Somehow this did not sound nearly cool enough to me. I felt like a little kid playing make-believe. But the tower responded as if my call had been legitimate. “Roger, Red Knight Four Seven One, taxi to position and hold.” This meant we could head out onto the runway but weren’t cleared for takeoff yet. Eventually the tower came back: “Red Knight Four Seven One, you are cleared for takeoff.”
I ran the power all the way up to maximum and accelerated down the runway, trying my hardest to keep the airplane pointed in the right direction using the toe brakes. Once I was going faster, it was a bit easier to control the plane’s direction using the rudder, and with Lauletta’s instruction I slowly pulled back on the stick to make the nose come off the ground. The runway, buildings, and trees tilted back and fell away as we pointed up into the sky. We porpoised a little, undulating up and down as I struggled to find the proper attitude—an aircraft’s orientation in the sky—but we were airborne. In that moment, I was elated. I was flying a plane—albeit very poorly.
We headed out using the “course rules,” a set of formal instructions on where to fly using reference points on the ground. These rules are designed to keep student naval aviators from crashing into one another in the air. I checked in on the radio, announcing where we were so other pilots could avoid us.
Once I was settled into the flight, I could concentrate on mastering the most basic skill: maintaining altitude. I looked out the window at the horizon to judge my attitude, and though we were going only 120 miles per hour, I lifted and dropped us wildly, struggling to keep the airplane within five hundred feet of our intended altitude. Years later I would fly the F-14 at more than twice the speed of sound and control the space shuttle in the atmosphere many times faster, but nothing ever felt as hard to control as that training airplane on that first flight. It seemed to resist my efforts at every turn.
After about forty-five minutes of demonstrating how bad I was at this, I was relieved when Lauletta directed me toward an outlying airfield so we could practice touch-and-go landings. He demonstrated the first one, carefully describing everything he was doing. He slowed the airplane as he approached the runway, lowered the landing gear and then the flaps, came in low over the threshold of the runway, and then idled the throttles and showed me how to slow enough to touch down without stalling or losing control. He then added power and immediately got airborne again—a touch-and-go landing. He made it look easy, and in fact the T-34 is a relatively easy airplane to fly, which is why we started out on them. Now it was my turn.
Landing an airplane requires controlling the direction, altitude, and airspeed to put it down within the first few hundred feet of the runway, gently enough that the landing gear don’t drive through the wings. Despite the airplane being small and the runway large, and despite the controls being relatively simple and responsive, I had a surprisingly difficult time putting landing gear and runway together properly. Eventually I managed to smack the wheels down onto the runway without killing us, then immediately took off to do it one more time, then another, then another. I didn’t feel I was getting any better.
I had hoped I would fly well from the outset, but it was already clear that this was going to take some time to learn, and nothing about it was going to come easily. Still, Lauletta said I had done pretty well for my first day, and he gave me an above-average mark on “headwork,” meaning that I had come prepared and that I had made good choices. This was one of the few subjective criteria he could grade me on out of ten or fifteen categories. I think he was trying to reward me for having a good attitude. He couldn’t reward me for much else.
We started off flying visual flight rules, which means flying in good weather conditions so the pilot can see the horizon and avoid any obstacles or other aircraft. After twelve flights with an instructor, I was declared “safe for solo.”
The first time a pilot flies solo is a big day. I climbed into the airplane not feeling particularly confident; I hadn’t slept well the night before because I’d been too busy lying in bed thinking about ways I could screw up. The weather was perfect, though, with clear skies and low winds. After a good takeoff and a flight of about an hour and a half, during which I demonstrated my competence by maintaining altitude and airspeed while not crashing into anything, it was time to land. In my mind, I ran through the steps I’d performed the other times I landed. One important thing to remember was to lower the landing gear below a certain speed. I was so intent on all the things I needed to do to land the airplane that I released the landing gear too early, while I was still going fast enough that the aerodynamic forces could damage them, or in the worst case break them off. I knew I had screwed this up the second I did it, but there was no way to undo it. I had to fess up.
I called down to the tower. “Tower, Red Knight Eight Three Two.”
“Go ahead, Red Knight Eight Three Two.”
“I lowered the landing gear too fast, but all the gear are showing down and locked.” I cringed as I waited for the response to come back.
“Okay, circle overhead at fifteen hundred feet until we figure out what we want to do. How much fuel do you have?”
I reported the fuel level, feeling relieved that the controller didn’t seem very alarmed by this turn of events—he sounded just as bored by this exchange as he had been by the rest. The decision was made to have me fly by the tower so the controller could look at my landing gear and confirm that they were down and undamaged. They were, and I was allowed to land.
It’s not unusual for a student pilot to commit this kind of error on a first flight, and I knew I could recover from it. Still, I was disappointed. I’d wanted to absolutely nail everything the first time I soloed.
There is a saying in the Navy about mistakes: “There are those who have and those who will.” It’s easy to look at someone else’s screwup and say, “I never would have done that.” But you could have, and you still may. Bearing this in mind can guard against the kind of cockiness that gets pilots killed, and in retrospect my error overspeeding the landing gear was a good early lesson.