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The Flyboy Podcast: Guest JB Brown · The Flyboy Podcast

0:09
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Flyboy Podcast, where we bring you just one thing: cool flying stories.
0:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, David Moore, and today I'll be talking with J.B.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: Brown.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: He spent 14 years on active duty, six of those years in the test community.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: He was also a Lockheed test pilot for 21 years, and he spent nine years at the National Test Pilot School.
0:31
SPEAKER_01: He has more than 10,000 flying hours, and that includes a lot of time in some interesting airplanes.
0:38
SPEAKER_01: Airplanes like the F-15, more than 500 hours, the F-16, more than 700 hours, the F-4, more than 900 hours, the F-117, almost a thousand hours, 990, plus the F-22, over 1200 hours.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: He also has some flying time in a couple of uh Russian MIGs.
0:59
SPEAKER_01: JB, let me begin by asking you, how many different planes have you flown?
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks for having me.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Um I have flown um a hundred and forty-nine different types of airplanes.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: That number goes to 158 if you start counting A model, B model.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: It's been a good ride.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: Indeed, indeed.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: Out of curiosity, was there one of them that you just said, wow, this is the coolest thing ever?
1:22
SPEAKER_01: You know, that you only got to fly like once?
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Only flew once, or so Wow, that's that's a bunch of them.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, if you're just talking pure joy and power and all of that, that you can't beat the F-22.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: Now I've flown that more than once.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: Favorite in the in the crowd, uh, believe it or not, it's a 1946 J3 Piper Cup.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: It's just basic flying.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: It's fly by wire, it's got cables.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you open the window, stick your elbow out, and uh you can see what you're doing.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: You just gotta fly the airplane, you gotta fly it all the way to the chalks, as most tail dryer guys know.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: So when did you first know that you wanted to be a pilot?
2:00
SPEAKER_00: You know, yeah, it started very, very young.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: One of the things, my dad was a private pilot.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: I was a reluctant passenger up until a point.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: We go to the Birmingham, Alabama airport and have Sunday lunch at the airport.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: And the uh it was actually a nice restaurant.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a greasy spoon as we know it today.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: And I remember we went out and there was a I think it was a Delta Airlines DC 3 sitting on the ramp.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: They're loading people on this thing.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: We're talking uh late 50s.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh the pilot opens the window, sticks out, makes eye contact, gives me a big thumbs up, and I say, you know, that's kind of cool.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: I think I want to do that.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: And then not too long after that, you know, we entered the space program, and I wanted to be an astronaut.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: Uh pretty much formed my career, my goals and aspirations about becoming an astronaut.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: Never made it, but I got some really nice rejection letters from NASA.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: So, with all of those airplanes that you've flown, have you ever come close to ejecting?
2:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, several times.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: Um one particular uh time comes to mind I was flying an F-22 out of Palmdale.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: We had a depot maintenance operation there, and I was doing a FCF.
3:10
SPEAKER_01: Functional check flight.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the the the shakedown after heavy maintenance.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: I get airborne about the time the nose gear hits the uh the upstop on retraction, I get a left engine bleed indication.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: As uh most jet pilots know, bleed air leaks are bad things.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, the F-4 would just come apart at the seams.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: And my sponsor when I showed up for F-117 training was a guy named Crank Mills who had a bleed air duct failure right after takeoff in the F-117 and had to eject, is that the airplane went out of control on downwind?
3:43
SPEAKER_00: He had a dual bleed air duct failure.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: So uh, you know, that's rattling around in my brain.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: I um I just turned downwind, pull the throttle to idle.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: The the light stayed on as I recall, but thinking I'm only going to be airborne for two or three minutes, I wasn't too worried about doing an engine shutdown or anything.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to get the airplane on the ground.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: And then uh, you know, come off the perch, uh roll out on final and advance power on the right engine to capture glide slope, and I get a ride engine bleed light.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking, okay, if this airplane just twitches, I'm out of here.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: And like I said, the F-117 accident was rattling around in my brain.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: Was able to land the airplane, it it held together.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh there was some really significant scorching in the engine bay, and what had happened is the uh the ducts themselves had come off of the engine, and the root cause was the uh the tech orders hadn't been refined enough to properly secure those things.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: You know, you got a brand new airplane, you're you're testing a lot of stuff, not just the airplane, but the logistics, the uh tech orders, the maintenance procedures, and things like that.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, give us a sense, if you would, of what a test pilot sortie is like compared to a regular vanilla flying sortie.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: What what are you doing when you are testing an airplane and how are you doing it?
5:00
SPEAKER_00: All right, so I was in what we would call developmental test.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: You know, I was a uh Lockheed test pilot, so I was the company's representative on actually the final quality assurance on the the design of the airplane and stuff.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: So we're going out to s to demonstrate that the airplane's safe and then it meets all the specifications.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: It does what it's supposed to do, and that goes everywhere from you know how high, how far, how fast, how strong, you know, uh load factor and stuff, down to you know, weapons delivery.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: And uh, I don't know, I think as a test pilot, I probably fired a dozen AIM9s and about the same number of AMRAMs at uh at drones or just just to get them off the airplane, just into space.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: Make sure end-to-end the system works as advertised and all that good stuff.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, there's a lot of other stuff.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: You know, we uh we go, you know, test pilot on parade, you know, and when the congressman wants to know what the airplane can and can't do, you get brought into the the halls of Congress to talk to them.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: We would do uh tours of the manufacturing places, you know, a little morale morale tours for the folks driving rivets.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: Um we would do the production acceptance uh out of Marietta where the airplane was built.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh that whole thing was uh we would fly two company flights, assuming the airplane was good.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: Two company flights, the airplane would go down and get all the coatings on it, and then the Air Force guy would fly two flights and then it would be delivered.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: That's high priority stuff because uh you know the paycheck gets written when that airplane's delivered.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of emphasis uh on getting that process going and doing it right.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: So among those 149 airplanes that you've flown, uh a couple were not American.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: A couple were built in Russia, I believe.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us what it's like flying a Russian airplane versus an American airplane?
6:48
SPEAKER_01: How are they different?
6:50
SPEAKER_00: I would think the uh the biggest uh difference is that very little accommodation is made for crew comfort.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Those are the most painful ejection seats I've ever sat in, very tight cockpits.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: And you get and you sit in those airplanes, you you get a real in an instant feel for how it's designed, what it's supposed to do.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: Like the MiG-21.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: That's a look forward, go fast, shoot somebody, and land pretty soon because you don't have any gas to begin with, type of airplane.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: You know, checking six isn't a big thing in their uh concept.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: It was all offense.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: You know, go for it, shoot, and go down.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: The the cockpits are painted uh this baby puke green, uh which is supposed to make you less fatigue on the eyes or something like that.
7:35
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: Pretty obnoxious color if you've ever seen one.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: Did you ever have any emergencies when you were flying a MiG?
7:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh several.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: I had one uh of note.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: I was uh helping a uh doctor in St.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: Petersburg who had bought one, and I was doing the airworthiness work on that to, you know, turn it over to him, then you know, teach him how to fly it, and then you know, that'd be his uh his toy airplane.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: Would you call this moonlighting as a test pilot?
8:02
SPEAKER_01: You're you know, this is a civilian guy who's just bought an airplane.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, he was actually paying National Test Pilot School.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: I was doing that under the uh auspices of the school.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh that's mainly to keep insurance things proper, you know, protect people insurance-wise if something had happened.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, ended up with a uh inadvertent IMC encounter that turned out to be 5,000 feet of heavy IMC.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: I was trying to get up high enough, trying to get above the RSVM airspace to uh check out a supersonic profile.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to get up above 41,000 feet on an IFR flight plan in an airplane that doesn't have an autopilot.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: This one was inoperative.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: The MiG-21 only has trim in the pitch axis, so there's no roll trim, no yaw trim, single seat in the weather, you know, and every time I try to change a frequency or something like that, the airplane would roll off, and uh, you know, it was uh all hands on deck, everything I could do just don't die, don't die, don't become a uh spatial D accident.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: For our listeners, we should explain IMC means instrument meteorological conditions.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: In other words, flying in bad weather where you can't see.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: Yep, in the clouds.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: So I'm up in the airspace where they're paying good attention.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: Of course, I'm desperately trying to stay alive.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: I get the the uh the old hey, I've got a phone number for you to call when you get back on the ground.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: I said that's the least of my worries right now.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: I had filed a uh little little round robin.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: The MiG-21, I was in a clean configuration, so maximum conservative flying.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: You've got probably 45 minutes of usable fuel on board.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: That's most conservative.
9:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you're gonna go up and fly fight in the MiG-21, you're talking 20 minutes sorty, something like that.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Very limited on gas.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, instrument flying.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: I took off out of St.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: Petersburg.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: I ended up overhead Tallahassee, and uh I'd had an electrical failure that froze the fuel gauge, so I didn't know how much gas I had.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: I this isn't right, you know.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: So I start pointing back towards St.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: Petersburg, sorted out the electrical problem, got the fuel gauge going.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting that the MiG-21 does not know how much fuel it has on board.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: They fill it up, you set the fuel gauge to the quantity, then it just ticks backwards.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: So it quit ticking for a period of time.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know how long.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm waiting on uh a couple of warning lights.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh one tells me this certain uh fuel tank is empty, which is the hey, let's be in the pattern when this happens.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: And then the uh the fuel low light came on, you know, and I'm doing the math, it's it's not pretty.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: Made my way back to St.
10:37
SPEAKER_00: Petersburg, declared an emergency pretty early on, and uh ended up.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: I I said, hey, I'm just gonna point straight for the runway.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm going opposite direction, get everybody out of my way.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh you got to fly over some uh pretty congested areas to get from the Gulf Side over to the St.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: Pete airport, and uh I land, I clear the runway, and the engine flamed out due to lack of fuel.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: Really pissed off Allegiant Airlines because they had an airplane that I was blocking.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: They were trying to get off the ground, and I blocked their airplane.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: That that was a that was a close one.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't know if I averted an accident, but uh I almost uh became part of one.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: That's one of those that that wakes you up in the middle of the night thinking about it.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: So it sounds like some pretty bad weather.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: Is that the worst weather you've flown through to land or or was there another occasion?
11:23
SPEAKER_00: Actually, it was VFR at the airfield.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: The weatherman didn't give us a good picture of the clouds on the way up.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: Like I said, I'm trying to get up to 41,000, and I think I was in the goo from about 2,000 feet up to about 31, 32, something like that.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh the worst weather I've landed in, certainly in a fighter, uh, was um at Spangdalum.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: I had uh spent a month at uh what was called Tactical Leadership Program.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: It was kind of a NATO weapons schoolish type of thing.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: We're coming up on a Christmas holiday, and the uh the bosses wanted the airplane back really bad.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: And the weather at Spangdalum was pretty crummy.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: We're flying from Yever, which is in northern Germany.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: They they waived the category one weather minimums, which I think are 301 at the time, uh, down to Publish, which is 200 and a half.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: Uh fly the PAR and so, oh by the way, we just had a snow squall come through here.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: We haven't plowed the runway, drop the hook, plan will take in the cable.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so uh we break out, I don't know, somewhere between two and three hundred feet, three-quarters of a mile on final, and it's a world I come out of a world of white into a world of white, and there's just this two lines of uh runway lights, and uh, you know, I had to meep all where the uh barrier housing was.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: Said, okay, well, I'm gonna put this thing halfway between those runway lights, somewhere short of that housing, and we'll see what happens.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: So uh wham, you know, I hit the runway and uh took the cable, came to a stop.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh, yeah, we're going, wow, that was pretty cool.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: And and then the uh crash recovery trucks are coming up off the center of taxiway at Spank, and they're trying to make the turn onto the runway, and they're they're losing control.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: They're doing donuts on the runway.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this isn't uh too pretty.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: But that was the worst one, certainly in a fighter.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: I did a uh Cat 3 auto land in the 737 to uh no ceiling and 700 RVR at San Francisco.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: That's just a pure act of faith.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: You're in the Klag, it's it's white all the way around.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: You're just watching that radar altimeter click down, you go, well, something's getting ready to happen here.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: Let's hope it's all good.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Indeed.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's funny.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: Worst weather I ever landed in was also at Spang 301.
13:33
SPEAKER_01: Through a snowstorm.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: So assuming the statute of limitations has run out, was there ever a time you flew someplace you weren't supposed to?
13:41
SPEAKER_00: One and only one, and I knew this guy.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't necessarily me, but I happened to know him.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: I I was talking to him in the bar one night.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, flying an F-15 out of Edwards, I had a friend at his own airfield, and calling it an airfield was rather liberal.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: He had a had property, property in the hills uh on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, up in this canyon, and uh the oil company wanted access to their walls through his property.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: And he said, Well, I'll tell you what, if you pave my my uh dirt road here and make it so I can land my airplane on it, he flew pit specials and stuff like that.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Um you can have access.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: Probably the stupidest thing I ever did was I took an F-15 over there and I did a touch and go on that road, runway, uh whatever.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Quite frankly, uh I was in burner before the wheels touched down.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: F-15 will float for a long ways, and I'm halfway down, and it was only like maybe 3,000 feet.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: And I had absolutely no business being there uh except for my buddies that were watching.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, I did the touch-a-go and went back to Edwards and you know, I had my fingers crossed and uh saying Hail Marys, you know, when I landed at Edwards, hopeless I didn't hadn't blown a tire or something.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: And uh to reinforce bad behavior, uh this guy had access to Edwards Air Force Base, and like three nights later, doorbell rings and uh go answer the door.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: There's nobody there except a a bottle of Jack Daniels with a Polaroid of the Skidmarks.
15:13
SPEAKER_01: So let me ask you, have you ever been lost while flying?
15:17
SPEAKER_00: Well, I I I I w once upon a time a WISA was very lost, and he didn't fess up.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: We were doing a uh single ship, low-level.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna attack the ball bearings factories in Schweinfurt, Germany.
15:29
SPEAKER_01: As one does.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: So we raged in there, and Schweinfurt is pretty close to the buffer zone, uh, which was to keep us out of the inner German border, out of East Germany.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: Is this in an F4?
15:42
SPEAKER_00: In an F4, yeah, out of Spain.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we do our our attack on Schweinfurt, and I'm doing the egress here, and I think I'm just having fun flying low and doing ridge crossings and all this, and I didn't keep track of how many ridges we'd crossed.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: And uh the Wizzo definitely did hadn't kept track.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: And there we were kind of on the northern vector, and the the uh the East German border kind of went to the west there.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: Do a ridge crossing.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: I only 135 degrees a bank coming over this ridge, and there it is right in front of me, the big double picket fence with the guard towers and the concertina wire and all of that.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: We got oh my god.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: So uh now was a break turn to uh get away from that thing, which means we grossly violated the buffer zone and the air defense identification zone, the ADIS.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, we were within, I don't know, maybe a mile or two of the the East German border.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: Uh the radar warning started doing some funky things, and then we really did terrain following to get back so that the friendly guys wouldn't find us and uh you know we didn't get hauled in front of the uh the colonels to explain our actions.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: We we got away with it, but uh that that one was kind of sporty.
16:48
SPEAKER_01: Wasn't intentional though, that's for sure.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: Uh no, not intentional, but you know, World War III wasn't gonna be intentional either.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: So tell me one of your favorite flying memories.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: I think um uh an it it was an F-117 sortie.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm doing a test up in the uh Nellis Ranges.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: We're north of Las Vegas up there, and it's uh, you know, oh my god, early in the morning.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: It's like four o'clock in the morning.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: The uh dawn is kind of imminent, headed east, you know, just this thin sliver of a horizon.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: You start making it out.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: The sun has gotten that far.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: The horizon had every color of the rainbow in it, which is kind of cool.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: The ground below us was black, the sky was dark, no stars out there, and I look up, and uh, you know, then 117 we had that pinky switch and turn out all the lights, just turn everything dark.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: I had a moment, I said, okay, I'm gonna just go lights out here, and I turned everything off.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: So I had that horizon, then above it was just a thin sliver of the moon, and punctuated above that was Venus.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: It was like wow.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: If you don't believe in a supreme being, this might put some belief in you because it was just a gorgeous sight.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: You know, I had 10 seconds, then it's time to go back to work, turn the lights back on, and and off we went.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: But that was pretty uh pretty awe-inspiring.
18:02
SPEAKER_01: Talking about the F-117, you are bandit 119.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: All of the bandits I've spoken to so far have bandit numbers above 150 because that's when the active duty Air Force got the airplane, and that's when they started the numbering at 150 to keep the number of pilots a mystery.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: So can you tell us about the bandit numbers below 150?
18:24
SPEAKER_01: Were there 149 bandit numbers?
18:27
SPEAKER_01: Uh how were they assigned and and how many are there, or can you say?
18:30
SPEAKER_00: Well, we started, I think, nominally at bandit uh 101 was gonna be the the thing.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Hal Farley, who did the first flight on the airplane, he decreed he was gonna be bandit 117.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: Makes sense.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: Then uh Dave Ferguson was a uh he was the second guy to fly the airplane, and he was an old thud driver, so he uh he declared he was gonna be bandit 105.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: And then I think uh with the other Lockheed and Air Force guys, they went, you know, 101, 102, 103, etc.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: on up.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, I was 119.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: And that was uh to put it in context with the other guys that have the higher bandit numbers, uh, that was February of ninety-five.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: So your bandit number one nineteen was actually assigned much later than bandits one fifty through five hundred or so.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: I was doing follow-on testing.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't one of the original guys.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: But you still kept the bandit numbers below 150.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how high the test pilot bandit numbers went.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: So we know flying can be dangerous.
19:37
SPEAKER_01: Have you lost any close friends?
19:39
SPEAKER_01: Tell us about folks we should remember today.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, you know, at first uh the dangers of this occupation uh I was a young uh first lieutenant at Spangdalum, Germany, and my uh uh crewed whizo, the guy I'd flown the most with since getting to Germany, is a guy named Dan Habis.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: He and Wayne Larson went down in uh February of 1980.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: And then uh, you know, these squadron mates and the good buddies.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: A year almost to the day, I think it was the same day of the week or the same numeric day, uh, we lost uh um Doug Withers and Bill Alcorn out of the same squadron.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: And you know, that's probably when I did the stupidest thing ever.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh they they went down in the morning.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: We all knew about it, and I went flying that afternoon, and uh my mind wasn't on it.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: Probably should have just, you know, said no boss, I'm not not ready to fly today, but that wasn't in my DNA at the time.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: And then uh one that really, really hurt and uh hit home was uh guy named Dave Cooley.
20:39
SPEAKER_00: We had an F-22 accident at Edwards Air Force Base.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: I had sent Dave out to fly that morning, and you know, we had a little chat when he was walking out the duty desk.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: That that one hurts to this day.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: All of them hurt.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Really hammers home the uh the hazards of this occupation.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: In Dave Cooley's case, I was part of the notification team, and uh those of you that listen to Bill Lake's uh podcast, that really hit home for me because it will change you uh to change somebody else's life like that.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll tell you what, let's go from somber to elated.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: Tell us about your coolest flying memory.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: Coolest flight?
21:20
SPEAKER_00: Uh unfortunately it was my Finney flight in the F-22.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: We had the family out there, and uh so I took off with uh probably the best wingman I've ever had in my life, a guy named Hooter.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: And I'll leave his real name out there.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: People that if they know Hooter, they know Hooter.
21:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh anyway, so we take the runway, and I'm gonna be chasing Hooter on the takeoff.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: So I take off first, come around the close pattern, and then I do an airborne pickup on him as he releases brakes.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: What that did is give me a chance to ziz over the heads of my family that were out in last chance.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: And then uh max climb up to altitude.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Went outside the Edwards airspace to the east in what's known as the high altitude supersonic quarter.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: Turned hot and then pushed it up to Mach 2.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: I think we're in the 40s when we do this.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: And then once we're inside the Edwards Airspace, went up touch 60,000 feet.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: We came on down, did uh some advanced handling, uh, you know, Cobra J turn.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what the AO, you know, you reach AOAs over 100 degrees in some of these things, you know.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: The airplane's perfectly controllable.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: He and I did a couple of BFM setups, and uh, you know, touch 9Gs, touch minus 3Gs.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: And what we did was just tagged each corner of the flight envelope of the F-22 and its capabilities, and then uh came back and landed and uh was met by uh severe uh intermittent rain showers uh upon exiting the airplane, which is would these be shampagne-soaked rain showers?
22:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh the champagne came afterwards.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to dilute the champagne, do we?
23:01
SPEAKER_01: That's fair.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: That's fair.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: That's fair.
23:04
SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: I have heard about you know the F-22 Cobra Dance and those kinds of super high AOA maneuvers.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: Can you describe those in a little bit more detail?
23:16
SPEAKER_01: You know, how do you go into those maneuvers?
23:19
SPEAKER_01: What do they allow you to do?
23:20
SPEAKER_01: What's it like in the cockpit?
23:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, um frankly, the Cobra and the J turns up there are a lot cooler to watch than they are to do, quite frankly.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: Uh you're in the airplane and you just see the world going by.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: For the uh for these super high AOA things, there's a little AOA range or speed range you got to be in to allow the airplane to, you know, you got to engage the thrust vectoring.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: And you know, that that just happens.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: That's part of the flight control system.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, if the if you're commanding more pitch rate or G than the airplane can give you aerodynamically, it's gonna you know throw the thrust vectoring in there.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: And and um, for the Cobra, it's just you know, you just slam full aft stick and you can feel the airplane dig in.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: You can hear the roar of the uh vortices coming off the uh the strikes on the nose, and you hear those come by the canopy, and then you know it's just a pulse up to super high AOA and then you push over out of it.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: In the process, you've lost uh probably 150 knots, it gained you know seven or eight hundred feet, something like that.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: You know, though these things are they're tools in the toolbox, and you gotta know when to use them.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: If you you know did a cobra to spit somebody out in front of you, you may do that.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: You may very well spit that one guy out in front of you, but meanwhile, you're a strafrag for his wingman.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: And like any other airplane, if you cash it in, it's gonna take you 30, 45 seconds to get back to uh you know a good fighting speed where you can maneuver the airplane at a high G, high turn rate.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're they're great for the air shows, but you use them very judiciously if you're uh you're in an air combat situation.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh you mentioned going Mach 2 a moment ago.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell me at what experience you had where you had the greatest sense of speed, not necessarily actual speed, but I mean oftentimes it seems like it's down low, you know, where you get the you know the obvious movement going by.
25:15
SPEAKER_01: Or can you really tell when you're going Mach 2 how fast it is?
25:18
SPEAKER_01: Does the world really move by that quickly?
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the blurring lights and the uh angelic choirs singing stuff.
25:26
SPEAKER_00: If the uh the sun angle's right and the atmospheric's right, you can see the shock wave.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: You know, and you you watch that as it goes across the gun.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: It just looks like a parallax, um, you know, like a piece of glass on the table.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: You see a little shift in uh what the where the print is.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: Um so you can see that racing across the ground.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: That's pretty cool.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Interesting, uh, critical mock in the F-22 was somewhere around 0.92, something like that.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: And in during in the middle of the day, that with the sun coming right through the canopy, you could see the shadow of the shockwave dancing up and down the canopy bow.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: Uh that's how you knew you were you were there.
26:04
SPEAKER_01: You were getting close to the mock.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, the the the raptor would get at about 0.95, you get this little slight rumble, you know, the the gravel road feel.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: So if you're looking over your shoulder, uh you know not paying attention, that's a that's a tactile indication you're getting close to the mock.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: But uh, and that goes away at about 1.05, 1.1, something like that.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, you can go supersonic and not know it in a heartbeat.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, Mach 2, uh, that airplane, it it just wants to go fast.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: I spent more time supersonic the first one month of flying a Raptor than I did my entire career up to then.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh it just lives out there and it loves it.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: And it's a very smooth ride.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: I've had I've had the F-15 to Mach 2, I've had the F-4 to Mach 2, I've had the F-16 to Mach 2, and they're not that comfortable.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: The airplane's talking to you, uh um saying, hey, I'm working hard.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: The raptors, like, you know, sit back, smoke a lucky man.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: This thing is just smooth.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: Wants to go faster.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: We test it out to Mach 2.1 for flutter, but the uh the book the book is written at 2.0 for the limit.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: When you get out there, uh you know skin temperature is an issue.
27:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh the raptors made out of composites and they're cooked in an easy bake oven.
27:22
SPEAKER_00: You don't want to approach those temperatures, uh so uh a lot of the uh limits are temperature you know driven.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: Okay, my last question, and this is a really geeky one, but you're the perfect guy to be able to address this.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: They told us flying the F-117 not to take it past the mock, not because it couldn't get there, but because they didn't know what it would do.
27:44
SPEAKER_01: You know, in terms of aerodynamic uh you know, what would it would it stay in control or not?
27:50
SPEAKER_01: And so they said don't go over point nine, and and you had the warning in your headset, airspeed, airspeed, airspeed, as you got close.
27:58
SPEAKER_01: So what's your guess?
28:00
SPEAKER_01: If you were to take an F-117 past the mock, what do you think would happen?
28:05
SPEAKER_00: Airplane would go out of control.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: So the uh the F-117 inherently did not know which pointing edge should be forward.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: It was unstable and uh certainly in pitch and yaw, probably neutrally stable in roll.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: It did not have the uh AOA or beta veins that a lot of airplanes do that tell the flight control computer uh what your angle of attack or side slip is.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: So the F-117 got all of its data through those air data probes up front.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: And if you attach a shockwave to those, um the the flight control computers are you know garbage in is garbage out.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: So the the computers won't know what to do.
28:43
SPEAKER_00: I know uh I had a couple of guys slidle up to me and they're talking about exiting Baghdad and going, yeah, 1.3, 1.03, you know, something like that, something slightly over the mock.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: So I went to our flight control guru.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: I said, Hey, hey man, this is possible.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you've flown the F-117, you get it going fast, it's not happy.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's not a round surface anywhere on that airplane, and and uh the the air flows separating all around those facets and it's it's rumbling and rattling, and and it's not a comfortable thing.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: So I asked them about it, and they they ran some simulations and uh straight down mil power, there's a little region between like 26 and 29,000 feet where you might get out to 1.01, 02, something like that.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: But nowhere near that in level flight or or a uh casual dive.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: And uh again, um the flight controls would uh would go stupid uh with the shockwaves being attached to those probes.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: That is the best answer ever.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, you you remember you know flying the T-38, you go supersonic and the altimeter and the airspeed indicator would flop back and forth.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, it's that type of effect.
29:57
SPEAKER_01: Cool.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: That is just cool stuff.
29:59
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, the 117 was an easy airplane to fly.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: You just didn't assault the limits, right?
30:05
SPEAKER_00: I think uh 145 was the minimum allowable speed, and that was because crummy air data going into those probes.9 was the max mock for the same reason.
30:15
SPEAKER_01: Keep it in the envelope for sure.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: Okay, JB, tell us one last story.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: We had kind of a standard mission uh out of Edwards where we had to be on the range, ready to go at sunrise.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: You know, as the sun cracked the horizon, we were ready to go to work, which meant uh it was about a 30-minute transit, so we were taking off out of Edwards about 30 minutes prior to uh to sunrise.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes before the towers opened, you know, the compan command post would come on ground control and say, Taxi at your own risk.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, it's always at my own risk.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, taxing out, you could again see that little sliver of the horizon starting to show.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, it it this is purely safety of flight stuff, but you know, I'm getting up at 3 o'clock in the morning to do this, or maybe even showing at 3 o'clock in the morning.
31:00
SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, no sleep that night.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: As you know, when it's dark, the lifties don't work very well.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: I I felt that you know, due to safety of flight, I'd have to use full afterburner uh to take off out of Edwards at you know 4:30, 5 o'clock in the morning.
31:18
SPEAKER_00: And uh I'm sure that kind of rattled the bass.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: You know, if I'm awake, by God, you're gonna be awake.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: And uh I accelerate down the runway, and you could be on a cooler day, didn't have to be a cold day, but a cooler day, uh, in full afterburner, you could break supersonic it by the end of the runway.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the airplane just get up and go.
31:41
SPEAKER_01: This is the in the F-22, right?
31:43
SPEAKER_00: F-22, yeah.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: So I get up to about 500 knots, stand it on its tail, and just you know, climb probably uh you know, 70, 80 degree nose high attitude.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: And passing the low 20s, stay right.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Boom, that fast, instant sunrise.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: I've been climbing into the sun, and uh, you know, the cockpit is just bathed in this bright light, and your eyes are trying to get used to it.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: And you look back down on the ground and you can still see the uh the headlights on the cars and the lights on at the houses and stuff, and say, Well, it's daytime up here.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: That was really kind of cool.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: After I did it once, I'd have to do it over and over just to make sure it still worked.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: Just to make sure it still works.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: JB, thanks so much for joining us on the Flyboy Podcast.
32:31
SPEAKER_01: It's been great to have you.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: It's been my pleasure, my honor.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: Uh thanks for including me.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: You've been listening to the Flyboy Podcast.
32:39
SPEAKER_01: This podcast is brought to you by our parent organization, the Flyboy Lab.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: The mission of the Flyboy Lab is to elevate awareness and appreciation of aviators, their service, sacrifices, and contributions, and hopefully we've fulfilled that mission today.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: New episodes of the Flyboy Podcast drop every Thursday morning, and you can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: Until our next sortie, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.