Endurance

8

IN THE SPRING of 1988, I moved to Beeville, Texas, a small dusty town of blowing tumbleweeds halfway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio. Beeville is one of a few centers of the universe for young Navy pilots who want to fly jets, and I was thrilled to be there. I moved into a small ranch-style house on a dirt road across the street from a cattle ranch with two college classmates who were also in flight school, ready to start my training.

I began flying the T-2 Buckeye, a twin-engine jet. The first time I dressed in a G suit and oxygen mask to climb into the cockpit, I felt like I had arrived in the big leagues. The T-2 is a forgiving jet, which is why we trained on it first, but it’s a jet just the same, which is to say challenging and dangerous to fly. I had a lot to learn. A jet has a lot more power than a propeller-driven airplane. It can go faster, it can accelerate quicker, and it is more responsive to the pilot’s touch—all of which make it much easier to “get behind” the airplane (when it feels like the airplane is in control rather than the pilot) and get into trouble.

I had to get used to the feeling of wearing an oxygen mask and G suit and flying while strapped into an ejection seat. The equipment is physically restrictive, and wearing it made me more aware of potential danger. It was more intimidating than I had anticipated. At the same time, in that G suit I tended to hold my head higher, shoulders back, and walk with a spring in my step. I was becoming a tactical jet aviator and I was proud of it. There would be times in the near future, though, when my cockiness would be dealt a blow.

After I had flown that airplane for about a hundred hours, it was time to try landing on an aircraft carrier—a Navy ship with a flight deck to launch and recover airplanes. Because an aircraft carrier’s flight deck is so short, it is equipped with catapults to help the aircraft take off and arresting cables to help them stop. The landings are difficult and dangerous, even under the best of circumstances.

This is the point in training when a lot of pilots wash out. I’d known this from the start, thanks to The Right Stuff. Carrier qualifications would be flown out of Pensacola, so I flew there the day before and met my brother and some of his squadron mates at McGuire’s, the bar with the dollar bills all over the place. Mark was a year ahead of me, since I had repeated my freshman year of college. He had gone to Corpus Christi for flight training and was now finishing up qualifying to land the A-6 Intruder on the carrier. When I met him and his squadron mates at the bar, they were all celebrating because Mark and a few other guys had just qualified for both day and night landings on the ship. Now that he had qualified, Mark would soon be moving on to his fleet squadron, stationed in Japan.

The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is an incredibly dangerous place. It’s not uncommon for people to be killed or seriously injured there, despite the high level of training. People have died walking into spinning propeller blades, getting sucked down a jet intake, or blown over the side by a plane’s exhaust. Much of the operation is done by a bunch of teenagers, and to avoid accidents everyone must know exactly what his or her job is and perform it well. Mine was to land the plane.

The weather was not great, and because of my experience level I wasn’t yet allowed to fly in cloudy conditions. As I got closer to the ship while keeping an eye on the weather, I noticed my roommate in another T-2 close by. I told him that to avoid running into each other as we dodged the clouds, I would join up on his right wing and we would fly formation. This was against the rules—neither of us had sufficient experience flying formation—but it seemed like the safest thing to do. Once we were clear of the bad weather, I backed off and fell in behind him as we approached the ship.

Looking down at the USS Lexington in the water, I couldn’t believe I was going to have to land my jet on that tiny dot. When you land an airplane at an airport, the runway is generally at least 7,000 feet long and 150 feet wide. More important, though, it holds still. The runway on an aircraft carrier is less than 1,000 feet in length and much narrower—and it also pitches, yaws, rolls, and heaves along with the ocean’s swells. The ship is also moving forward in the water, and because the landing area is angled with respect to the ship’s bow, it is constantly moving away from and to the right of the jet trying to land on it.

The sight of the ship was intimidating. As I flew overhead and turned downwind, I didn’t pull back on the stick hard enough, which drove me wide. This made it much more difficult to get lined up properly behind the ship. As I approached for my first landing, the deck actually seemed big compared to my T-2, which was deceiving, because my landings still weren’t very precise. I tried to look at the optical landing system at the left side of the flight deck, a visual aid that lets pilots know how accurate their approach is. I hit the deck and added full power, heading back off into the air. My first attempt hadn’t gone badly, and now I was slightly more confident. I was to do six touch-and-goes—landing and taking off again immediately—before extending the plane’s tailhook to grab the arresting cable on the flight deck. I’d have to make four actual landings in order to qualify, and I hoped to make them all that day. As soon as I made my first arrested landing, I would officially be a carrier aviator, or “tailhooker,” part of a unique fraternity.

I got through all my touch-and-goes with no problem. But when I put the hook down while approaching the ship, the danger of the situation became more real to me and I felt my adrenaline rising—not a good thing. I approached, touched down, and went to full power as we had been trained to do, in case the hook missed the wires—I’d need to be ready to leap back up into the sky to prevent my airplane from sliding off the front end of the aircraft carrier into the water. The feeling when the hook caught the wires and confirmed that I had done everything right would have been fantastic—if I hadn’t forgotten to lock my harness properly. As my airplane was caught on the arresting cable, I was thrown forward and smashed into the instrument panel. The effect of getting into what felt like a car crash at the same time I had made my first heart-stopping carrier landing combined to slow down my reflexes. I was now supposed to reduce the power once I came to a stop, but I was having trouble doing it quickly. One of the aircraft handlers ran out in front of the jet, wildly giving me the “power back” signal.

I did a second arrested landing, then another one. One more and I would have the required four. But then it started getting dark, and we were sent back to the airfield. I expected to go out the next day and do the last required landing for my qualification, but when I saw I wasn’t scheduled to fly, I had to assume I had disqualified. I was upset for a few hours, thinking that I had failed. But it wasn’t long until I learned that I had done well enough on the three landings I completed that I was qualified without the fourth. I was a tailhooker.

SOON, I started flying the A-4 Skyhawk, an attack jet from the Vietnam era that let us learn more of the capabilities we would need for flying in combat: dropping bombs, flying at low altitude in order to evade detection, and air combat maneuvering. Just as in the T-34 and T-2, the pace of the training was aggressive. We were expected to learn quickly and move on to the next challenge. At around this point in the training, the pilots who had previous flight experience started to lose their advantage as the rest of us caught up. To learn how to drop bombs, we flew from Beeville to the Naval Air Facility El Centro in Southern California, two hours from San Diego, which is set up with targets for pilots to practice on. I wasn’t especially gifted at dropping bombs, and nothing I tried to improve my accuracy seemed to work. I got used to taking ribbing from my classmates about it, but I wasn’t the worst; occasionally someone else would drop a practice bomb so far off target it would get close to the spotter sitting in a shack at the edge of the bombing range.

The targets had been given strange names, probably so we could differentiate them from one another on the radio. Some of them I still remember: Shade Tree, Loom Lobby, Inkey Barley, Kitty Baggage. The targets were set up with different run-in lines to let us practice different approaches over different terrain. Each target consisted of concentric rings with a clearly marked center point that we would try to hit with our Mark 76 practice bombs. The A-4 bombsight was a fixed reticle, a light projected onto the windscreen, and using it required that I not only hold that dot on the target but also visually compensate for wind. I released the bomb by pushing a small button on the stick, and I had to account for the time it took the bomb to fall from my altitude. The temptation was to fly lower, decreasing the variables of the fall, but I couldn’t drop so low I would be in danger of crashing.

I took much more naturally to air combat maneuvering, otherwise known as dogfighting. We started off with the basics, flying behind the instructor’s aircraft in a position to be able to fire the gun, then trying to stay there as the instructor’s airplane started moving around unpredictably. This was humbling at first, as the instructor was somehow able to go from being in the defensive position (in front of me) to an offensive position (behind me). I quickly got the hang of it, though, and as the engagements got more complicated, I gained in confidence. Thinking in three dimensions, as you must when dogfighting, came naturally to me. I soon learned the validity of the naval aviator motto: “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.” I learned that if I showed up at the point where our engagement started with more air speed than I was supposed to have, I had a slight advantage.

This was one of my favorite phases of training, not only because I did well at it, but because it was fun. I experienced a freedom and creativity in air-to-air “combat” that I hadn’t found anywhere else. I loved getting into long rollers, maneuvering the aircraft up and down amidst the large billowing cumulus clouds of the early Texas summertime, trying to “kill” my opponent. The last flight in this phase of my training I gave one of the instructors an epic beat-down—at least that’s how it felt to me.

After I successfully carrier qualified in the A-4, I got my aircraft assignment. I was to fly the greatest Navy fighter plane ever, the F-14 Tomcat.

I had been in Beeville for about a year when I got my wings. My parents came for the occasion (my brother was unable to attend because of his own Navy duties). We lined up in our white dress uniforms for the ceremonial pinning on of our wings. My mother pinned my wings on me, a glowing, proud expression on her face. I remembered the day she had graduated from the police academy, when I got to see her lined up with her classmates in uniform, and the impression that sight had made on me. Now things had come full circle.

I WAS ASSIGNED to Fighter Squadron 101, the Grim Reapers, and moved to Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, for initial training on the F-14 Tomcat. My roommate and I drove overnight and I started my training almost immediately. Just as I had done with other aircraft, I progressed quickly from familiarization training to formation training to basic intercepts—finding another airplane and locking onto it with the radar. Eventually I began to learn basic air combat maneuvers, and this was when we began to feel like true fighter pilots. I practiced flying against a similar airplane (another F-14), a dissimilar airplane (like the A-4 or F-16, the Navy’s best approximation of the Soviets’ MiG), and flying against different numbers of enemy planes. All of this training would culminate in taking the airplane to the ship, which would be much harder than it had been in the T-2 and the A-4, since the Tomcat had such poor flying qualities and we had to qualify at night.

There is no training version of the F-14; there is no stick in the backseat, meaning the instructor can’t take over for the student. We did a lot of classroom work first, learning the systems of the airplane, then putting in many hours in the simulator before climbing into the cockpit for the first time.

My first two flights were with an experienced pilot in the backseat, who was memorable for the chew he had in his mouth at all times, including while flying the jet. He must have just swallowed the spit. After that, I flew only with an instructor RIO (radio intercept officer, like Goose in Top Gun). I found it odd to have someone who wasn’t a pilot grading me on my flying skills.

We quickly advanced to learning to fly the airplane in combat: air-to-air gunnery, basic intercepts day and night, single- and multiplane air-to-air engagements and low-altitude flight training. Air-to-air gunnery involved a lot of airplanes flying in a pattern around another airplane, which towed a banner the others were trying to shoot at. These exercises were done using real bullets, which seems like a terrible idea, though I never saw anyone get shot by accident. Each of us had bullets painted with a different color so the instructors would be able to tell who had hit the target how many times. Just as with bombing, I wasn’t particularly good at this, but I enjoyed the competitive aspect.

The night before I tried to land the F-14 for the first time on the USS Enterprise off the coast of Virginia, I lay awake in bed for a long time. Our instructor had told us, “You won’t be able to sleep, so just try to lie still and think about nothing so you get some rest.” This turned out to be good advice and has served me well many times in the years since.

My first arrested landing was a complete disaster. I landed so low that my tailhook hit the back of the ship. That’s called a hook slap, and it’s not good. Basically, if I’d been any lower I would have crashed, and that would have been the end of me and my RIO. While none of my subsequent approaches were as bad as that hook slap, I didn’t get much better. After a while, the instructors had seen enough and sent me home. I had disqualified.

I landed back at Naval Air Station Oceana with a weird feeling of disbelief. After my RIO and I jumped out of the plane, he looked at me with concern. I must have appeared as bewildered as I felt.

“Hey, you’ll figure it out,” he told me with an awkward pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Shake it off.”

I could only mutter in response. There had been so much riding on this, and I had failed. As I went inside and took off my gear piece by piece—helmet, harness, G suit—I couldn’t believe how much I sucked at this. I didn’t know how I could improve if I got another chance, and it was possible I wouldn’t get one.

I thought about what I might do with my life if I couldn’t fly jets in the Navy. I had once picked up an application to the CIA at a college fair. That might be interesting. I thought about the FBI—that is, assuming the Navy would discharge me rather than send me out to fly a heavy airplane, work on a ship, or, worst of all, fly a desk. I had a couple of weeks to think about what my alternatives were while the Navy deliberated over my fate.

In the end, they decided to give me a second chance. I started all over in the carrier qualification phase, where I was paired up with a RIO who had been given the call sign “Scrote” because some unkind squadron mates had decided his face looked like a scrotum. Scrote had a good reputation for helping pilots who were having trouble behind the boat like me.

“You know, you can fly the airplane okay, but you’re not flying it all the time,” he told me. “You’re on altitude and airspeed, but you’re not on top of it.” I had been trained to keep my altitude within a two-hundred-foot range, so I didn’t worry if I was ten feet off the precise altitude, or twenty, or fifty. But Scrote pointed out that this imprecision in the end would lead me far from where I needed to wind up, and fixing it would take a lot of my attention. I had to always be making small, constant corrections if I wanted to make the situation better. He was right. My flying got better, and I’ve been able to apply what I learned from him to a lot of other areas of life as well.

My second attempt to qualify was on a black night with no moonlight. As I got within a couple of miles of the ship, I felt the pressure of what I was about to do. I started peeking out from my scan of the instruments inside the cockpit to see whether I could spot the ship. It was disorienting to see the faint lights of the carrier in an ocean of black. At three-quarters of a mile, the air traffic controller told me to “call the ball,” to start flying the approach visually (rather than using the aircraft’s instruments). My first thought was, Oh, shit, but I flew as I had been trained to, made small corrections to power and lineup. The glow of the flight deck that had looked so dim from the air became brighter until it was an all-encompassing yellow haze, and the next thing I knew I felt the tug of the arresting cable. I felt I had arrived on some alien planet, a new landscape that looked absolutely surreal. I had landed safely and successfully on that dark night.

The day you qualify to land on an aircraft carrier is a big deal, and when you do it at night, it’s an even bigger one. As with many things that were a big deal in my squadron, it was traditional to have a party to celebrate it. This party was at my house, a three-story condo a few blocks from the beach that I shared with two other guys. To prepare for the party, we bought a ton of beer, some chips, and some Jell-O for making Jell-O shots.

My roommate’s girlfriend had brought a friend to the party—Leslie Yandell. I remember seeing Leslie sitting on my couch talking with her friends and drinking a beer. She was cute, with a bright smile and curly blond hair. I decided to talk to her for a bit and found out that she had grown up in Georgia but lived nearby. Her stepfather was a dentist, and she worked as a receptionist in his dental practice. She was easy to talk with, and I liked her laugh, so I asked her out for the next weekend. She said yes.

In the Navy at that time, there was an idea that a single officer generally didn’t advance as quickly as a married one. This wasn’t a written rule—maybe it was even nonsense, but everyone believed it. Being a family man was supposedly an indicator of a certain kind of stability and maturity. I knew that all of the original Mercury astronauts Tom Wolfe wrote about were married, with at least two children. I wanted a family, and now that I was twenty-six and advancing in my career, it was starting to seem like the time was right. My brother was already married, and that added to the feeling that I should be ready for this stage of my life.

Leslie and I dated regularly for most of that year. I enjoyed going to her mother and stepfather’s for dinner every Sunday. (He had been a commander in the Navy Reserve.) I soon became close with Leslie’s brother and sister-in-law as well. It seemed like a logical next step to officially become part of their family. I asked Leslie to marry me over a bottle of wine sitting on a park bench on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay, and she said yes.

IN SEPTEMBER 1990, I was assigned to a real fighter squadron, VF=145, nicknamed The World Famous Pukin’ Dogs. They were based at the hangar right next door at Naval Air Station Oceana, so I didn’t have to move. The squadron was deployed in the Persian Gulf on the USS Eisenhower; since we were in the middle of Operation Desert Shield, I would join them when they returned.

Being in an F-14 squadron in the 1990s was like a cross between playing a professional sport and being in a rock-and-roll band. The movie Top Gun didn’t quite capture the arrogance and bravado of it all. The level of drunkenness and debauchery was unbelievable (and is, thankfully, no longer the standard). There were strippers in the Officers’ Club every Wednesday and Friday night, and it was a big party every time. On my first day, a senior officer in the squadron told me in no uncertain terms, “This squadron is about three things: flying, fighting, and fucking, and not necessarily in that order.” I told him I understood, and I did, at least about flying and fucking (sort of). But I was confused about the fighting part—I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the Soviets or some other enemy combatant, or something else. In fact, it meant going to bars on the weekends with the intention of getting into bar fights. At the annual conference for naval aviators, known as Tailhook, the debauchery reached new levels. For example, some pilots decided to make their adjacent rooms into a suite by using a chainsaw to cut through the wall. Soon after, events at a Tailhook conference would create a sexual harassment scandal that made national news and resulted in a chain reaction of investigations, firings, and policy changes. Though I had never witnessed anything as extreme as the behavior that led to the scandal, I had witnessed behavior that crossed the line, and I always wondered how this could be acceptable in the military. I didn’t participate in it, but I hadn’t done anything to try to stop it, either. In the long term, the policy changes have been for the better. As a result of the shake-ups caused by the scandal, women were soon allowed to fly in combat for the first time. This created a much more even playing field and advanced the careers of a few talented women pilots, some of whom would later become my astronaut colleagues. Over the course of twenty years, many more would follow.

I continued to train over the course of the next year and flew to other air stations in Key West and Nevada to practice and continue acquiring new skills. I was with the squadron when it left for its next cruise on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (we called it Ike for short), in September 1991. We were headed to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the fjords of Norway. I would be gone for six months, during which I would fly the F-14 nearly every other day, on combat air patrol. The Soviet Union fell apart while we were at sea, and we didn’t know yet what that would mean.

One black night only a few weeks into the cruise, my RIO Ward Carroll (whom we called Mooch) and I launched in the Arabian Sea without a hitch and took up our combat air patrol position over the carrier. Our official duty was to protect our aircraft carrier’s battle group from airborne threats. In other words, we were there to shoot down any bombers or fighters that might be getting anywhere near us. We also used this time to do some training. When our hour-and-a-half sortie was over and it was time to head back, I heard Mooch say, “There’s land between us and the ship.”

“Land?”

I was pretty sure we hadn’t flown over any land. There wasn’t any bad weather forecast for that day, but the horizon had completely disappeared. Then I realized that the “land” we were seeing on our radar was sand—a haboob in Arabic, a giant sandstorm. It had completely engulfed the region, and it was likely going to make it a very tough night behind the boat.

As we got closer to the ship and leveled off to start our final approach, visibility was awful. I heard the air traffic controller say, “Salty Dog One Oh Three, three-quarters of a mile, call the ball.” He wanted me to confirm I could see the visual landing aids that would allow me to line up for landing. I looked outside and saw absolutely nothing. Then I heard the landing signal officer, who stands on the back of the ship to guide us in, say, “Paddles contact, keep it coming,” meaning he could see us even if we couldn’t see him. We continued our descent toward the ship.

When we were less than a quarter mile away, I could finally see the carrier. At 150 miles per hour, I had about five seconds to make corrections to line up the airplane with the centerline and adjust our altitude and speed to land in the right spot on the flight deck, right before the third arresting cable. We touched down. As usual, I went to full power, always necessary in case the landing wasn’t successful and I would have to take off again instantly. I expected to feel the comforting pull of the arresting wire bringing us to a stop—but it never came.

“Bolter, bolter, bolter…hook skip,” called the landing signal officer, the LSO. To bolter means to fail to catch the arresting wire with the airplane’s tailhook. We had to immediately accelerate at full throttle in order to take off again and circle around for another attempt. Off we went back into the sandy darkness of the sky. I was frustrated because I hadn’t done anything wrong—I was just unlucky. The hook had skipped over the wires. We came in again, only to experience another bolter. We came around again. Another bolter. We came around again. Now we got a wave-off, meaning our approach was so ugly they wouldn’t let me try to land for fear I’d crash. Now I was seriously getting angry with myself and nervous.

The visibility was not improving, and we were running out of gas. We went around a number of times more, which only resulted in more bolters—wave-offs because we were too close to the airplane in front of us and wave-offs for performance (in other words, shitty flying on my part). Eventually we were “trick or treat,” which means we either had to land this time or go get more gas. I boltered again. We were off to the tanker.

The tanker was an A-6 Intruder configured with external fuel tanks that circles overhead at three thousand feet, ready to refuel airplanes. Finding the tanker was a challenge in itself, because we were still engulfed in the sandstorm. We did a radar-only rendezvous, which was very risky, with Mooch calling out range, bearing, and closure as we approached. Once I was within twenty-five feet or so, I was able to see the tanker and join up on its wing. I extended my refueling probe, but the bumpiness of the air and the fact that I had gone around so many times in attempts to land on the ship had me thoroughly unsettled. It took me multiple attempts to make contact, during which I tried not to think about what would happen if we couldn’t refuel: we would have to eject or take our chances with the barricade (a net rigged on the deck to catch the airplane), both very dangerous. Once I finally did make contact with the tanker and refueled, I headed back toward the ship.

Then I boltered, and boltered again. I am going to do this for the rest of my life, I thought. Eventually I put the airplane down on the deck in the right spot and felt the relief of the arresting cable’s tug as we came to an abrupt stop. As I taxied forward to be chained down, I noticed that my right leg was shaking uncontrollably from the adrenaline surging through my system after all those attempts and close calls. Mooch and I made our way off the flight deck, down the dimly lit corridors smelling of jet fuel, down the ladder, and into our brightly lit ready room. The pilots burst into applause when we walked in. They’d been watching our misadventures on a monitor the whole time.

“Welcome back to Ike. We never thought we were going to see you fellas again.”

It had been my first real “night in the barrel,” and I had survived it. (There’s an expression among naval aviators based on a bawdy old joke about a pilot finding sexual relief via a barrel, only to discover that his turn in the barrel was coming up.)

I laughed and accepted their congratulations.

“There are those who have,” I said, “and those who will.”

MY SECOND MEMORABLE bad night flying was in the Persian Gulf, on a night that was brilliantly clear at first. The moon was bright, what we called a commander’s moon because the air wing’s commanding officers would take advantage of it to log their night landings under easier conditions. My RIO Chuck Woodard (call sign “Gunny”) and I launched that night to protect Ike and its battlegroup from the Iranian air force. After about an hour, the carrier’s air traffic control told us we could return to the ship early. We had plenty of fuel, since we were coming back sooner than planned, so for fun, and to expedite our return, I lit the afterburner and we went supersonic. We were approaching the marshal point, an imaginary point twenty miles behind the ship where supersonic speed was not recommended. Normally I wouldn’t have been going that fast, but it was such a clear night it seemed safe.

I immediately sensed I was getting behind the airplane. Even though it was clear at altitude, a layer of fog had rolled in below us, and by the time we descended through five thousand feet above the water, I was having a hard time keeping up. I started feeling rattled, sweating with my heart pounding. I was having a “helmet fire.” Everything was happening too fast. I felt completely overwhelmed.

My altimeter alarm went off to warn me we were passing below five thousand feet; then it went off again to warn me we were getting even lower. It was a distraction, so I made the almost-fatal error of turning it off.

The next thing I heard was Gunny shouting, “Pull up!” Without thinking, I immediately pulled back hard on the stick, simultaneously looking over at the altimeter and vertical speed indicator. We were at eight hundred feet, dropping at four thousand feet per minute. About twelve seconds later, we would have flown into the water, becoming one of the many planes that never return to the ship. No one would have had a clue as to what had gone wrong.

With much difficulty, Gunny and I were able to gather our wits and land safely. We proceeded to my stateroom, where we cracked open a bottle of whiskey to calm our nerves and celebrate cheating death.

Leslie met me when I returned from that cruise, and I was thrilled to see her. While I had been gone, I had been deprived of so many things—the people I cared about, beer, decent food, privacy—and it was great to get them all back again. I would have the chance to experience that kind of deprivation again.

MY WEDDING DATE WAS set for April 25, 1992, a month after I returned from the cruise. That morning when I got up and started going through the process of getting ready—taking a shower, shaving, packing my bag for the honeymoon—a strange feeling of dread loomed over me. I kept poking at it in my mind, the way your tongue keeps going to a sore tooth. This was supposed to be as happy a day as any, like the day I landed on the aircraft carrier, or the day I got my wings, or the day I graduated from college. But all I felt was this strange foreboding.

All of a sudden, as I was knotting my tie, I realized I didn’t want to get married.

I cared for Leslie and enjoyed her company. But if I was being honest with myself, I wasn’t marrying her because I had been moved to in my heart. I thought about the six groomsmen who were prepared to stand up with me. They were all Navy men, some from my squadron who I hadn’t even known for very long. The people I had grown up with and been through trials with and who had been there for me for many years, were coming to the wedding, but they weren’t in the wedding party. Without being aware of it, I had created a Navy event rather than a wedding.

I felt I had no choice but to go through with it. I wasn’t going to disappoint Leslie and her family, or my own family. Mark was coming all the way from Japan, and I thought about how bewildered and annoyed he would be if he arrived to learn the wedding had been called off. By the time I was dancing with Leslie at our reception, I had managed to put all these thoughts out of my mind. Somehow it didn’t feel like a permanent mistake I was making. I was only twenty-eight. I would try to make this work, but if I couldn’t, I figured, I could get divorced.

I APPLIED TO U.S. Navy test pilot school in Patuxent River, Maryland, after two and a half years in the Pukin’ Dogs. Usually pilots serve in a fleet squadron for four years before applying, so I didn’t think I would be accepted, but I wanted to let the selection board see that my interest was serious and to familiarize myself with the application process. To my surprise, I was selected, and even better, my brother had been selected too, so we would be classmates. We started in July 1993. My biggest concern wasn’t my flying, which I had become pretty confident about, but the fact that I had almost never used a personal computer. I knew I would have to get comfortable with technology, so I asked a squadron mate to help me buy one and teach me how to use it.

Leslie and I headed to Patuxent River (everyone calls it Pax River for short), only a few hours from Virginia Beach. This would be the first time in my career that I spent much time with members of the other military services. The school had U.S. Air Force pilots, Marine pilots, Army pilots; there was an Australian F-111 pilot and an Israeli helicopter pilot. Some of the people in my class would later become astronaut colleagues: Lisa Nowak, Steve Frick, Al Drew, and of course Mark. Soon after we arrived, the senior class threw a party for us, called a “You’ll Be Sorry” party, warning us that we would be sorry for deciding to become test pilots because the training was so hard.

I didn’t find the academic work particularly grueling, though I had to review some calculus and physics. We learned about aircraft performance, flying qualities, flight control systems, and weapons systems of the aircraft we might be testing. We also spent time familiarizing ourselves with the airplanes we would fly regularly during training. For the fixed-wing pilots like me, that meant the T-2 again, as well as the Navy version of the T-38, a much more challenging airplane. Friday nights were spent at the BOQ bar or at the home of one of my classmates. The weekends we spent doing homework.

As we got checked out in the T-38, I found landing particularly challenging, because I had gotten out of the habit of flaring an airplane—pulling back on the stick as you get closer to the ground to arrest the rate of descent prior to touchdown. When we land on a carrier we approach and land with a constant rate of descent. We also started flying other airplanes, generally with instructors or classmates who were checked out in them. This was all meant to expand our flight experience base. We also learned to write technical reports, a large part of the program. Experimenting and collecting data on a specific aspect of the airplane, then writing a detailed report on the findings, take more of a test pilot’s time than actually flying airplanes.

After graduating from test pilot school in July 1994, I moved to the other side of the airfield to the Strike Aircraft Test Directorate, the Navy’s test squadron for high-performance jet airplanes, located on the same base. My fighter squadron was a great fraternity, but in some ways the test pilot community was better because of its diversity. There were civilians (a group of people I hadn’t previously worked with much in the military), people from different countries, different cultures, ethnicities, sexual orientations, genders, and backgrounds. I was surprised to find that diverse teams were stronger teams, each person bringing his or her own strengths and perspectives to our shared mission.

MY DAUGHTER Samantha was born on October 9, 1994, in Pax River. Leslie had become more fragile and sensitive during her pregnancy, but once Samantha was born, Leslie’s life revolved around her. As a mother, she was doting and full of praise. Samantha was a jolly kid, outgoing and infectiously happy.

Mark lived not far from us, and he and his wife came over often, or we would go to their home. I was part of a close-knit group of test pilots and flight test engineers, and we all enjoyed having one another over on the weekends. Leslie and I both liked having people around, which kept us from having to spend as much time alone together. My colleagues and friends all liked her, and so did their spouses. So for a while, we got along. Thanksgivings and Christmases with her family or mine were always great. I was doing the work I wanted to do and I had a family. It seemed like this was going to be my life.

IN MY ROLE as test pilot I was assigned to assist in the investigation of an accident involving an F-14 that had crashed on approach to the USS Abraham Lincoln in a routine training mission. Lost in the accident was Kara Hultgreen, a pilot I had overlapped with in flight school. I didn’t get to know her well in Beeville, but since she was one of very few women there, she was hard to miss. Shortly after we got our wings, when the Navy had just opened up combat positions to women pilots, Kara had become the first woman to qualify in the F-14. Her achievement drew a lot of attention, so it was especially distressing that she lost her life soon after, on October 25, 1994.

A video of the crash, shot from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier, showed the airplane overshooting the centerline. When Kara turned the airplane too tightly, the airflow into the left-hand engine was disturbed, causing a compressor stall—a known issue with the F-14A. (The F-14 had horrendous flying qualities in general, and the scene in Top Gun where Goose smashes into the canopy is one of the more accurate moments in that movie.) When Kara engaged the afterburner on the remaining engine, the rapid thrust asymmetry caused her to lose control of the aircraft. Her RIO was able to eject them both and he escaped safely, but the pilot gets ejected 0.4 seconds later, by which point the cockpit was facing the ocean. She impacted the water before her parachute opened and was killed instantly.

A new digital flight control system was being designed for the F-14 to prevent upright flat spins and crashes like Kara’s. The system had taken longer to roll out than anticipated and was plagued by technical delays and cost overruns. Once our investigation of Kara’s crash reached the conclusion that the new digital flight control system would likely have saved her life, the project was expedited. Soon it was ready to be tested.

Normally, first flights of new aircraft (or significant modifications to existing ones) are flown by test pilots working for the companies that manufacture them—in this case, Northrop Grumman. But because I had flown the Tomcat more frequently in the last year than anyone else, despite being relatively junior, I was chosen by our squadron commander—to everyone’s surprise, including mine—to fly the first flight. The day before I was scheduled to fly, when I got into the cockpit to check out the airplane’s systems, I was testing the trim button on the stick and discovered that using the button caused the flight control surface to move in the wrong direction. The lead flight test engineer, Paul Conigliaro, and I were aghast. I was supposed to take this thing into the sky the next day, and the flight control software was completely screwed up. To this day, Paul remembers my first words to the contractor responsible for the new system: “I can’t tell you how much this concerns me.”

When we checked the airplane again in the morning, it had been repaired—it turned out two wires had been crossed. My RIO, Bill “Smoke” Mnich, and I rolled down the runway that morning not knowing for sure whether this airplane would leave the ground in a controlled manner. At 125 knots, I slowly pulled back the stick and we were airborne. Soon after, we were raising the landing gear and flaps. I pulled the throttles back from full afterburner and headed out over the Chesapeake Bay to begin our maneuvers. After an hour and a half of flying very slowly and methodically, expanding the flight envelope of the new system step by step, we were safely back on deck.

The F-14 was retired in 2006, and airplanes with this system never experienced another flat spin or aircraft carrier landing fatality.