Highest Duty

7. LONG-TERM OPTIMIST, SHORT-TERM REALIST

LIKE MY FATHER, I was a military officer who never saw combat. When each of us joined the service, we knew that we might find our lives threatened in war. We soberly accepted that commitment to duty, but neither of us had any visions of martial glory. My father felt honored to serve his country as a naval officer. I saw my years of peacetime Air Force service as a high calling, because every day of training and practice better prepared me to defend my country if called upon.

After spending years readying for tasks they never had to carry out for real, many military men are left to wonder how they would have fared in combat. I understand that, yet I don’t feel incomplete because I never saw wartime service. The fighters that I flew were designed to destroy those who would do us harm. I’m glad that I never had to inflict grievous damage on someone else, or to have it inflicted on me.

But I’ll never fully know how I would have performed under the pressures of battle. Yes, I faced certain risks on almost every flight I flew as a fighter pilot; it’s a dangerous job, even during training missions. Still, over the years, like many who serve in times of peace, I have asked myself questions: If ever faced with the ultimate challenge, a life-or-death moment in battle, would I have been able to measure up? Would I have been strong enough, brave enough, and smart enough to endure the demands of such a test? Would I be able to preserve the safety of those under my command?

My sense is, I would have performed as I was trained. I don’t think I’d have panicked or made a grave mistake. But I have accepted the fact that I will never know for sure.

I expected that my commercial airline career would follow a similar pattern. I would take off and land again and again without incident. Yes, airline pilots are trained for emergencies—we practice in flight simulators—and we know the risks, low as they are. The good news is that commercial aviation has made such great strides and is so reliable that it is now possible for an airline pilot to go his entire career without ever experiencing a failure of even a single engine. But one of the challenges of the airline piloting profession is to avoid complacency, to always be prepared for whatever may come while never knowing when or even if you’ll face an ultimate challenge.

Because a commercial career can feel routine, I truly didn’t think I’d face a situation as dire as Flight 1549. On reflection, however, I realize this: Though I never saw battle, I spent years training hard, paying close attention, demanding a great deal of myself, and maintaining a constant readiness. I survived my own close calls and carefully observed the fatal mistakes made by other pilots. That preparation did not go to waste. At age fifty-seven, I was able to call upon these earlier lessons, and in doing so, answer the questions I’d had about myself.

I GRADUATED from the Air Force Academy on June 6, 1973, and within a few weeks, I enrolled in the summer term at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, getting my master-of-science degree in industrial psychology (human factors). It’s a discipline focused on designing machines that take into account human abilities as well as human limitations. How do humans act and react? What can humans do and what can’t they do? How should machines be designed so people can use them more effectively?

It was a cooperative master’s program designed to fast-track academy graduates, allowing us to get a graduate degree from a civilian school very quickly, without delaying entry into flight school, which was the next step for many Air Force officers. I had taken graduate-level courses my senior year at the academy, so once the credits were transferred to Purdue, it took me just six more months to get my master’s.

At Purdue, I studied how machines and systems should be designed. How do engineers create cockpit configurations and instrument-panel layouts, taking into account where pilots might place their hands, or where eyes might focus, or what items might be a distraction? I believed learning these things could have applications for me down the road, and I was right. It was helpful to get an academic and scientific perspective on the underlying reasons for procedural requirements in flight. When you’re learning how to be a pilot, you’re often taught the correct procedures to follow, but not always why those procedures are important. In later years, as I focused on airline safety issues, I realized how much my formal education allowed me to view the world in ways that helped me set priorities, so I understood the why as well as the how.

After my six months in Indiana, the Air Force sent me to Columbus, Mississippi, for a year of what is called UPT—Undergraduate Pilot Training. It was a mix of classroom instruction about flying, flight simulator training, and a total of two hundred hours in the air. At first I got to fly the Cessna T-37, which is a basic twin-engine, two-seat trainer aircraft used by the Air Force. It was twenty-nine feet long with a maximum speed of 425 miles per hour. Eventually, I graduated to the Northrop T-38 Talon, which was the world’s first supersonic jet trainer. It could reach a maximum speed of over 800 miles an hour, which is more than Mach 1.0.

I’d come a long way from the days of slowly circling Mr. Cook’s field in his Aeronca 7DC propeller plane, barely topping a hundred miles an hour. Now I was being taught skills that would allow me to fly at high speeds in formation, my wings just feet away from the jets on either side of me. And I was sitting on an ejection seat, ready to bail out if my jet became unflyable.

I was twenty-three years old then and my two instructors in the T-37 and then the T-38, both first lieutenants, were a few years older. They were from Massachusetts and Colorado, and they had something wonderful in common: They weren’t just teaching me because they were required to do so. “I want you to succeed,” they each told me, and they offered every bit of guidance they could give me.

After Mississippi, the Air Force sent me to Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a base with a storied history. During World War II, it had served as the training ground for men flying Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, which was the most common heavy bomber used by Allied forces.

The B-24 was designed to have a long range, and more than eighteen thousand of them were manufactured quickly during the war. But flight crews found that the plane was too easily damaged in battle, and given a design that placed fuel tanks in the upper fuselage, it was too likely to catch on fire. The B-24s delivered their payloads—each plane could hold eight thousand pounds of bombs—but a lot of lives were sacrificed in order to do so. Many of those lost men passed through Holloman before me.

Holloman was known for other historical achievements, too. On August 16, 1960, Captain Joseph Kittinger Jr. took an open balloon gondola to 102,800 feet to test the feasibility of high-altitude bailouts. He stepped out of the balloon over Holloman and fell for four minutes and thirty-six seconds, at a velocity of 614 miles an hour, the longest free fall a human being had ever endured. His right glove malfunctioned, and his hand swelled to twice its normal size, but he survived and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Like Holloman, every base where I was stationed had a history that inspired me. It was almost as if you could feel the presence of heroes in the winds over the runways.

I was at Holloman for “FLIT,” which stood for “fighter lead-in training.” We worked on basic air combat maneuvers, tactics, and flying formation in the T-38. I knew I wasn’t a true fighter pilot yet, but training at Holloman, I knew I was going to be. I had a lot to learn, but I had the confidence that I could do it.

You couldn’t avoid the feeling that you were in elite company. There had been thirty-five men in my pilot training class in Mississippi. Many of them wanted to fly fighters. Just two of us were chosen to do it. So I took seriously that my superiors had faith in me, and I worked hard at Holloman to live up to their expectations.

Next stop was a ten-month stint at Luke Air Force Base near Glendale, Arizona, where I checked out on the F-4 Phantom II. The supersonic jet, which can fire radar-guided missiles beyond visual range, flies at a maximum speed of over 1,400 miles an hour, or Mach 2.0. Unlike many fighters, the F-4 was a two-seat airplane. The pilot sat in the front seat and a specially trained navigator called a Weapons Systems Officer (WSO) sat in the back seat.

We went through the F-4 system by system—electrical, hydraulics, fuel, engines, flight controls, weapons, everything. We looked at each system individually and how they worked together as a whole.

My fellow pilots and WSOs and I learned not just how to fly the F-4—that was the easy part—but how to use it as a weapon. We dropped practice bombs. We engaged in air-to-air combat training. We practiced flying in tactical formation. We also learned to work closely with our WSOs as an effective team.

Day after day, we learned the intricacies of the machine, and learned about our abilities or inabilities to master it. And equally important, we learned a great deal about one another.

This kind of flying was very demanding and exciting at the same time. So much of what we had to do in the cockpit was manual. We didn’t have the automation that exists today to help us figure out things. Unlike those who pilot current fighters, with complex computerized systems, we had to do most everything visually. Today, computerization enables flight crews to release bombs that hit targets with pinpoint accuracy. In the older fighters that I flew, you had to look out the window and make estimations in your head. Before you flew, you’d go over the tabulations of numbers, determining when you’d have to release a bomb given a certain dive angle, speed, and altitude over the target. If you were slightly shallow or steep in the dive angle, the bomb would go short or long. In a similar fashion, the speed at release and the altitude at release also affected whether the bomb would go short or long. You also had to allow for crosswinds when you flew over the target. Modern airplanes provide pilots with far more guidance about how to do all these things precisely.

In 1976 and early 1977, I spent fourteen more months flying the F-4 while stationed at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, seventy miles northeast of London. It was my first assignment as an operational fighter pilot.

JIM LESLIE, now a captain with Southwest Airlines, was a contemporary of mine in the Air Force. We arrived at Lakenheath within a few days of each other back in 1976, and we looked a lot alike. We were both skinny, six-foot-two blond-haired guys with mustaches. When we showed up together, people would get us mixed up. Some didn’t even realize we were two separate guys until they saw us in the same room.

A lot of the older pilots knew one of us was named Sully, but they weren’t sure at first which one of us it was. “Hey Sully!” they’d say, and after a while, Jim got so used to being addressed that way that he’d turn around, too. When I landed Flight 1549 in the Hudson, I’m guessing there were some old fliers from the Lakenheath days who pictured Jim as the “Sully” at the controls.

By his own admission, Jim was a bit of a hot dog in the skies. I had the predictable call sign of “Sully.” His call sign was “Hollywood,” and he wore fancy sunglasses and unauthorized boots that were part cloth, part leather. He was a bit flamboyant, but he was also smart and observant. He’d put things in perspective. As he liked to say it: “It’s impossible to know every last bit of technical stuff about how to fly fighter planes, but we ought to know as much as we can because we need to be the go-to guys.”

After Lakenheath, I did a three-year stint at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where I rose to the rank of captain. Jim was stationed there, too.

He and I became close, though we took different approaches as aviators. He took pride in being a bit of a loose cannon. I considered myself more disciplined. When we were dogfighting, there were rules for how far away you had to be from another jet when you passed it head-on. If the instructions were that we get no closer than a thousand feet, Jim would try five hundred feet. “I know I can do it,” he’d say, and he was right. “Sully, you can do it, too.” I knew I could, but I knew that if I did, I’d be shaving the margins we needed in order to avoid the unexpected, when a slight misperception or misjudgment could put two airplanes too close.

I respected Jim. He knew he wasn’t really putting anyone in danger, because he knew his own skills. But this was training, not combat. I was more judicious in my use of aggressiveness. There would be times in my career, including my years as a commercial airline pilot, when it would be useful and appropriate to use a bit of aggression.

The bonds among pilots were paramount. At each base where I was stationed, we were reminded again and again how vital it was to know about the dangers of complacency, to have as much knowledge as possible about the particular plane you were flying, to be aware of every aspect of what you were doing. Being a fighter pilot involved risk—we all knew that—and some accidents happened owing to circumstances beyond a pilot’s control. But with diligence, preparation, judgment, and skill, you could minimize your risks. And we needed one another to do that.

Fighter pilots are a close-knit community in part because it’s necessary for everyone’s survival. We had to learn to take criticism and also how to give criticism when needed. If a guy makes a mistake one day, you can’t ignore it and let it pass. You don’t want him making the same mistake the next time he flies with you. You’ve got to tell him. Your life, and the lives of others, depend on it.

I’m guessing I met five hundred pilots and WSOs in the course of my military career. We lost twelve of them in training accidents. I grieved for my lost comrades, but I tried to learn all I could about each one of their accidents. I knew that the safety of those of us still flying would depend on our understanding of circumstances when some didn’t make it, and our internalizing the vital lessons each of them could leave as a kind of legacy to us, the living.

AMERICA LABELED Charles Lindbergh as “Lucky Lindy,” but he knew better. I’ve read We, his 1927 book about his famous transatlantic trip. In it, he made clear that his success was due almost entirely to preparation, not luck, or as I prefer to call it, circumstance. “Prepared Lindy” wouldn’t have had the same magic as a nickname, but his views of pilot preparation have long resonated with me.

Whenever a fellow airman lost his life during my military career, I tried to think of how I might have reacted, and what steps I might have taken. Could I have survived?

At Nellis, each pilot and his WSO were assigned a particular airplane. We had our names stenciled on the canopy rails.

At one point, I was on temporary duty (TDY) at Eglin Air Force Base in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. I was there to have a rare opportunity to fire an air-to-air missile at a remotely controlled target drone over the Gulf of Mexico.

One morning while I was in Florida, another crew was scheduled to fly my plane, an F-4, back at Nellis. The F-4 had a nosewheel steering system that was controlled electrically and powered hydraulically. There was an electrical connector that had wires to connect the cockpit control with the nosewheel. Once in a while, moisture would get into the connector. If there was contamination there, it would short out the connector pins. So the nosewheel could end up turning without a command from the pilot. We’d have to write it up in the aircraft maintenance log and the technicians would check it and repair it as necessary. Sometimes, the connector simply needed to be dried out so it would work properly.

This pilot was set to take my plane for a training flight that morning. Taxiing to the runway, he noticed that the nosewheel steering was not working properly. He taxied back to the ramp, shut the airplane down, and reported the discrepancy in the maintenance log. The maintenance crew took corrective action and signed it off.

Later that day, that same F-4 was scheduled for a flight, including a formation takeoff, in which pilots in two jets were going to power up, release their brakes, and then take off in formation, matching each other exactly in acceleration.

One of the pilots in the formation was at the controls of the F-4 that had been assigned to me, the one which had aborted earlier in the day. After he started his takeoff, the nosewheel turned sharply to the left without him commanding it to do so. It took him into a ditch beside the runway, collapsing the landing gear and rupturing one of the external fuel tanks.

He and his WSO were sitting in the damaged airplane, deciding how to extricate themselves, when the leaking fuel caught on fire, and they were engulfed in a ball of flames.

I wonder if I had been the next pilot to fly that plane, would I have read the maintenance record, seen how the nosewheel issue had been addressed, and known to be especially watchful of any evidence that it would fail again?

That pilot and WSO were a good crew. But at their funerals, I was reminded of how a crew must be diligent on every front on every flight.

This was graphically illustrated in my own close calls, too.

One time at Nellis, I was in an F-4, on a high-speed, low-level flight. The goal was to fly as low as possible, which is what I’d need to do if I ever had to fly below enemy radar. I was flying just a hundred feet off the ground at 480 knots, and there were hills I had to go over. The techniques I was practicing required me to maneuver the jet so it would barely clear a hill without getting too high above it. Flying too high would make me obvious to enemy radar.

Doing this properly took a lot of practice. Each time I had to raise the nose to fly over the hill, and then push the nose back down after we’d cleared the hill. It was a bit like riding a roller coaster. If it was a steeper ridgeline, I’d come up to it, pull up steeply to clear it, and as I crested the top, I’d roll inverted, upside down, and then pull down the back side of the hill and finally roll back to the upright position.

At one point, I came to a ridgeline, thought it was tall enough that I would be able to pull up to the crest, roll inverted, and pull back down the back side. At the top of the ridge, I realized I didn’t have enough altitude ahead of me to complete the maneuver. It was a potentially fatal misjudgment on my part. I had to quickly push myself back up into the sky and then roll out.

I had seconds to correct the situation, and I managed to do it. But let me tell you: The incident got my attention. There were pilots who died after making similar misjudgments.

When we got back into the squadron building, I took responsibility for what happened. I turned to the WSO who had been with me and said, “I’m sorry, Gordon. I almost killed us today, but it won’t happen again.” I then explained to him exactly what had happened and why.

After I had been at Nellis a few years, I was assigned to an Air Force Mishap Investigation Board. We investigated one accident at Nellis in which a pilot in an F-15 had tried an aggressive turning maneuver too close to the ground. He didn’t have enough room to complete it. The vast desert practice ranges we used, north and west of Las Vegas, had elevations starting at about three thousand feet above sea level and going much higher. If you’re looking at your barometric altimeter, it is set to give a reading of your altitude above sea level. It doesn’t give you the height above the surface of the ground. The pilot apparently misjudged how high he was, and how much room he had. It’s likely he realized this when it was impossible to correct. As pilots say, “He lost the picture.” Errors had crept into his situational model and had gone unnoticed and remained uncorrected until too late.

I had to take statements from the other guys in his squadron. I had to sort through photos of the accident, shots of the shattered plane on the desert floor. The carnage was chronicled in exact detail, including photos of identifiable sections of the pilot’s scalp.

As in every Air Force accident, investigators had to turn all the specific circumstances inside out to learn exactly what transpired. It was as if the pilot who died still had a responsibility to help ensure the safety of the rest of us, his fellow aviators.

Pilots are taught that it is vital to always have “situational awareness,” or “SA.” That means you are able to create and maintain a very accurate real-time mental model of your reality. Investigating this pilot’s apparent inaccurate SA reminded me of what was at stake for fighter pilots. It took an absolute commitment to excellence because we were required to do incredible things close to the ground and fast, often changing directions quickly, while always making sure that the way we were pointed was safe to go.

In so many areas of life, you need to be a long-term optimist but a short-term realist. That’s especially true given the inherent dangers in military aviation. You can’t be a wishful thinker. You have to know what you know and what you don’t know, what you can do and what you can’t do. You have to know what your airplane can and can’t do in every possible situation. You need to know your turn radius at every airspeed. You need to know how much fuel it takes to get back, and what altitude would be necessary if an emergency required you to glide back to the runway.

You also need to understand how judgment can be affected by circumstances. There was an aircrew ejection study conducted years ago which tried to determine why pilots would wait too long before ejecting from planes that were about to crash. These pilots waited extra seconds, and when they finally pulled the handle to eject, it was too late. They either ejected at too low an altitude and hit the ground before their parachutes could open, or they went down with their planes.

What made these men wait? The data indicated that if the plane was in distress because of a pilot’s error in judgment, he often put off the decision to eject. He’d spend more precious time trying to fix an unfixable problem or salvage an unsalvageable situation, because he feared retribution if he lost a multimillion-dollar jet. If the problem was a more clear-cut mechanical issue beyond the pilot’s control, he was more likely to abandon his aircraft and survive by ejecting at a higher, safer altitude.

My friend Jim Leslie was on a training mission in an F-4 in 1984, dogfighting with other airplanes. His plane ended up in a spin due to a mechanical malfunction, and there was no way to get it to fly again. “Pilots are only human,” he later told me. “In stressful situations, your brain tells you what you want to hear and see, which is: ‘This ain’t happening to me!’ And so you mentally deny that your plane is going down. You think you have time to fix the problem or to escape, when really, you have no time. And so you eject too late.”

Jim pulled his ejection handle, which first sent his WSO out of the F-4, then sent him a split second later. “I thought I had ejected us in plenty of time,” he said, “but I later learned that I did it just three seconds before the plane hit the ground.” Had he waited even one second longer, he wouldn’t have made it safely out of the aircraft.

“Nobody wants to crash,” Jim said. “It’s not a good mark on your flight record. The loss of that F-4 cost the Air Force four million dollars that day. But I lived. And some people die because they don’t want to be responsible for the cost of the plane.”

Jim later had a chance to fly the F-16. Two of his roommates died in F-16 training accidents, and the job fell to Jim to pack up their gear and return it to their families. Later, Jim would again have to eject from an unflyable plane, an F-16. Again, he survived. “Every day I wake up is a bonus,” he’d tell me.

PERHAPS THE most harrowing flight of my military career came in an F-4 out of Nellis. My “GIB” (“guy in back” or “backseater”) was Loren Livermore, a former bank clerk from Colorado who decided to abandon his desk job and become an Air Force navigator. He and I were on a gunnery range over the Nevada desert. I was leading a formation of four fighters, flying a box pattern around the target on the desert floor as part of bombing practice.

We were at a very low altitude, and I felt the plane move by itself. Imagine being in your car, driving along, and all of a sudden, without turning the steering wheel, you start veering to the left. It would be a bit shocking.

For us, in the F-4, the unsettling moment came when we felt the plane make a sudden uncommanded flight control movement.

Loren had hooked up a cassette recorder so he could have a record of what we said to each other, and of our radio transmissions. My response to this movement was very clear on the tape.

“Goddamn it!”

“What was that?” Loren shot back.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

Being just a hundred feet above the ground, traveling 450 knots, in a plane with a mind of its own—that’s not a path you want to be on. I immediately pulled the F-4 skyward. I needed a rapid climb to get away from the unforgiving ground. I had to buy myself time and give myself room. At a higher altitude, Loren and I might be able to make sense of the malfunction and deal with it more effectively. More important, if the situation worsened, we would have the time and altitude to be able to recover, or successfully eject and survive.

I radioed, “Tasty one one, knock it off.” That was my order to the other three planes to abandon the practice run and stop the training mission.

Each pilot acknowledged my order.

“Two knock it off.”

“Three knock it off.”

“Four knock it off.”

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” I said. “Tasty one one. Flight control malfunction.”

As leader of the formation, I still had to give direction to the other three planes. “Two and four go home,” I said. “Three join on me.”

I wanted two of the jets to go back to Nellis. They could serve no useful purpose, and I didn’t want the increased workload of being responsible for them anymore. As flight lead, I had a responsibility to my flight of four jets as well as myself and my WSO. It was prudent to stop the training when it was no longer reasonably safe and to focus my attention on the higher priority of merely staying alive a little longer.

I chose to have No. 3 escort me, since he was also a flight lead and was more experienced than either No. 2 or No. 4. I wanted No. 3 to see if he could help me make sense of whatever my F-4’s malfunction was. Before 2 and 4 left the range, and the frequency, I radioed, “Tasty one one, armament safety check complete.”

Each of the other pilots responded.

“Two, armament safety check complete.”

“Three, armament safety check complete.”

“Four, armament safety check complete.”

This ensured that all arming switches were returned to the safe position before planes left the range.

The No. 3 pilot was George Cella. At the time there was a popular TV commercial for Cella Lambrusco wine. The lovable character in the commercial, named Aldo Cella, was a short, pudgy Italian guy with a dark mustache. He wore a white suit and hat, and had women hanging all over him because of his brand of wine. So George’s tactical call sign was “Aldo.”

Aldo said, “Better do a controllability check.”

When I got to a higher altitude, about fifteen thousand feet, I slowed down the jet to make sure it would remain controllable at a slower speed when the time came for me to attempt a landing. Loren, my WSO, turned to the appropriate troubleshooting page, E-11, in our emergency checklist and we verified we could control the plane.

Aldo flew his jet very close to mine. He and his WSO inspected the exterior of my aircraft, looking for any obvious damage, fluid leaks, or other anomalies. “You look OK,” Aldo said as he chased me in his F-4.

I contacted Las Vegas Approach Control and advised the civilian controller of my emergency status and of my need to return for landing at Nellis. The controller put certain constraints on how I might return, and how long I could take to line up. He wanted a tighter turn to my final approach.

“Unable,” I told him. That’s the standard response when a pilot can’t do what a controller is asking him.

I told him I needed a five-mile final approach to make sure I could be stabilized for landing. I was glad I had insisted on that, because as I was descending, a gust of wind caused a wing to dip. Aldo and his backseater assumed I was losing control of the F-4. They expected to see Loren and me flying like cannonballs out of our plane in our ejection seats. But I moved the control stick full right, and was able to raise the left wing that had dipped. For the moment, we held on.

After that gust of wind, I was intensely focused on keeping the wings exactly level, and on carefully maintaining both our vertical and horizontal path to the runway. I tried to get exactly in line with the runway’s centerline.

Aldo followed me down, ready to let me know the instant I deviated from the proper path or entered an attitude from which I couldn’t recover. I felt like I was still in control, but I was wary, prepared for the possibility that my aircraft might betray me and I’d have to abandon it.

We made it over the safety area leading up to the runway threshold, and within a few seconds, we were on the runway itself, our drag chute deployed.

We had made it safely to the ground.

I braked to a stop, then slowly taxied back to where the other fighters were parked. Loren and I stepped off the ladder, and stood there for a moment. We were both holding our helmets and oxygen masks in our left hands, but our right hands were free. Loren reached out to shake my hand, and said, from his heart but with a big grin, “I thank you, my mother thanks you, my brother thanks you, my sister thanks you…”

Loren and I had worked together as a team, with help from Aldo and his WSO. We had maintained control of the aircraft and solved each problem so we could land safely.

Had I died that day, other pilots would have grieved for me. Fellow pilots would have been assigned the duty of investigating the accident. They would have learned the cause of my crash. I’m glad I saved them from having to look at a photograph of my scalp.

EACH MAN we lost had his own regrettable story, and so many of the particular details remain with me.

At Nellis, there was Brad Logan, my “wingman” (which meant he flew the aircraft beside me, following my lead). There would be four planes in formation, and Brad was in the number two plane. We flew together more than forty times. He was a very good pilot.

I was a captain, and he was a first lieutenant, a few years younger than I was. He was an unpretentious, unassuming, jovial guy who was always smiling. Big, solid, and friendly, he looked like Dan Blocker, the actor who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. Naturally, Brad’s tactical call sign was “Hoss.”

After Nellis, he was flying out of an air base in Spain. One day, on a training mission, his plane was in formation descending through the clouds. I heard there was a miscalculation or miscommunication between air traffic control and the leader of his flight. Maintaining his assigned position in the formation, through no fault of his own, Brad’s plane crashed into the side of a mountain obscured by clouds. The other planes in the formation were high enough to fly over the mountain, but Brad and his backseater were killed.

He had a wife and a young child, and as I recall, they received just $10,000 or $20,000 from his government life insurance policy. That’s how it was for pilots’ families after their accidental deaths; the support they received was very modest. But we signed up knowing this. We were aware that some of us wouldn’t make it because not all training exercises could go flawlessly. There was always the chance that surprises such as low clouds and an unexpected mountain could be our undoing.

Those who survived accidents often found ways to acknowledge to the rest of us that they had cheated an unkind fate. They had a bit of an aura about them.

There was a terrific pilot named Mark Postai who was stationed with me in England in 1976. He was a very smart, skinny guy in his mid-twenties, with dark hair and an olive complexion. He had majored in aeronautical engineering at the University of Kansas.

On August 14, 1976, Mark took off from runway 6 at RAF Lakenheath, heading to the northeast, and there was a thick forest off the end of the runway. He had a flight control malfunction that made the airplane unflyable, but he and his backseater were able to eject successfully before the plane crashed into the forest and exploded in a fireball. They survived, uninjured.

When Mark made it back to the base, someone told him: “You know that forest belongs to the Queen of England.”

He replied, with a smile, “Please tell the Queen I’m sorry I burned down half of her forest.”

Mark lived in the officers’ quarters assigned to bachelors, and a week or so after the accident, he invited us into his room for a party. “I want you guys to see something,” he told us.

Air Force personnel had searched the woods and found the ejection seat that had saved his life. In appreciation, Mark had put it on display in the corner of the room. “Go ahead, sit in it,” he said. We all had drinks in our hands—there was a nurse from the base in the room with us also, I recall—and it just seemed like a very appropriate thing to do, to plant ourselves in that seat and feel the magic. Maybe it offered us reassurance that an ejection seat might save our lives someday also.

Mark told us how it felt to eject, how his heart was pounding. We all knew the science behind ejection seats, of course. A sequence of events must happen to get you out of the jet. Once you pull the ejection handle, the canopy flies off. Then there’s a ballistic charge, which is similar to a cannon shell that catapults you out of the airplane. And once you get a certain distance from the aircraft, a rocket motor sustains you and keeps you moving with a slightly more gentle acceleration. After the rocket finishes firing, the parachute deploys itself. The seat falls away, and you parachute down to the ground.

That’s if all goes well, as it did for Mark.

The night of his party, he proudly showed us the letter he had received from Martin-Baker Aircraft Company Ltd., which billed itself as “a producer of ejection and crashworthy seats.” Evidently, they sent one of these letters to every pilot who had used one of their seats and lived. In the letter, they told Mark: “You were the 4,132nd person to be saved by a Martin-Baker ejector seat.” (The British say “ejector” instead of “ejection.”)

Like me, Mark’s next assignment back in the States was at Nellis, flying the F-4. Because of his skill as a pilot, and his engineering training, he was asked to be in a special “test and evaluation” squadron. The group operated in great secrecy. I figured he was flying stealth fighters.

Mark ended up marrying a young and very attractive woman named Linda. His life was coming together. And then one day, we got word that he had died in an accident. None of us knew what kind of plane he had been flying, but we were told that his death resulted from, of all things, an attempted ejection that had failed.

Only recently, more than two decades later, did I learn through the aviation magazine Air & Space what had happened to Mark. The article offered a look at how the United States worked to get inside knowledge about enemy planes during the cold war, especially Soviet MiGs. The story briefly touched on an American pilot who died ejecting from a MiG-23 in 1982. It was Mark. Turned out, the plane had come into American hands somehow. Mark’s job was to train U.S. fighter pilots to be able to fight effectively against Soviet aircraft.

The article mentioned a book, Red Eagles: America’s Secret MiGs, which I tracked down. The book explained that the single engine in the MiG that Mark was flying caught on fire. He began an attempt at an engine-out landing at his desert base but had to eject. The Soviet fighters had ejection seats with notoriously bad reputations. I assume Mark knew this when he pulled the ejection handle and hoped for the best.

Very few pilots ever have to eject once in their lives. My long-ago friend Mark ejected twice. The second time, of course, there was no congratulatory letter waiting for him from the company that made the ejection seat.

A couple of years after Mark died, I found myself at a social event where Linda, his young widow, happened to be. I told her that I thought her husband was a terrific guy and a gifted pilot, and that I had always enjoyed his company. I told her how sorry I was. And then I was quiet. There wasn’t much more I could say.

I guess I felt like something of a survivor by 1980, as my Air Force career was ending. No, I had never been in combat. But unsettling things happened just often enough to get my attention. I knew what was at stake.

There were a dozen different ways on a dozen different days that I could have died during my military years. I survived in part because I was a diligent pilot with good judgment, but also because circumstances were with me. I made it to the other side with a great respect for the sacrifices of those who didn’t. In my mind, I can see them—young, eager faces that are with me still.