Endurance

6

AT FIVE in the morning, when it was still fully dark, I slipped into the B Company dorm. I quietly opened the door of a room on the third floor, where two eighteen-year-old boys, Maritime freshmen, were sleeping soundly. The room smelled of unwashed socks and sweat. I stood over the boy on the left side, the bed I had slept in myself only two years earlier. On the other side of the room, another indoctrination officer stood over the bed where Bob Kelman had slept. When I gave the signal, we both started banging the garbage pail lids together while screaming, “Wake up, MUGs! Wake up, you lazy bastards!” at the top of our lungs.

I had been appointed the chief indoctrination officer for the class, in charge of supervising all those running the grueling period of drills and training the incoming freshmen. It was a demanding job but a huge honor—it meant I had done exceptionally well and that my superiors saw leadership potential in me. I was determined to prove them right. This was my first real opportunity to be a leader.

I had 250 new MUGs (Midshipmen Under Guidance) to train. I was responsible for teaching them the traditions and expectations of Maritime, as well as helping them adjust to life away from home. As the final authority on discipline, I had decided that I wanted to be the kind of leader who was firm but fair. I wanted to hold everyone to the same high standard, but I also wanted to approach each situation with an open mind and a willingness to listen to others’ points of view.

I once received an anonymous note from a MUG warning me not to get too close to the ship’s railing at night on our next cruise—a threat to push me overboard. This was an early lesson that a leader can’t always please everyone. I can understand why this MUG and the others I dealt with found the rules burdensome. But I had come to believe that shined shoes and polished belt buckles, however insignificant they might seem, helped us to learn the attention to detail required to safely and effectively operate at sea.

Each summer, we took the Empire State V to new ports, and immediately after I returned from each of those cruises I would then leave for my Navy cruise. I spent one summer doing a program called CORTRAMID (Career Orientation and Training for Midshipmen). We spent a week each in the surface, submarine, and aviation communities as well as a week with the Marine Corps. The idea was to give us some exposure to the different options for Navy service. With the Marine Corps, I observed explosives demonstrations and ran around in the woods with an M16 at night. With the aviators I flew in an E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, and with the Navy SEALs I got to do their grueling obstacle course. I spent three days on a submarine.

In my senior year I was named the battalion commander of my Navy ROTC unit, another leadership role. By that time, I was taking harder classes than ever, mostly electrical engineering. I now knew how to study and took pride in it, actually enjoyed it. I was learning circuit design, network analysis, and other advanced engineering courses. I would have liked to change my major to physics if that had been an option at Maritime. I’ve sometimes thought if I were ever to become a college professor, I would want to teach first-year physics or calculus. Those foundation classes are make-or-break for students, and I think it would be rewarding to give young people the keys to learning hard things that I had figured out for myself.

It was still my goal to become a Navy pilot, specifically to fly jets off an aircraft carrier. In college, I had been doing whatever I could to improve my chances, including caring for my vision. A lot of my friends who hoped to become pilots talked about how to maintain their vision, and we all became a bit obsessed. Every prospective pilot knew some poor bastard who had worked all his life toward becoming a Navy pilot only to be rejected for having vision slightly less than 20/20. I was concerned about eyestrain and made sure to always have a bright light to read by. In retrospect, there was probably nothing I could have done to have much effect.

Early in my senior year, I took a standardized test called the Aviation Qualification Test/Flight Aptitude Rating. The qualification test was something like an IQ test, and the flight aptitude part consisted of mechanically oriented puzzles and a visual logic section that showed illustrations of views of the horizon from a plane’s cockpit that we had to match with the correct airplane orientation.

I knew how important this test would be to my future, so I worked hard to prepare for it. There weren’t study guides, so I made my own, drawing pictures of airplanes and what the view would look like from the cockpit. The day of the exam, I left the classroom feeling like I had done as well as I possibly could. I wouldn’t know for weeks what my results were, and then it would be months after that before I would learn to what part of the Navy I would be assigned. Even if I did well, there was still no guarantee that I would be chosen for aviation, much less that I would go on to fly jets.

ONE COLD DAY in January, my roommate George Lang and I were sitting in our room just after lunch, watching Star Trek on the tiny color box TV we kept next to the fish tank in our room. A news anchor broke into the show to report that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded seventy-three seconds after launch. We watched the shuttle blow up on the screen over and over, just after the ground gave the call “go at throttle up.” (At the time I had no idea what this phrase meant; much later I would learn to respond to it myself, confirming the communications between the ground and the shuttle.) It would be weeks after the accident before the theory emerged that the unusually cold weather in Florida had caused a rubber O-ring in one of the solid rocket boosters to fail.

“You still want to do it?” George asked me after a few hours of watching nonstop.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The shuttle,” George said. “You still want to fly on it?”

“Absolutely,” I said, and I meant it. My determination to fly difficult aircraft had only grown stronger as I had learned more about aviation, and the space shuttle was the most difficult aircraft (and spacecraft) of all. The Challenger disaster had made clear that spaceflight was dangerous, but I already knew that. I felt confident that NASA would find the cause of the explosion, that it would be fixed, and that the space shuttle would be a better vehicle as a result. It sounds strange, but seeing the risk involved only made the prospect of flying in space more appealing.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA—at least for a while.

Years later, one of the first briefings I got as a new astronaut was about the Challenger disaster. Hoot Gibson, who was in the same class as three of the Challenger crew, detailed exactly what had gone wrong that January day. He also told us what the crew likely experienced in the last minutes of their lives. He wanted us to understand the risks we would be running if we flew in space. We took his words seriously, but no one dropped out after that briefing.

GRADUATING FROM MARITIME, in 1987, made me pause and reflect. My admission had been make-or-break for me. I would never forget that. What I had learned there—in the classroom, on the ship, from my peers, from my mentors—had been life changing. I was a completely different person from the confused kid who had entered through those gates four years earlier. I felt a debt of gratitude to the school for everything it had done for me, and I was nostalgic about leaving a place where I had so many fond memories. Over the years, I’ve tried to stay connected to the school, and in the time since I graduated their prestige has grown—when financial magazines rank colleges whose graduates have the highest salaries, SUNY Maritime is almost always up there with Harvard and MIT, sometimes at the very top.

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.

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.”

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.

There was a T-34 simulator, and some of our graded flights were “flown” in the simulator rather than in the airplane. We could sign up for practice time in the simulators, and whenever the new schedule went up, I was first in line to book as much time as I was allowed. I did extremely well on all my graded simulator flights, and since the instructors had to help us set up the simulator for the practice sessions, it didn’t hurt that I was making an impression on them as a motivated student.

Once I had soloed a few times, I started learning aerobatics. I went out with an instructor again, listening while he explained the maneuver he was about to demonstrate. I found I had a real knack for it, and I enjoyed this part of the training—the sense of freedom it gave me—more than anything else. Flying around the big, puffy clouds, rolling the airplane upside down and around at will, feeling the force of acceleration pushing me down into my seat—I never felt like I was disoriented or sick, which happened to some of the other newbie pilots. It felt great to find an aspect of flying I was good at. As I finished up that part of the syllabus I couldn’t wait to try aerobatics in a more powerful plane, and I couldn’t wait to fly that way while simultaneously pretending to shoot another airplane out of the sky.

Some people washed out even before they got the chance to fly solo: they couldn’t pass the swim requirements, couldn’t pass the survival training, or failed their safe-for-solo check flight. The program wasn’t meant to weed people out—the Navy had already invested a lot in each of us, and they wanted us to succeed—at the same time, they needed to be sure we wouldn’t endanger ourselves or others. Only a small percentage of those who start flight school wind up being assigned to a jet squadron, and I had done everything I could to establish a place among them.

WE KNEW THAT our next assignments would be announced on an upcoming Friday. That day, we waited in the hallway to learn our fate. I didn’t feel as nervous as some of my classmates seemed to be. I knew I had made every effort and held nothing back, working as hard as I could at the things I could control and ignoring what I couldn’t. I was ready for whatever was to come.

Finally a secretary tacked a simple sheet of paper to the bulletin board. We all crowded around. It had ten names on it in alphabetical order, and next to each one an assignment. Next to KELLY, SCOTT I found the words BEEVILLE NAVAL AIR STATION. I had done it. I was one of two guys in my group to make it to jets. I felt for my friends who didn’t, but I was elated knowing that my dream was still alive.