I earned a high score on the aviation qualification test, and soon after I was assigned to flight school in Pensacola, Florida. I packed all my belongings into my old white BMW and drove south that summer of 1987. Pensacola is on the panhandle, commonly known as the Redneck Riviera, so in a lot of ways it’s more like Alabama than most people’s idea of Florida. It’s a small city, dominated by the naval air station, and tourism is the main industry aside from training Navy fliers. Pensacola is very much a typical military town with trailer parks, pawn shops, and liquor stores, but in this case set against a background of beautiful beaches.
When I reported for my eye exam on the first day of flight school, there were four uniformed officers facing me. I’d expected to find one busy flight surgeon who would make me read a chart and then (I hoped) send me on my way, but the wall of high-ranking officers scrutinized me, stern and unsmiling throughout the exam. Their presence was distracting, and I continually questioned my responses—perhaps this was their intention. I got through the eye exam with a clean bill of ophthalmic health. Years later, I met a Navy flight surgeon who was in that room the day of my eye exam. He admitted that it was an intentional tactic of intimidation.
Naval aviation indoctrination got started with several weeks of tough physical, swim, and survival training. There was a cross-country course we had to navigate in a certain amount of time, an obstacle course with hurdles to jump over, barriers to shimmy under, sand to crawl through, a wall to climb. The film An Officer and a Gentleman gives a pretty accurate representation of what aviation indoctrination training was like, and just as in the film, we student naval aviators had to conquer the Dilbert Dunker a few weeks in. The dunker is designed to simulate the unpleasant experience of a water landing or ditching in an airplane. Dressed in full flight gear and helmet, we were strapped into a mock-up cockpit that was then sent down a steep rail into the deep end of a swimming pool. We were warned that the impact with the water could be hard enough to knock the wind out of us, and that once submerged we’d have only a few seconds to get our bearings before the cockpit turned upside down. I would have to detach the comm wire from my helmet, release myself from the restraints from which I’d be hanging, find my way out of the cockpit, and then dive deeper in order to escape the fuel that might be burning on the ocean surface in a real water landing. A few people who went through this before me couldn’t find their way out and had to be pulled out of the cockpit by rescue divers. This made the risks much more vivid to those of us still standing in line, but when I hit the water I managed to find my way out on the first try.
We also had to go through a similar dunker that simulated a helicopter crash in water. We were strapped into a mock-up helicopter, which was dropped into a pool, flipped over, and sent to the bottom. As with the Dilbert Dunker, I had to be able to get unstrapped and swim to safety. The helo dunker was much harder, though, because several of us, blindfolded, had to get out a single door. People have drowned in the helo dunker, and I heard that some even went into cardiac arrest. We sat strapped in and watched the water slowly climb, grabbing a last breath as it reached our noses. We had to wait to unstrap ourselves until after we were upside down and the motion stopped. I’d try to find a railing or structure on the inside of the cockpit to serve as a reference point to reach for once blindfolded. Once I was upside down, though, everything seemed to move around, and I’d inevitably get kicked in the face by someone flailing for the door, or get kicked in the stomach and have the wind knocked out of me. I’m sure I also kicked the guys behind me. I couldn’t have been happier when I passed the test, though I knew I would have to requalify every four years (NASA has its own water survival training, but it’s much easier). As it happens, I would never need to use any of the emergency training, either the Navy’s or NASA’s.
The swim requirements were even harder. We had to be able to swim a mile and tread water for fifteen minutes, in full flight suit and boots. I got through the mile easily, but I found treading water murderously difficult. Other guys seemed to be naturally buoyant; I seem to have the buoyancy of a brick. I practiced and practiced and was finally able to pass the requirement, though just barely.
I also learned various survival techniques in water, like taking off my pants and making a flotation device out of them by tying the legs closed and filling them with air. I learned drownproofing, a technique for staying alive in water for long periods of time by calmly floating facedown in the water and bringing my mouth slowly up to the surface only when I needed to take a breath. I learned how to disentangle myself from the strings of a parachute collapsed on me in the water. I practiced being rescued from the water by a helicopter, hooking a sling called a horse collar around myself to be hoisted up into the air. The hardest part of this was all the water the helo would kick up into my face, making it feel as though I was drowning.
One day we were taken in groups to experience the altitude chamber, a sealed room in which the air pressure is slowly lowered to simulate an altitude of 25,000 feet. At this level the oxygen deprivation isn’t life threatening, but it gave us a chance to observe our symptoms of hypoxia, which can include tingling in the extremities, nails and lips turning blue, trouble speaking clearly, and confusion. After a number of sessions in the chamber, I tried to push my limits to see how bad my symptoms could get. At first I started to feel a bit drunk and stupid, a vaguely pleasant sensation that turned quickly into euphoria. Euphoria became confusion, followed closely by tunnel vision, and the next thing I knew, the safety monitor was putting my oxygen mask back on for me—I had waited too long and become unable to do it myself. The lesson of the low-pressure chamber was that you go over the cliff quickly. I would continue to do periodic recertification in the altitude chamber, but I always avoided the cliff.
We also did a great deal of coursework. We learned aerodynamics, flight physiology, aircraft engines and systems, aviation weather, navigation, and flight rules and regulations. Most of this material was new to me, but it wasn’t too dissimilar from what I had studied in college. Some of my classmates who had chosen undergraduate majors in the arts and humanities struggled more with the material. But I knew this was one aspect of the training I could excel at if I applied myself to it, so I did. The grades we earned didn’t count in the same way a GPA does in college, but I knew that the better I did at every aspect of aviation indoctrination the better my chances would be of getting assigned to jets.
As part of our survival training, we were dropped off in the woods for days to learn to build shelters, make signal fires, navigate on land, and feed ourselves on only what we could hunt or forage. We couldn’t find anything to eat except for a rattlesnake we killed with a big stick.