create and maintain a very accurate real-time mental model of your reality. Investigating this pilot’s apparent inaccurate SA reminded me of what was at stake for fighter pilots. It took an absolute commitment to excellence because we were required to do incredible things close to the ground and fast, often changing directions quickly, while always making sure that the way we were pointed was safe to go.
In so many areas of life, you need to be a long-term optimist but a short-term realist. That’s especially true given the inherent dangers in military aviation. You can’t be a wishful thinker. You have to know what you know and what you don’t know, what you can do and what you can’t do. You have to know what your airplane can and can’t do in every possible situation. You need to know your turn radius at every airspeed. You need to know how much fuel it takes to get back, and what altitude would be necessary if an emergency required you to glide back to the runway.
You also need to understand how judgment can be affected by circumstances. There was an aircrew ejection study conducted years ago which tried to determine why pilots would wait too long before ejecting from planes that were about to crash. These pilots waited extra seconds, and when they finally pulled the handle to eject, it was too late. They either ejected at too low an altitude and hit the ground before their parachutes could open, or they went down with their planes.
What made these men wait? The data indicated that if the plane was in distress because of a pilot’s error in judgment, he often put off the decision to eject. He’d spend more precious time trying to fix an unfixable problem or salvage an unsalvageable situation, because he feared retribution if he lost a multimillion-dollar jet. If the problem was a more clear-cut mechanical issue beyond the pilot’s control, he was more likely to abandon his aircraft and survive by ejecting at a higher, safer altitude.
My friend Jim Leslie was on a training mission in an F-4 in 1984, dogfighting with other airplanes. His plane ended up in a spin due to a mechanical malfunction, and there was no way to get it to fly again. “Pilots are only human,” he later told me. “In stressful situations, your brain tells you what you want to hear and see, which is: ‘This ain’t happening to me!’ And so you mentally deny that your plane is going down. You think you have time to fix the problem or to escape, when really, you have no time. And so you eject too late.”
Jim pulled his ejection handle, which first sent his WSO out of the F-4, then sent him a split second later. “I thought I had ejected us in plenty of time,” he said, “but I later learned that I did it just three seconds before the plane hit the ground.” Had he waited even one second longer, he wouldn’t have made it safely out of the aircraft.
“Nobody wants to crash,” Jim said. “It’s not a good mark on your flight record. The loss of that F-4 cost the Air Force four million dollars that day. But I lived. And some people die because they don’t want to be responsible for the cost of the plane.”
Jim later had a chance to fly the F-16. Two of his roommates died in F-16 training accidents, and the job fell to Jim to pack up their gear and return it to their families. Later, Jim would again have to eject from an unflyable plane, an F-16. Again, he survived. “Every day I wake up is a bonus,” he’d tell me.
PERHAPS THE most harrowing flight of my military career came in an F-4 out of Nellis. My “GIB” (“guy in back” or “backseater”) was Loren Livermore, a former bank clerk from Colorado who decided to abandon his desk job and become an Air Force navigator. He and I were on a gunnery range over the Nevada desert. I was leading a formation of four fighters, flying a box pattern around the target on the desert floor as part of bombing practice.
We were at a very low altitude, and I felt the plane move by itself. Imagine being in your car, driving along, and all of a sudden, without turning the steering wheel, you start veering to the left. It would be a bit shocking.
For us, in the F-4, the unsettling moment came when we felt the plane make a sudden uncommanded flight control movement.
Loren had hooked up a cassette recorder so he could have a record of what we said to each other, and of our radio transmissions. My response to this movement was very clear on the tape.
“Goddamn it!”
“What was that?” Loren shot back.
“I don’t know,” I told him.
Being just a hundred feet above the ground, traveling 450 knots, in a plane with a mind of its own—that’s not a path you want to be on. I immediately pulled the F-4 skyward. I needed a rapid climb to get away from the unforgiving ground. I had to buy myself time and give myself room. At a higher altitude, Loren and I might be able to make sense of the malfunction and deal with it more effectively. More important, if the situation worsened, we would have the time and altitude to be able to recover, or successfully eject and survive.
I radioed, “Tasty one one, knock it off.” That was my order to the other three planes to abandon the practice run and stop the training mission.
Each pilot acknowledged my order.
“Two knock it off.”
“Three knock it off.”
“Four knock it off.”
“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” I said. “Tasty one one. Flight control malfunction.”
As leader of the formation, I still had to give direction to the other three planes. “Two and four go home,” I said. “Three join on me.”
I wanted two of the jets to go back to Nellis. They could serve no useful purpose, and I didn’t want the increased workload of being responsible for them anymore. As flight lead, I had a responsibility to my flight of four jets as well as myself and my WSO. It was prudent to stop the training when it was no longer reasonably safe and to focus my attention on the higher priority of merely staying alive a little longer.
I chose to have No. 3 escort me, since he was also a flight lead and was more experienced than either No. 2 or No. 4. I wanted No. 3 to see if he could help me make sense of whatever my F-4’s malfunction was. Before 2 and 4 left the range, and the frequency, I radioed, “Tasty one one, armament safety check complete.”
Each of the other pilots responded.
“Two, armament safety check complete.”
“Three, armament safety check complete.”
“Four, armament safety check complete.”
This ensured that all arming switches were returned to the safe position before planes left the range.
The No. 3 pilot was George Cella. At the time there was a popular TV commercial for Cella Lambrusco wine. The lovable character in the commercial, named Aldo Cella, was a short, pudgy Italian guy with a dark mustache. He wore a white suit and hat, and had women hanging all over him because of his brand of wine. So George’s tactical call sign was “Aldo.”
Aldo said, “Better do a controllability check.”
When I got to a higher altitude, about fifteen thousand feet, I slowed down the jet to make sure it would remain controllable at a slower speed when the time came for me to attempt a landing. Loren, my WSO, turned to the appropriate troubleshooting page, E-11, in our emergency checklist and we verified we could control the plane.
Aldo flew his jet very close to mine. He and his WSO inspected the exterior of my aircraft, looking for any obvious damage, fluid leaks, or other anomalies. “You look OK,” Aldo said as he chased me in his F-4.
I contacted Las Vegas Approach Control and advised the civilian controller of my emergency status and of my need to return for landing at Nellis. The controller put certain constraints on how I might return, and how long I could take to line up. He wanted a tighter turn to my final approach.
“Unable,” I told him. That’s the standard response when a pilot can’t do what a controller is asking him.
I told him I needed a five-mile final approach to make sure I could be stabilized for landing. I was glad I had insisted on that, because as I was descending, a gust of wind caused a wing to dip. Aldo and his backseater assumed I was losing control of the F-4. They expected to see Loren and me flying like cannonballs out of our plane in our ejection seats. But I moved the control stick full right, and was able to raise the left wing that had dipped. For the moment, we held on.
After that gust of wind, I was intensely focused on keeping the wings exactly level, and on carefully
