aerodynamics or FAA commercial pilot regulations and he could write a book or teach a class on it; ask him about elementary calculus and he was lost. His average grades and average SAT scores — he took the test three times — denied him his hope of admission to the Air Force Academy.
Now desperate to make up for lost time, Rinc enrolled in the University of Nevada at Reno and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. He turned down dozens of offers from companies all over the world — a young engineer with a commercial pilot’s license was rare indeed — and applied for and won a place at the Air Force Officer Training School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. After that came a pilot training slot, one of only a handful awarded to OTS “ninety-day wonder” graduates.
He graduated with honors and was one of the first Air Force second lieutenants to be selected to fly the coveted FB-111A Aardvark supersonic bomber for the Strategic Air Command. The FB-111 was an elite showpiece assignment — there were fewer than fifty line Aardvark pilots in the entire U.S. Air Force. But the SAC version of the F-111 fighter-bomber never went to fight in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, so Seaver never saw any combat. And his FB-111 assignment ended less than two years later, when the Aardvarks were retired from service, a victim of budget cutbacks.
There were no other flying slots open during the steep force drawdowns of the early nineties, so Seaver transferred to the Aeronautical Systems Division, Special Projects Office, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, working as a project officer and weapons design engineer for the B-1B Lancer bomber. He helped develop a series of high-tech, almost science-fiction-like weapons for the bomber, earning accolades and high-ranking attention throughout the Air Force as a forward-thinking, innovative designer. But the Lancer was in danger of being unceremoniously retired as well, and funding for advanced weapons and upgrades was slashed. Seaver’s job was eliminated virtually overnight. He attended Squadron Officer School and was promoted to captain, but his prospects were looking poor for the career in the military that he longed for.
Without a regular commission or any recent flying experience, the young captain left the active-duty force, went home to Reno, and transferred to the Nevada Air National Guard. The Guard unit in Reno was one of the last to fly the RF-4 Phantom tactical reconnaissance jet, and Seaver saw his opportunity to fly a fast-mover once again. But he was a victim of the same old pattern that had dogged him before: the aged RF-4 was soon doomed to retire. When the Reno Guard got C-130 Hercules cargo planes, Seaver, disappointed but thankful to be back in the sky once again, accepted a part-time pilot assignment, flying one or two missions a week out of Reno-Tahoe International Airport.
In between, he worked as a flight instructor and charter pilot in Reno, earning his Airline Transport Pilot rating and quickly accumulating more commercial flight time. He piloted every charter assignment that came his way, got as much sleep as he could, then worked equally hard as a C-130 “trash-hauler.” He completed Air Command and Staff College and received his master’s degree, both achievements very unusual for National Guard officers. Everyone thought he was crazy for chasing an unattainable dream: to someday be called back to active duty and fight in the mythical air battle he still dreamed about.
But Rinc Seaver proved them all wrong. When the Reno Air National Guard transitioned from the C-130 to the B-1B Lancer bomber, he applied and was immediately accepted for pilot transition training and a fulltime Guard assignment. He was back in his element, and his star quickly rose. He was promoted to major three years below the zone and became the squadron’s senior standardization/evaluation pilot. To top it all off, he led the fledgling 111th Bomb Squadron in winning the LeMay, Dougherty, Ryan, Crumm, and Fairchild Trophies in Air Combat Command’s biennial long-range Bombing and Navigation Competition. “Aces High” became the first Air Force Reserve Component unit in history and only the second B-1B unit to win the coveted Fairchild Trophy.
But Seaver’s promotion and success did not sit well with most of the other Reno Air Guard crewdogs. Although he was clearly the most technically knowledgeable flier in the squadron — his pilot skills rivaled those of some of the veteran aircraft commanders — almost everyone saw him only as a young, cocky, know-it-all junior major with no life other than flying. What made him think he was so great? He had relatively little total military flying time, very little Bone time, and no combat experience. Some of the pilots he gave evaluations and check rides to had thousands of hours and many more years in service, and had flown combat missions in Desert Storm and even earlier conflicts, such as Operation Just Cause over Panama. As far as they were concerned, Rinc Seaver was an outsider and would always be one — forget that he was a native Nevadan and one of the first members of Aces High. Even after winning Bomb Comp, the old heads still considered him a mere systems operator, not a real aviator.
Rinc Seaver’s answer to them was simple: go piss up a damned rope. He worked hard to be the best. He did his job with skill and dogged determination, just as he did everything else in his life, and he took no crap from anyone regardless of rank or flying time. Even in the Nevada Air National Guard, where politics, influence, and family name meant almost as much as skill and dedication, Rinc Seaver — the name meant “determined warrior” in Welsh — took a backseat to no one. He developed a reputation as a brash, determined loner who liked to push the envelope as much as possible at every opportunity.
Now he sat in the B-1B Part-Task Trainer, a computerized B-1 flight simulator, with a pilot and OSO/DSO compartment side by side in nonmoving but otherwise fully realistic cabs, ignoring Long’s glare. “Watch this,” he said to Furness, about to recap the doomed flight. “Okay, Neil, hit it.” Furness suppressed her irritation and nodded to him to continue. The PTT had full visual displays out the cockpit windows and a worldwide radar and threat display database, so the crews could fly anywhere in the world and get realistic terrain and geographic displays and readouts. A control console was manned by two instructors and a computer technician. The instructors could program thousands of different scenarios into each simulator session, re-creating the simplest orientation flights or the most complex wartime emergency procedures scenario imaginable. The simulator operated twenty hours a day, six days a week. Like most military units in this age of steep budget cuts, the simulator had more “flying” time than all of the unit’s aircraft combined.
The computer-generated visual display out the cockpit windows showed a vast expanse of desert, dotted with tall, jagged, rocky peaks. “Here we are at the Scud-ER target at Navy Fallon,” said Seaver. “We hit two targets, but the damned squids jerked our chains and kept the emitters on and didn’t simulate a kill, so we thought we missed. Chappie is ready to spit nails because he thinks he shut down all the threats, which he did, but the Navy kept on transmitting like they never got hit, the bastards.” Chappie was Al Chapman, his dead defensive systems officer.
“Seaver…”
“Hold on, boss,” Seaver said, pushing on. “We’re yanking and banking and jammin’ and jivin’ our asses off. Everyone’s pissed at me because they thought we missed the first two targets and because I wasn’t doing enough for bomber defense. That’s bullshit too — we shacked all three targets — but…” He stopped, ashamed that he had patted himself on the back and then said something negative against the dead. He could feel the icy stares on the back of his neck and knew the others, Furness too, resented it.
“Anyway, we nail the third target. Dead-on. We fly right into a SAM and triple-A nest on the other side of the ridge. A shitload of SAMs and triple-A — the smoky SAMs are everywhere, a couple dozen of ’em. We scram left away from the trap. We’re at two hundred hard ride. I put the spoiler override switches into OVERRIDE, pop the speedbrakes and pull ’em into idle power, and start our two point five Gs pull to cornering velocity. Speed comes down nicely. Override switch back to normal, speedbrakes down. Now watch.”
The visual display showed the steep bank, with more and more earth replacing sky in the cockpit window. Seaver pushed the throttles to max afterburner and pulled the stick right, but nothing happened — the steep bank stayed in, and they dipped earthward. Seconds later the simulator crashed with a sound resembling Wile E. Coyote hitting the ground in a Road Runner cartoon.
“Seaver, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove…”
“I know why we crashed, boss,” he said. “Look: over ninety degrees of bank, airspeed slowing…”
“You cross-controlled your jet,” Furness told him. “You know you’re not supposed to do over ninety degrees of bank while TF’ing.”
“But look at the speedbrakes,” Seaver said insistently. “Just like the Powder River accident a couple years ago. Low altitude, steep bank angle, tight turn, and the speedbrakes are still extended. Sink rate builds up…”
“But you said you retracted the speedbrakes.”
“They had to be still extended, boss,” Rinc said.
Long rolled his eyes in disbelief. “So you say.”
“I know I did,” Rinc said. “Either they didn’t retract, or they stuck extended. But they didn’t retract.”
