—
PENSACOLA WAS the top of the world for a young officer like me earning a salary for the first time—the princely sum of $15,000—with no dependents and no responsibilities other than to the Navy. I walked around town feeling like a rock star and spent a lot of that salary in bars. At Trader Jon’s, a dimly lit dive, the brick walls were crammed with photos of pilots and other aviation memorabilia, and metal model planes hung precariously overhead. At a bar called McGuire’s, hundreds of thousands of one-dollar bills signed by the patrons dangled from the ceiling like sleeping bats. I added one of my own.
After we got through classroom and physical training successfully, which took about six weeks, it was finally time to learn to fly airplanes. We started off flying the T-34C Turbo Mentor, a propeller-driven trainer. It’s a post–World War II–era airplane, small, with a tandem seating arrangement, one seat in front and the second in back. The flight manuals we had to study were phone-book thick, packed with charts and graphs and studded with unfamiliar terms and abbreviations. The material was incredibly dry, but we had to master it before we could fly.
My strategy was to study everything assigned for each day and get ahead on the next lesson’s reading as well. I committed the emergency procedures to memory as I’d been told to. If the instructor asked me what I would do if I lost an engine on the T-34, I could tell him, “Put the PCL idle, T-handle down clip in place, standby fuel pump on, starter on, monitor N1 and ITT for start indications, starter off when ITT peaks or no indication of start.” I haven’t flown the T-34 for nearly thirty years, and I only flew it a total of seventy hours, but I can still rattle this off without thinking. I could still recover from the loss of an engine, or a range of other emergencies, in that plane.
When I was declared ready, the first phase of my actual flight training began. In the briefing room, I met Lieutenant Lex Lauletta, my on-wing instructor, a tall blond guy who greeted me with a congenial smile. That set me at ease, since some of the instructors were said to be real assholes, especially to guys like me who were dead set on flying jets. Lauletta was a former P-3 pilot who was building his flight hours in order to become an airline pilot. I would do most of my initial flights with him, and he kept me from killing myself as well as instructing and mentoring me. He would also be grading me, and his evaluation would count more than anything else to determine whether I would get to go on to meet my goals of flying jet aircraft or would be sent to fly helicopters or larger fixed-wing airplanes—or nothing at all.
That day in the briefing room, we talked about what the syllabus looked like, what we would do when we met next, and how my preparation was going. During that initial meeting I tried on my own “green bag,” or flight suit, for the first time. For me, this was like getting assigned a uniform you get to wear for the rest of your flying life that lets people know you’re a badass Navy pilot. I would rarely go to work wearing anything other than a flight suit for the next nine years.
Later, we walked out to the airplane for the first time. It was a cold, foggy fall morning, weather I wouldn’t be allowed to fly in alone for a long time. As I got strapped in, I was excited and nervous. I had invested so much in the idea of being a carrier aviator, had worked so hard to get to this point, but I had no idea if I could actually fly a plane. Some people can’t, no matter how hard they try, and you can’t know that until you’re up in the air.
Out on the airfield, I saw hundreds of T-34s were lined up, one after another, stretching out into the horizon, their distinctive bubble canopies covered with condensation. Lieutenant Lauletta figured out which airplane was ours, and as we walked toward it he gave me my first lesson about how not to get killed: never walk through a propeller arc, even if you know the propeller isn’t turning. When he found the airplane that had been assigned to us, he jumped up on the wing, opened both canopies, and threw our helmet bags onto our seats—his in back and mine in front.
He led me through my first preflight check. We checked the wings, flaps, and flight control surfaces on the wings, then opened the engine cowling and inspected the engine, including checking the oil. We looked at the propeller, checking for damage. We checked that the tires were properly inflated and that the brake pads weren’t overly worn. We agreed that everything looked normal, though in reality I wouldn’t have been able to tell if something was wrong. Lieutenant Lauletta tried to give me as much detail as he could about what he was looking for. Then it was time to climb into the plane.
The first moment I settled down into the seat was surreal. On one hand, it was the end of a long struggle to get there, starting the afternoon I first cracked the cover of The Right Stuff. There had been many moments when it seemed that I wasn’t going to make it. Now I could say I had—I was a student naval aviator. On the other hand, this was going to be the start of a whole new set of challenges.
Lauletta helped me get strapped in properly, then we both closed our canopies. I’d studied diagrams of the cockpit of the T-34 in the flight manual as if my life depended on understanding them (because it would). I’d learned the controls and practiced using them in the simulator. Now they seemed to have multiplied into a field of thousands of knobs, switches, gauges, and handles. I had to tell myself to get on with it, that I was ready to do this. It was time to start the plane.
Under Lauletta’s instruction, I applied power and started moving forward. Taxiing was more difficult than I had anticipated, because the airplane didn’t have nose-wheel steering, like a car. Instead, I had to use differential braking to steer the plane, meaning I would partially apply the brakes just on the left side if I wanted to turn left, and just on the right side if I wanted to turn right. This was so completely counterintuitive, I felt like I was learning to ride a bike, trying to keep my balance with someone watching over my shoulder the whole time, grading me. I was already struggling.
A pilot must also learn to use the radio, which is harder than you would think. Talking and doing anything else at the same time can be challenging, as it requires using two different parts of the brain. And of course I wanted a cool Navy radio voice. When Lauletta cued me, I spoke into the radio and said, “Whiting tower, Red Knight Four Seven One ready for takeoff.”