MILITARY UNITS FROM all over the world came to Nellis to use the endless miles of open Nevada desert to practice maneuvers. I flew against not just the Marines and the Navy but also the Royal Air Force from Great Britain, and units from as close as Canada and as far away as Singapore.
Nellis is famous as the home of “Red Flag,” which meant that three or four times a year, we’d engage in weeks-long war games and exercises. We’d be split up into “good guys” and “bad guys” and then we’d take to the skies, devising tactics to fool our adversaries and avoid getting shot down.
Red Flag began in 1975 as a response to deficiencies in the performance of pilots new to combat during the Vietnam War. An analysis by the Air Force, dubbed “Project Red Baron II,” found that pilots who had completed at least ten combat missions were far more likely to survive future missions. By the time they had ten missions under their belts, they had gotten over the initial shock and awe of battle. They had enough experience to process what was going on around them without being too fearful. They had enough skill and confidence to survive.
Red Flag gave each of us “realistically simulated” air-to-air combat missions, while allowing us to analyze the results. The idea was this: Give a pilot his ten missions, and all the accompanying challenges, without killing him.
We were able to have dogfights over thousands of square miles of empty desert. We could drop bombs and go supersonic without bothering anyone. We had mock targets—old, abandoned tanks and trucks—out there. Sometimes we’d drop dummy bombs and sometimes we’d use live ordnance, and we’d have to make sure everyone in formation was far enough away so shrapnel from the bomb explosion wouldn’t hit anyone’s plane.
Each jet had a special instrument pod that electronically recorded what was going on. There was radar coverage in the desert to monitor attacks, and whether the shots taken were valid. We’d have mass briefings before the exercises and mass debriefings afterward.
On one mission, I was given the opportunity to be the Blue Force mission commander, responsible for planning and leading a mission involving about fifty aircraft. It was a complicated task, planning high-speed, low- level attacks using different kinds of airplanes. We had to figure out when to attempt midair refuelings, how to avoid threats, and how best to use all the available resources to achieve the best outcome. It took leadership and coordination skills, getting everyone on the same page.
Exercises such as Red Flag were thrilling, but other aspects of military life were less appealing to me.
As I approached the end of my service commitment in the late 1970s, I got the sense that the best part of my military career was already behind me. I’d served six years and I just loved flying fighters. But I had learned that if I wanted to have a successful, rising career as an Air Force officer, I’d have to do a lot more than climb into a cockpit and fly. To keep getting promoted, I’d have to choose a career path that took me further away from flying. I’d have to spend much of my time giving briefings or sitting at a desk, signing off on paperwork.
In the peacetime Air Force, appearances mattered. Not just haircuts and shoeshines, but also how you appeared to those above you in the hierarchy. To get promoted, you had to be a good politician. You needed to develop alliances and find a well-connected mentor.
Yes, certain people respected my flying abilities, but I was never particularly good at networking. I didn’t put the effort into it. I felt I could get by on my own merits as an aviator.
There were other things that also factored into my decision to leave the Air Force. By the late 1970s, with the Vietnam War over, there was a big drawdown in the military budget. The cuts were exacerbated by rising fuel costs, which meant that to save money, we weren’t being permitted to fly as much. It takes years to get good at using a jet fighter as a weapon, so it was crucial to get pilots into the air as often as possible. The budget issues would leave me grounded more than I would have liked.
My career decisions at that time in my life had a lot to do with the simple question: How much will I get to fly?
The idea of applying to be an astronaut certainly had great appeal to me, but by the late 1970s, when I might have tried to qualify, manned missions weren’t in the forefront of NASA’s plans. The Apollo program, which had sent twelve men to the moon between 1969 and 1972, had been canceled. The space shuttle wasn’t yet in operation. Two of my academy classmates would end up flying the space shuttle in the early 1990s, and in many ways I envied them. But I knew I’d have to spend years and years of my life preparing to fly just once or twice in space. That’s if I could even have made the cut. I didn’t have an engineering degree, and had never been a test pilot as my two classmates had been.
My last day of military service was set for February 13, 1980, three weeks after my twenty-ninth birthday. President Reagan had just taken office and the hostages had been released in Iran. It looked like the nation was headed into more peaceful times, and it felt like the right time for me to return to civilian life.
My final flight was an air-to-air combat training mission, and as you can imagine, it was bittersweet. I flew against our squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ben Nelson, and we both knew the emotions I was feeling at the controls. After the flight, I climbed out of the jet, shook hands with Lieutenant Colonel Nelson and some other well-wishers on the ramp, and then I gave a final salute. It was a simple good-bye.
“Good luck, Sully,” Lieutenant Colonel Nelson said.
It was official. I would never again fly a fighter. That’s not to say I wasn’t a fighter pilot, though. Just as there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine, I would always be a fighter pilot.
I SENT an application to almost every airline, but it was not an easy time to get a job as a commercial pilot. The airlines were losing money and starting to feel the effects of federal deregulation fifteen months earlier. There were growing issues between management and labor. In the decade to follow, more than a hundred airlines would go out of business, including nine major carriers.
All of the airlines combined hired just over a thousand pilots in 1980, and I was grateful to be one of them. I came cheap, too. When I started at Pacific Southwest Airlines, as a second officer/ flight engineer on the Boeing 727, I was earning less than $200 a week. That was my gross, not my take-home pay.
There were eight of us in my PSA class of new hires, and I rented a room in San Diego with a former Navy pilot named Steve Melton. Steve and I went to class all day, training to be flight engineers. We later had simulator training, after which we would return home and turn our closet into our own little makeshift cockpit. On the inside of the closet door, we taped posters with mock-ups of a flight engineer’s panels. We quizzed each other on every light, dial, switch, and gauge, and all the procedures we had to know. We had a lot to learn, and little time to do it.
All eight of us in my class of new hires were so broke that on a lot of afternoons, we’d go to an aviation- themed restaurant-bar close to the airport. The place served one-dollar beers during happy hour, and appetizers were free. That would be our dinner several nights a week.
I entered the airline industry at the tail end of what’s been called the Golden Age of Aviation. Before deregulation, flying was relatively more expensive, and for a lot of people, it felt like a special occasion when they went to the airport to fly somewhere. When I arrived in 1980, everything had gotten a little more casual, but you still saw a lot more men and women in dress clothes than you see today. These days, a growing percentage of travelers look like they’re on their way back from the gym or the beach or just working in the yard.
Airline service was a lot more civil and accommodating back when I started. On most major airlines, whether you were in first class or coach, you got a meal. Children flying for the first time were given wings and tours of the cockpit. Flight attendants would even ask passengers if they’d like a deck of playing cards. When was the last time you were offered playing cards on an airplane?
From the start, I was very happy to be an airline pilot. True, I had honed skills I no longer needed. I wasn’t going to have to refuel my aircraft in-flight from another aircraft. I wouldn’t be dropping any bombs or practicing aerial combat. I wouldn’t have to fly at a hundred feet above the ground at 540 knots. But I appreciated being given the opportunity to join such a prestigious profession—one that only a few people get to join, but that many would have liked to.
It’s interesting. After you fly for an airline for a while, you realize that it doesn’t really matter what your background is. You could have been the ace of your base, or even a former astronaut. You could have been a war hero. Your fellow pilots might respect you for that, but there’s no real impact on your career. What matters most is your seniority at that particular airline. How many years have passed since you were hired? The answer to that decides your schedule, your pay, your choice of destinations, your ability to decline flying red-eyes,
