that whole story, they were having nose wheel steering issues with the Harrier at the time. It wasn't castering properly and that's what they chalked it up to. He was lucky to get out of it. Maybe a little critical. He shouldn't have tried to go around or maybe pull the power back to idle before he decided to shell the jet. But so that was going to be a question of mine. So the power was up when he ejected. That's why it was like beating, beating across the airfield at a high rate of speed. The power was, yeah, the thought was, the thought was, his thought process was to go around. Yeah, and the spool up was just so slow that he was looking at the. [33:22] At the edge of the runway before he could do that. You said you, let's go back a little, a few minutes. You said you saw, you thought, Hey, what's this hot air balloon doing here? So how close, how close was this? It was just off your left, you know, your front left, like 10 o'clock, like right here. I mean, when he ejected. It was, I didn't think I was in danger of nailing the chute or anything, but it was in my lower left quarter panel. If you had a quarter panel in the wind, It was just the weirdest thing because all of a sudden out of nowhere, it just appeared. [33:56] You're not supposed to be ballooning on the field. Yeah. I'm just happy I didn't key the mic and put it on the record until now. But, those were my thoughts. When I think back to the, being a squadron pilot and how fast, responsibility was thrust upon you in the squadron, just the needs of what was going on in a squadron. Heck, I got there in September and the skipper sent me to safety school the next April, which- Tanner Iskra You've been there six months. Right? Dr. John Baxter Yeah. And all of a sudden, I'm the safety officer. Do you know who the- and I was still a lieutenant. I'm still first lieutenant. And you know who DSS was, the director of standardization and safety at the squadron? Tron. Tanner Iskra There you go. The other lieutenant. Dr. John Baxter The other lieutenant. Beautiful. That was always a good job though. I did safety and the beautiful thing about that was regardless of rank, you always had the skippers here. You could walk into his office and go, this is screwed up. This needs to get fixed. This is going to be a problem. And yeah, and you know, as long as you were serious about your job, the skipper would take you seriously. Of course, they didn't generally send you to safety school if they thought you were a knucklehead. So that was a good thing. But, um, I enjoyed that job. So you must have been the least of all the seven knuckleheads that showed up because Because they sent you to safety school and they made Tron the NATOS guy. [35:22] Yeah. Yeah. We had a good time. It kind of, that kind of leads into the next. So there I was story. What did they say within three months of getting done with safety school? You're going to have, you're going to be, you're going to be investigating a mishap. We had a deployment out. We did a CAC. So we, we went out to 29 palms, whole squadron as 29 palms, the combined arm exercise. There we go. Thank you. I was going to go. I don't think we've covered that CAC combined Yeah, yeah, sleeping in tents, living in the desert, but good flying, really good flying. Actually, I'm fixing to walk for my afternoon flight and I'm walking from my tent up to the ops tent to get a Jeep to go across the field. I look in the distance and there's a big black. [36:12] Cloud of smoke. And I'm like, okay, one or two really bad things. It's only us. And there was a helicopter squadron that was there. And I was thinking either we lost a Harrier or possibly a bunch of Marines just got killed in their helicopter. Because generally that doesn't end up very well. Tanner Iskra No. David Kunst So, the first things what happened is I get to the ops and they're running. Slap, slap, we lost a jet, we lost a jet. Okay. Is the pilot okay? What's going on? And I go, Yeah, it's out at Surprise Springs and the pilot ejected safely. He's okay. Okay. Who is it? [37:05] Rump second airplane, second airplane in about 11 months. I'm like, so my CACs turned into a lot of message traffic and picking up airplane parts and getting a mishap investigation going and everything. That one actually turned out to be the digital electronic fuel control. [37:33] What happened on this was real briefly the fuel metering unit, which is the hydro mechanical piece of the puzzle that actually meters the fuel into the engine, but digitally controlled that thing locked up and it gave him about 55% power and it locked up when he was doing a downwind entry into surprise springs and then when he was coming around the approach turn, you know, he came up on the power and basically the RPM was, was locked at 55%. Oh, gee. And it settled, settled, settled until paddle said, eject, eject, eject, you know, from power, power, power to eject, eject, eject, right? Yeah. Right. Unfortunately, he did about everything in the cockpit except select manual fuel. But that was, that was a solid problem. Hindsight though is what it boils down to. It is. You know, when you've got a handful of airplane and it's coming out of the sky. Yeah. You don't have a lot of time to think about everything. Yeah. Well, the question is, would he ever get out of another one? Was really the question that. [38:44] That they had to ask. So there was no punitive. They were just, they just said, yeah, this is, probably maybe look for something else to do. Probably about an inch and a half shorter too, after two ejections and it's that short a time. That was unfortunate for Romp. There's a little bit more to that story, but for another time, maybe. So, in 542, in the two years I was in the squadron for just a little bit over two years, we lost four jets. Tanner Iskra Oh my gosh. David Kunst Actually, I take that back. The first one, rumps first, the runway excursion, that was class B and they put it back together. Tanner Iskra Okay. David Kunst But we didn't lose that. wasn't strike on that, but there was Hawk, Rump, two of Rumps and then Skivvies, which. [39:38] Was bad. Our skipper was Muff. He's retired obviously and super great guy, but we got back from that CACS and I remember sitting in the office, the wing DSS came down and was reading the riot act to our skipper Muff that he hadn't gotten any message traffic and that the two lieutenants in his safety office were just screwing everything up and need to get better help basically, more responsible help. But to Muff's credit, he said, get out of my office and don't ever come back. Tanner Iskra, MPH, 347-347-7245 Good for him. Michael Maloney Yeah. So again, that's, that's a tough kind of leadership. Really good skippers that you see from really good skippers. At that time, I think Tripp was the XO. My favorite, my favorite, my favorite Marine Corps squadron commander. Yeah. [40:36] Slapping your email to me, some of the stories you said, after the first two years, then, you know, everybody started getting bad deals coming at them. You know, I'm guessing fact tours, non-flying tours, and guys were just threatening to get out. They wouldn't have to make a bad deal. Tell us about that. The time in the squadron was so, it was really so short. It went, you know, it went by in a flash and all of a sudden these FACT tours are coming down or training command tours. That's what happened to Mags was probably one of the first guys to go. There was, I won't say who it was, but we used to say that a bad deal came down towards this guy and he's like, well, I'm going to resign. I'm getting out. Going to be able to do the fact to her. [41:24] And then once it went to somebody else and he took it back and we, we joked about him having a laminated resignation letter that he was using. I had a relationship with 203. [41:36] CEO Ben mayor at the time ben's gone he's. He passed away several years ago but i work for him at the group when i was waiting waiting to start the rag he was the group director standardization safety so maybe that's how i got my safety stamp. He was a steal the rag and as i saw the writing on the wall and looking for how things were in a pan out i talked to him and he said man slap a lot to have you come down and, and I'll get you out of safety and why don't you come down and work for me. That was an opportunity I really couldn't pass up and so I took it and that was really interesting. Roderick Hatch 06.56 Rag instructor, yeah. I will repeat and attest to that. John Deakins 06.57 That was probably my favorite job in the Marine Corps was teaching in the rag because even though a student would try to kill you now and then, by their very nature, you know, they're going to do stuff that's unexpected and that's why you're there to teach them. I learned more about flying the Harrier teaching it than I ever did learning it and actually operating it. [42:39] Yeah, I agree. You never learned something as well as when you have to teach it. The time in the rag was a lot of fun in the schedule writing shop. I was lucky because Spico came in there and we started writing a schedule together. And that guy just is the driest sense of humor and a lot of fun to work with. We had a pretty good gig. Lovey was the opso. Was he still around? Does that ring a bell? Colonel Lovejoy. [43:10] Hound was always a big fan. [43:14] He let us run the show. We did what we needed to. We got the job done. And the rag was kind of neat because Ryder was WTI. And he got us doing stuff. He had a big push to get the RAG back to being tactical, which was really neat. We did a deployment out to, a weapons deployment out to Fallon. We loaded up with blue bombs. We had tankers and we were going to hit the Razorback ranges, dive off the tankers, do a short low level into the Razorback ranges and drop the blue bombs and then join up with the tankers and keep going out to Fallon. And that was just kind of unheard of with your typical trans con that you do, especially in a training command or in a training squadron. But it was really, really fun. And then, you know, the different students really have their own flavor. We had some guys, I think we were getting just the beginning of what we referred to as the top gun recruitees into the right. [44:26] We had one guy shows up on a Ninja, you know, and he's a really great guy. We have one guy that showed up, this guy's got a DeLorean, but they're all kind of, you know, show me to my, show me in my fighter, you know, where, where's my fighter. Yeah. So we, we have a good time with all that. The other thing is I did that my last year in, we got tagged for quite a few air shows. [44:50] So, I did the air show thing, which was one of those things that I always wanted to do. Back to when I was getting into flying, I went to an air show at Moffett Field with my dad. And the weather was horrible, kind of low, rainy, Northern California weather. And And, uh, the blues did their, the blues were there, but before the blues flew, he said, Hey, Scott, you need to watch this airplane, this next airplane. And a little, and a guy in a green suit walks out, gets in a green airplane, funny looking airplane and blasts off and does the Harrier level three demo. And it was like, holy cow. Wait, wait, wait, wait a minute. Airplanes can't do that. What the hell? Yes. Jet aircraft can't do that. That's not possible. It was. Maybe it was the early seed for the Harrier. That kind of got me going. I mean, I wasn't laser beam focused on flying Harriers, but it was one of those things I look back and I go, yeah, maybe that's what it was. And to be able to go and do that. [46:03] During my flying career was, I was really lucky to be able to do that. I had an air show, kind of an air show partner, a buddy of mine, Buck, we would go out and you might know him. He was still in the, he stayed in for a little while. Yeah. Yeah. Buck. Yeah. He was over at the company I work for. That's right. I almost just said where he is. Yeah. I know where he is right now. He's, he's, he's, he's lucky to be, to be around after his incident in Chicago there. Yeah. I talked to him a while back, but Buck and I did a bunch of air shows. We did Beckley, West Virginia. I remember we're in Beckley. It's like, why are the Thunderbirds, Harriers and the A-10 demo team in Beckley, West Virginia? Yeah. I did that show with Hound one year. Did you? Did you? Really? Yeah. [47:00] They must have a big high level Senator or something. Yeah, who was Armed Forces Appropriations? Yeah, it was Byrd. Robert Byrd, that's what it was. Yeah. That explains it. I got a funny story about Beckley when you're done. So the demo team's there and Buck and I, we were kind of palling around with those guys too. And they had their crew chief. And right before they leave, they're heading down and they're all talking about how they got to go meet a general. Go meet a general down in at MacDill or something like this for their next show. And Mike and I. [47:37] We grab a Marine Corps sticker and we put it on the nose of one of the A-10s and then on the, gear pod of the other one. I mean, what's the first thing the general's gonna do? They let you look at an A-10, you walk out, you look at the gun, right? And what's he gonna see there? This is Rick Shorstad. Nice. I love it. But yeah, what did you do in Beckley? Philip Hill, Jr. Oh yeah. So, well, thinking of, let me go to the sticker one first. There was another, there was a reserve squadron that used to paint paw prints when you'd come park on their line. On an overnight, you'd come back to your airplane the next day, there'd be paw prints from their squadron painted on your airplane. Just so you knew where you'd been. So, we're in Beckley and Greyhound and I are standing there by the airplane and this kid comes up and he's, probably 17 years old, maybe 18, and he's got his private license and he's all full of himself and he's looking at it. He goes, oh, that airplane's not much bigger than the 172 I fly. He goes, yeah, I could probably fly that. I can fly anything there is. I could fly that airplane easy. He looks at him and goes, that airplane would chew you up and spit you out before you got to the end of the runway, son. [49:01] Yeah. He was pretty full of himself. A hound just wouldn't have any evidence. Like, yeah, not quite. Yeah. One 72 pilot. There you go. I could fly that thing. That's not much bigger than what I fly. It'd be easy. I don't think so. Vapor. Was he a student when you were a rag instructor? Yeah. He was that did he get his call sign in the rag? Yes. I'm guessing. Did you hear the story on that one? We need to get him on to, but yeah, maybe he'll tell it to you. But there was it was not what you think. Okay. Yeah. I was a low fuel state. Well, that's what I was thinking on vapors. Yeah. Yeah. Or he's just shit hot coming into the break. I don't know. You know, that's the wrong kind of vapor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But the, uh... [50:01] Probably the one of the funnest air show stories we have. We're doing this air show in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Buck and I, and it was a long weekend. So, we couldn't go back to Cherry Point. It was closed until Monday. And we talked to the air show guys and go, you know, we really need to leave early. We've already flown. We flew the show on Sunday. He goes, we really need to leave before you guys get done. We're going to Patrick. We're going to overnight there. They go, well, could you do a formation flyby for us? And we're like, oh yeah, we'll do a formation flyby for you. Tim Draper Well, yes, we can. Dr. John Baxter So it kind of reminds me a little bit of the story you told about the St. Louis airport, but we, so I go to Buck, I go, look, this would be a great time to try that high speed low speed thing that the Blue Angels do. We'll do a stream stow, We'll go out, we'll come back into the break. [51:08] You break, you slow down and fly your normal pattern. I'll extend out and come back around for the high speed part of it. You just stay on the inside of the runway and I won't cross the center line and I'll stay on the crowd side of the runway. And I remember, so we break, I keep the power in the corner and I extend out. And all I remember hearing was, come on, Slav, come on, hurry up, hurry up. [51:42] And I'm like, I'm going as fast as I can to catch up. It didn't work out exactly how the Blue Angels do it, you know, but it was. Yeah. One airplane went by really slow. One went by really fast. Oh, hey, defy for the non Harrier aviators listening. Streams Stowe. Can you just describe what that means? Oh yeah. Yeah. So rather than being, uh, doing a section takeoff for a formation takeoff, we'd separate by, was it a thousand feet? I seem to recall about a thousand feet. Might've been a thousand feet. One would line up on either side of the runway. The lead would, we do all of our run-ups and our checks. The lead would say rolling, rolling, go. That's when you put the power in a corner. Both guys did it simultaneously. You're rolling down the runway and then you got to your nozzle rotation speed and both guys would rotate the nozzles pop up and then the lead would give a couple percent and then you could join up on them generally by the end of the runway. Right? Yeah. [52:48] Thank you. That's a perfect description. Hey, and one more thing. And a stow being what's called a short takeoff. So yeah, it's just accurate. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, short takeoff. Usually takes a few hundred feet. Not a lot. No more than 300, really. We've heard referenced over and over to putting it up in the corner, putting the power in the corner. So what does that mean? Putting the power in the corner? Describe that. [53:20] Wow. Yeah. So I guess the cockpit's got four corners, right? So I think it came from the, you know, the put it up in the left hand corner, up in the left hand corner, As far as it'll go, right? As far as it'll go, yeah. Military power, firewall power. Yeah. Yeah. But not through the limiters. Not through the limiters, that's right. So there were limiters on the airplane. Naturally, you'd go all the way forward and it would go to max power and the digital engine control unit, the DECU, would control, keep the engine from over-temping, over-cooking itself. So if you got in trouble, you could go through that limiter and the engine will give you all it had no matter the temp. And that was a quick way to destroy a multimillion dollar engine. Uh, if you left it up there too long, you could save the airplane, lose the engine, save the airplane. And that's why it was there. Yeah. So many foot pounds of pressure, uh, pushing forward would break that little, uh, would trip the switch. Yeah. Yeah. There's a little, there was a little spring plunger, right. You pushed against that and then it, it just hit the little switch at the end there. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you all I got. I'll give you all I got captain. [54:36] It's a, yeah, it's all coming back. I don't know if I had to trip the limiters. I had one where I was doing a hover check. Did you guys see PMCF, you know, hover check? A repeat was. Yeah. So you had to do a hover check and it was the water, water didn't flow and it was hot and I was a little bit too heavy. And, you know, I just need a little bit more temperature without water. We had a 90 gallon water tank. I think it was 90, it was either 90 or 60. 500. It was 600, 500 pounds. So, yeah. So it was a more like a 60 gallon water tank. Good for up to 90 seconds of flow. Or it was a 90 gallon good for 60. 50 imperial gallons. But yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay. 50 imperial gallons. 500 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. 10 pounds a gallon. Distilled water. It had to be distilled water. It had to be distilled water, and it would get injected into the engine to cool it so you could run the engine just a little faster and get a little more thrust out of it. And I seem to recall, you know, given on a standard day, standard temperature, all that, it was worth 1,200, 1,500 pounds more thrust, wasn't it? It was a lot. It's like 1,500 pounds of extra thrust. Yeah. Yeah. [55:44] Yeah. But it's one of those single point failures that, you know, if the water pump didn't work, Then you were in a sandwich quickly. Yeah. Maybe you're going to go through the limiters. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that was all fun. What a great design on that airplane now to do all that. I have the F-35s fly over my house out here. They built them right over here at Lockheed Martin. And yeah, it still gives me shivers to see that, but that's a totally different program on that, the way that that thing flies. A little more computerized, a few million more lines of code in that than the AV-8. Yeah. Well, Slav, I'm looking at your email with all of these little different information, parts of your career. It looks like you literally got off active duty about the time I was checking into the rag interior point I think so. Yeah. March of 1990. Yeah. That's about when I checked in and Bear was the admin officer. And he says, you know, I got good news and bad news. Lieutenant, what do you want first? I'm thinking, well, go ahead and give me the bad news, you know, because, you know, I'm thinking I'm going to be the rifle range safety officer for the next three months or something. He goes. [57:12] Well, the bad news is you're not going to start for a few months. Okay. What's the good news? Here it comes, right? And he goes, well, and he told me I was going to go get stashed next door at that little Ham's 32 squadron, you know, that, oh yeah. Yeah. So, I got to do that. That was kind of fun. Yeah. When I was waiting around, I flew, I, I, I flew around in the OA4 was. [57:34] Yeah, that was fun. Yeah. That was, that was good. A good little thing to do. I was always a bagger. I was, you know, from the very beginning, even when I was held back in the training command, if I was on a flight schedule, I was in there begging for a backseat in something. And a lot of guys went to the beach and stuff and did other stuff, but, you know, my whole time flying, I wanted to fly airplanes. And so, I did that. And I remember Rick Rodecker gave me my first backseat ride in a T88A. And when we did that short takeoff and then when he came back and he came back and he did a vertical landing, I was like, I don't know if I'll be able to do this. I don't know if I will be able to keep up with this thing or move the stick enough to do a vertical landing. It was just, I was spreading my legs to make sure I didn't hit the stick. He's moving it around. But the A was a little more unstable, right? In the hover. I never flew that. [58:48] Yeah, it was a little bit. It was like the B with the stab off. Yeah. If you ever did that. The SAS. Yeah. Yeah. Stability augmentation. Yeah. Three. Yeah, but with that off, it was similar to that. Yeah, that's what I was told. When I wonder, hey, I just had a real quick, I had a flash there. Bear took me for a ride. My first ride in the Harrier, I just jumped in the backseat with him. He was in a T-Bird. He was leading a couple of guys out to the range and then back. And we had come and I had the same kind of thoughts that you did. He was like, I don't know how the hell I'm going to be able to do this. I mean, the takeoff, it was like, holy shit, we accelerated fast. And then of course, we came back and we landed on the pad and then he taxied out of the way real quick to watch the students land in the single seeders. [59:43] And he we came in pretty fast and we decelerated pretty rapidly. And then he put it down on the pad. And I'm thinking, holy shit, what just happened? But I had to tell you this to get to get you because remember, they had the hot pits. Yeah, fuel you up. You go through the hot pit, which is you leave the engine running, you pull in, they they drag the fuel over, they give you fuel and then you'd go park. And it was already fueled. So we're sitting in the hot pits and I'm sitting in the backseat. And I, you know, I'm just sitting there and and bears going, the plane captain or the, you know, the Marine that's a feeling that's sitting there's one guy standing right off to the left and he's, looking right up at me because I guess he thought I was the instructor. And he goes, Hey, bear goes. [1:00:26] Show him, show him one finger. Now, you know, hold up two fingers. Which, which I don't know, which one? I'm holding up fingers. He goes, he goes, you didn't flip them off. Did you think? No, no, no, no. He's telling me to give this guy all the signals that mean absolutely nothing. And I've got this poor kid down here standing next to us going, what in the actual hell is he trying to tell me? Nice. Oh, that's funny. Good times. I actually had my first ride with Tim Shea, the Brute Exchange pilot. And he came in and he was determined to impress me. So we did a braking stop hover, 15 degrees north down. Is a face full of dirt when you're 15 degrees nose down doesn't seem like much. You got a face full of dirt when you're hovering. Yeah, that was impressive. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a, it was really a neat airplane. So much you could do with it. I remember telling, telling students because guys would get a little bit frustrated or, or whatever. And, and it was, my observation that the Harrier took average hands could fly the Harrier, but it took above average head work. You had, there was so many single point, uh. [1:01:47] Procedural errors that would put it into the dirt that unlike any other airplane. I mean, what's the difference between a 70 degree day and a 90 degree day in a Hornet? A couple of hundred feet of deck roll? You know, in a Harrier, you go to the pad and you didn't take that into account, you're a passenger. It happened to friends of mine. I mean, yeah. [1:02:16] Landed short of the pad. It was, yeah, just crazy. So, these little headwork errors that guys would make was a high, I think it was an under, it was an under, it was a threat that was not addressed nearly enough, I think, for our guys. Yeah, I would say that's a very fair observation that you're absolutely right. Um, and you could get good at that airplane and, you know, with a couple of hundred hours, you could be very good at the airplane, but, uh, you could find yourself an extremist pretty quickly if you didn't take everything into account every time you took it up. [1:02:55] Yeah. I think a through mitigation technique was they started, um, they started making minimum minimum cutting scores before they would even let a guy go to the rag. That was maybe a way to, mitigate some of that. Average guy can look like a pretty shit hot guy in a Hornet, but an average guy could look like a pretty smoking hole real fast in a Harrier. Jim Collins, Jr.: Yeah. Over the airplane's history, they went through a lot of that. Remember, there was a period of time when they were, it was all second tour aviators. And they were trying to, yeah, second tour. And then they were like, well, nobody junior to a major, you know, or I mean, it was, they tried everything. And then when I was going for it, you had to have no downs in a training command, a good AQT FAR score, aviation qualification test, flight aptitude rating or two points above squadron average. Any one of them. So, I didn't have any downs. I had a good AQT FAR, but I was squadron average. And that's what they were taking. [1:04:08] In the Harrier when I did it. And then when I went back as a RAG instructor, it was wide open. And they're like, we're taking everybody because it's the AVAB. And we're not going to do this anymore. I don't know. What was it for you, Repeat? What was that like? Do you know? Do you recall? Paul Meyers Of course, it's been 25 years, but I've got to say that my recollection was the guys coming through when I was teaching were, they were outstanding. We didn't have really any weak hands in the bunch to- Robert Lundahl When you were in the rag, I was in Kingsville instructing, and I can tell you that they weren't letting guys select Harriers. They weren't at the top. [1:04:47] Actually, some guys were getting Harriers that didn't want Harriers because they had better scores than some of the other Marines. Yeah, that was a funny thing too. They had Harriers also had to be your top choice. I went through. When I selected, if Hornets, if it was Hornets and Harriers, you weren't getting a Harriers. You're going to get your third choice if you didn't get Hornets. Okay. You know, that's kind of, so there I was, that's kind of, that's kind of ancestor worship a little bit, you know, there, these guys are trying everything to make it as safe as possible, but yeah, the guys that really tried hard again, I think great aviators that went there and, and great guys that just were in the wrong spot at the wrong time. I mean, you, you think about what happened to Indian, uh, his canopy imploded. It was a TAV8A. He was racing around low level, flight surgeon in the backseat, canopy imploded, uncommanded ejection for him, killed him and the flight surgeon didn't get out either. And then they restricted them down to, I don't know, 250 knots or something like that was a fix for that. But who else? So, you know, I mean, Skivvies, what happened to Skivvies was, shouldn't have happened to, That was the first fatality, I think that was the first fatality we had in AVAB with Skibbeys. [1:06:11] What was the scenario on that? It was air to air, beautiful day. I remember like it was yesterday and- He turned off the Q field? Was it the stag turned off the pitch? you're the best feel the best feel the best feel feel feel And roll. Yeah. Roll channel. [1:06:31] Thinking he could roll faster? Yeah. Feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel Good tactical advantage fighting another Harrier. Yeah. So let me jump in real quick and explain what that is. And then if you'll explain the rest of the scenario, because you're more familiar with it than I think Fig and me. Feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel feel So the Q field, Q is the mathematical expression for airspeed in the airplane. You go the harder it is going to be to pull in a cable operated airplane. Well with a hydraulic airplane you move the stick and it's just gonna move the control surface 3,000 psi and it's gonna move it instantly to where you want it to go. So the computer goes no no let's make it a little harder to pull on that stick the faster you go the harder it is to pull but you had the ability to turn that switch off that gave you the feeling of a higher airspeed. So you could just move the stick at will anywhere and it would instantly move the flight control surfaces. So, if you'll go to, I turned it back over to you, Slaff, because it sounds badly. The other thing that a lot of guys didn't know me included was the Q feel also affects the rudder feel. [1:07:35] So the rudder actually gets harder to push at higher air speeds. And that kind of goes into the contributing factors in that mishap. So I won't go into a lot of details because there's some issues with who was in a flight and everything. Anyway, yeah, Q-Feel was off, the mechanics of it, Q-Feel was off, roll was off. And unless you really read the fine print in the NATOPS, the roll channel of the stability augmentation also was. [1:08:09] Part of the departure resistance system. And so if you think about it, if you get a higher angle of attack, if you introduce any roll, you get an instantaneous side slip and that will cause a departure. So the roll channel would restrict the roll at higher angles of attack as the angle of attack went up so that it wouldn't depart. So Skivvy's left to left with the skipper, beautiful clear day. It's a 2v1. He's the wily bogey and left to left goes two circle, two circle fight, which means one guy turns one way, the other guy turns the other way. You expect to see the guy on the other side of the circle, which can be five miles away, right? Three to five miles away, two circles. Tanner Iskra, MPH Depending on your speed. Yeah. Dr. Jim Carraggia Yeah. So, it's a dot. It's not like Top Gun. And it's a dot. That's why you need good vision to to be able to do this kind of thing. Well, the skipper comes around the two circles and he doesn't see anybody where they're supposed to be. And he sees an airplane that's kind of in a, not real nose low, but a slower nose low spiral. And he calls a knock it off because they think it's an interloper. Somebody else in the area that's not, in that restricted area that's not part of their flight. Interloper, right? So he called knock it off for an interloper. He watches, skipper's got 4,000 hours of Harrier time. And he watches this airplane and just flies until it. [1:09:38] Crashes into the Neuse river, splashes into the Neuse river. So, the rest of the story, and that was really hard because we couldn't, there was no ejection and they couldn't find, they couldn't find the pilot. We couldn't find the pilot for three days. That was heart-wrenching. So, the mechanics of the cause of the whole thing that we came up with was we had the HUD tape through the initial parts of the departure and it departed and the injuries that skivvies had pointed towards a hyperextension fractures in his neck, which means his neck was held in his body. [1:10:21] His body pulled on his neck and it broke his neck and he was incapacitated and there was marks on on his, on his helmet that matched the screws on the side of the seat in between the seat and the canopy. And we had a head and neck guy come down and, you know, verify that whole thing and that whole scenario. So it's pretty ugly. I mean, you can't invent this stuff, right? You cannot invent what happens in aviation. Yeah. Yeah. And whoever thought someone would turn that off and it would hurt him. I'll turn this off and I'll be able to put on a wicked bad turn and kick the CO's butt and he'll be impressed with me. And you know, good head work, bad judgment. Yeah. There was some dynamics with that. Yeah. Yeah. That was- Or good initiative, bad judgment, I should say. Yeah. That was tough. But that was the first fatality. That was the first fatality, I think, in the ABAB. I didn't. I'll be darned. And I kind of lost count of ejections after 20 in my short period of time that I was there. But that's a lot. That's a lot of airplanes. Yeah, a lot of airplanes, buddy. Yeah. Well, let's don't end on this happy note. Give us something funny you saw. Yeah, so what is really funny, this was funny, and there's a little bit of message in here too. So. [1:11:50] Way back in training command days, Tommy Mariner was our OPSO. We tagged on to a VT-21 weapons that with four airplanes from Kingsville and went out to Fallon and got some Xs out there, but we only had four jets and they're limping along and we're getting the Xs. And I remember we had, we kind of had a bad day. The guys that I was with, we had, I don't know what we were doing. It was rockets or strafing, or maybe it was bombing, but we all sucked at it. We went back to the BLQ room, four of us, I think four or five of us, we're all in the room and we're saying how bad this sucks. And I know you're saying, where's the funny part of this whole thing, right? But, you know, we're talking rather loud, yeah, this sucks and da, da, da. And we're fixing to go back and they want us to get some, they want us to do some low levels on the way back and plan all this stuff. And one of the guys like, I'm not going to freaking plan for low level and blah, blah, blah. They're going to get to do them anyway. [1:12:52] Yeah. And right as we're venting on all of this, the door flies open and it's Tommy Mariner, it's Tut, and he freaking reads us the riot act. And he said, you guys will do whatever you're told. And there are people out there that would give their left nut to do what you're doing and get to fly these airplanes and fly around in an A4. And none of you guys are going back in back seats unless you come and talk to me." You know, it was really funny, not funny, ha ha, but it was funny because I really took it to heart. I go, you know, he's exactly right. There are people, all those guys that I worked on that T-33 with and back in a civilian in the Warbird world that would just give anything to just go for a ride in one of these. Yeah, just for a ride. Yeah, not even to get the time for a living, but a ride. Yeah. [1:13:55] Right. And I took that to heart. And of course I went back and I ate a little bit of crow and I begged him to fly back in the backseat of one of the jets. And he allowed me to do that, which I'm grateful for, but it really put it in perspective. What we get to do and how great, how really great that is. It's much less than 1%. It's 1%. [1:14:19] 10th of 1%. And then if you chalk up flying the Harrier in there, but that was kind of, it's kind of one of those things that you're, the funny, the funny part of that story is you're sitting in there thinking, you know, thinking you're really smart. And then you're all full of yourself, right? That's awesome. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, you know, he rolls in there and brings him back to the real world, which was good. It was good. It was good for me. I don't I don't know if the other guys took it to heart, but I'm just kind of a sensitive kind of guy. There you go. That's a reality. Yeah. And a good one at that. We could, yeah, we could tell, we could sense that. You know, law man was supposed to be in the seven lieutenants and he, he ended up, he up having to have knee surgery because of his Arizona State Trooper injuries, I think. He finally had to get knee surgery. So, he got cut out of that. But I just kind of think about how different his path may have been if he would have been in the group with us versus going to 331, because 331 deployed to Westpac, right, you know, right after he got there. I never went to Westpac. [1:15:41] And never had to go on the boat. We came real close to deploying on the Kennedy as a squadron. Tanner Iskra Oh, that would have been different. Dr. John Baxter Yeah, that, that kind of, the A6s were getting real tired and they wanted something else. And they came up with the idea to kind of redo that. Remember that Roosevelt 231 as a squadron went on the Roosevelt. [1:16:04] In the 88A. They did a cruise on a Roosevelt. But yeah, so. But then they decided, well, we don't want to waste big deck space on an airplane that doesn't doesn't need a hook or a catapult. Yeah, then we were banished, banished forever from those cruises. Yeah, that's, that's right. But it was, it's a fascinating history. I don't, I'm glad that you guys are doing this. So it gets some of that history out there. Well, we're thrilled to be doing it. And the feedback has been nothing shy of amazing. It's been a lot of fun. And that's why I'm hoping that perhaps your pop would be willing to come on and share some of that history with us as well. Um, he's still pretty sharp. Uh, I might have to loan him my headphones. They do get guys together. There's a lot of air force out there in, uh, in Arizona and Tucson. He's in the Tucson area and they get together and, uh, he's given some talks about his days on a carrier. Well, that would be fun to do. And even to get some of those guys. And if you're listening and you know, somebody, or you are somebody who's got some stories, these, these are truly history stories. Yeah. Some of the things people did in aviation are amazing. We've been blessed to be able to get them to come and share it with us. [1:17:21] Sadly, we're at the end of our ability to spend any more time with you today, Slath, but I'm hoping you'll come back at some point in the future, chat some more with us. We've had- You know, you're going to think of six stories as soon as it's over. You're going to think, oh, I should have told them about this time and this time. So that's why the invitation's always open. I appreciate that, you guys. And you're touching more people than I think you realize. Just real quick, we get together with guys in the neighborhood and get real smart, a couple of Scotches here and there in front of our fire pits. It's amazing how much the IQ goes up with Scotches. And we've used your format to get to know some of our neighbors. Just kind of, you know, how did you get involved? We've got a firefighter that lives next door. And you know, how did you get involved in that? It is just a great format. Everybody has a story. They do. Whether you're a aviator or a plumber or whatever, everybody's got stories. So this is for our stories. This is for aviators. [1:18:25] Exactly. Yeah. And they're fun. They're fun stories. Yeah. Some of them not always so happy, but they're fun, good stories. You know, you had shiny on here, you know, he was one of my students, you know, all these guys and Rich Regan, he was one of my, you know, contemporaries and everything I remember. And, and, and all, let me add all aviation too. I talked to a young man the other day, who's just, he's got his CFI and his CFII and he's He's trying to break into professional aviation as a, as something more than an instructor, because that pays ever so well, but he, he wants to move on. And I'm thinking Fig, he may be a good guy to get on to, to help some of our younger listeners who think they want to break into aviation, to find out what that pathway is. If you don't go through the military to get your ratings and become a pilot. [1:19:11] Get him on man. Yeah. Get him on here. Yeah. Here's, here are the challenges. Here's where it's tough. Cause I know this much. I, you've got to want to do this. This is not something you can go, I think I'll do that. I think I'll go pump gas. I think I'll – and not trying to denigrate anything anybody does. I think I'll go flip burgers at Wendy's. This is not – aviation is not something you go, I think I'll go do. You got to want it because it's work. It is a lot of brain work and a lot of application, mental application to get there. You can't just wander into it. I guess that's my point. Yeah, and we're the three lucky guys that got to go through it and do it. You know, and that's, uh, yeah, it came out the other side, the other side in one piece in spite of our best efforts. So, uh, right. So yeah, well, all right. Well, let me, uh, let me close it out here. We've got a couple of people we got to acknowledge. The first thing I want to talk about is Rumble folks. [1:20:09] We were at 97, three more, three more. You got to sign up and I get to quit paying 10 bucks a month so we can live stream to Come on, there's three of you on Rumble, there's 10 of you on Rumble right now. Come on, make it so you can help us out here. All three friends for crying out loud. Three friends. Exactly. It's free. Sign your mother up. Anything. [1:20:31] Hey, you can also find us on Facebook. SothereIwas.us slash Facebook. SothereIwas.us slash Rumble, if you're looking for us on Rumble. SothereIwas.us slash Twitter. And you can email us. You can email Fig. Fig at sothereiwas.us. or me, repeat at sothereIwas.us. R-E-P-T. [1:20:51] Our sponsor is Robbins Birdbrain Designs. Custom gifts, etch anything. Get a hold of Robin. Find out how you can put a special personalized touch on your gift to somebody. Show you've put a lot of thought and effort into getting them that perfect personalized gift. Thanks to our friend over at the Mac Geek Gab. Who is that fig? Dave Hamilton. He's the one that's responsible for all the technology that gets us up and running and we really, really appreciate it. We couldn't Thanks a lot, Dave. Yeah. I put up a new page this week, Fig. I don't think you're aware of it yet. So there I was.us slash subscribe. So you go to that on your iPhone or your Android phone. You go to so there I was.us slash subscribe and there are links there that you can hit, Apple Music, Spotify, iHeart, anywhere that you like to listen to podcasts. There'll be a button there. It'll take you and subscribe in your method of listening. If you- Yeah. So if you can do it though on Apple Podcasts, we'd really appreciate it because that's where the homepage is on Apple Podcasts. When you're subscribed to us through there, you can then go on and give us that five-star rating. Not a four-star rating, not a three-star rating. We need that five-star rating and good reviews. The reviews have been amazing. We're humbled. We're honored. And then lastly, glossary. If there's a term you've heard. [1:22:15] That you didn't understand and we didn't think to stop and explain to you what it was, write to us, tell us to get it on the Glossary page and we'll explain what it is. But in the meantime, until next week, everybody stay safe and... Jack 6. [1:22:28] Music.