The Flyboy Podcast: Guest Cliff Latta

Aircraft flown: A-10, AT-38, 727, 737, 757, 777

Join us as Cliff Latta shares his incredible journey from childhood fascination with aircraft to over 4,000 hours flying the A-10 Warthog and his experiences in combat, air shows, and aircraft testing. Discover the challenges, heroism, and technical marvels of military aviation through firsthand stories.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to the Flyboy Podcast, where we bring you just one thing: cool flying stories. I'm your host, David Moore, and today I'll be talking with Cliff Lotta. Cliff has more than 4,000 flying hours in the A10. He also has more than 10,000 hours flying with the airlines. He's flown a number of different variations in the airline: the 727, 737, 757, 67, and 77. Great to have you with us, Cliff. Welcome to the Flyboy Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Thank you, David. So nice to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

So, Cliff, tell me, when did you first know that you wanted to be a pilot?

SPEAKER_00 0:42

You know, I recall when I was a young kid, I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, in the east side, which was a lower middle class neighborhood. And I remember sitting out in my front lawn on the grass, looking in the sky, and watching aircraft fly overhead. As it turned out, those they were F-84s from the 180th Tactical Fighter Group out at the Toledo Air National Guard. I remember looking up and seeing those aircraft and saying, I don't know what those are. That looks like the coolest thing in the world. I want to do that someday. And I think I was pretty much hooked from that moment. My decision about career took many paths, of course, but I was fortunate enough to eventually get to fly an attack aircraft, a fighter aircraft, the A-10.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

For those who haven't flown the A-10, why don't you give us a sense of what it is like to be in the cockpit flying the Warthog?

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Well, oh my God, I love flying that airplane. You know, it it's a roomy cockpit. I've gotten a lot of flights in the F-16, and that's tight. You feel cramped in that aircraft. But the A-10 is a roomy cockpit. It's well thought out. And it's actually, uh, if you wanted to talk about ease of flying, it's not a difficult airplane to stick and runner, to take off and to land. To employ the aircraft and to employ it accurately and tactically is incredibly challenging. And there are a lot of challenges, as you recall, flying in Europe, uh leading a force ship through the weather, trying to get down below the weather in formation to go low level and rooting around, trying to find targets under the clouds in the German countryside, which was I that was incredibly difficult and challenging for young guys. And then, of course, the best part about flying the A-10, I think, other than just the fact that you're with a great group of guys and you're flying formation and there's the camaraderie in the squadron, the best part about flying the A10 is shooting the gun. The first time you shoot that gun, you don't really know what to expect, but the HUD jingles quite a bit, and you get a flood of cordite gunpowder that you can smell. And it is just it is just a drug that you want to keep smelling over and over and over again. So I loved firing the gun, and of course, I loved the missions in the A-10 because they had direct impact on other people's lives. So the close air support mission, in which we were actually uh supporting and flying overhead our friendly ground troops and protecting them. And also the other mission that I flew quite a bit was combat search and rescue, where we were looking for uh other airmen who may have been shot down in enemy territory. So both of those missions I found really, really rewarding. Yeah, easy airplane to fly, tough to employ, I think. So you don't stay away from threats in the A-10 by outrunning the threats. You have to really kind of use your brain and have an idea where the threats are at, avoid them, either through altitude or through terrain masking or through uh any one of other any other means, just try to avoid the threat, unless you can't. Then you then that becomes the primary target.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

You know, it's funny you talk about uh firing the gun. One of the things that really impressed me about it, there were certain atmospheric conditions you could get where if you squeeze the trigger, you could actually see the contrails of the bullets. And they're coming out of the muzzle at 3,000 feet per second. And so it's almost like turning on a light switch. There's no you don't see any vertical drop on the arc of the bullets. It's like aiming a flashlight at a target 2,000 to 6,000 feet downrange. It was just amazing.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Amazing. And did you fly the lastie version?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

I did. I did. I got it I I flew a lot of the iron guncross uh first uh two assignments, and then on my third assignment in at uh Bentwaters, we uh transitioned to lastie, and that was uh a whole nother capability. Just added on. It was amazing.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

With that precision attitude control, when you turn that on, pull to that first, your gun cross didn't move, and it became in essence death dot, which was pretty fascinating to me. At long ranges, too.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Didn't you actually do some of the testing for lastie when you were at the 422 later?

SPEAKER_00 4:56

I did. I was oh that what a great assignment that was. I showed up and the lastie testing was underway, so I I joined the team and all the big brain guys there that uh Jeff Eggers, one of the smartest guys I know, and Craig Schloppman uh were there, and it they had already set up a lot of the testing for lastie, so I just got to go out and fly the early testing. And also I was lucky enough to fly some of the original tactic. How are we going to employ it tactically? What are the tactical benefits of having low altitude safety and targeting enhancement on the aircraft? And for your viewers, that gave the A-10 uh uh not only an autopilot, which made cross countries easier, but it also gave us a constantly computed impact point for bombing. So that rather than trying to meet very precise parameters to try to get the bomb somewhere close to a target, as long as you had the pipper on the target and you met other criteria such as above abort altitude, uh, you pretty much were gonna hit the target. Having a CCIP constantly commuted impact point was a game changer in the A-10. And then, of course, the gun became much more accurate with the precision attitude control, which kind of locked the bike controls once you once you came to the first D-10 on the trigger. We also did the early night vision goggle testing in the A-10. And part of writing the test program is you look at all of the Air Force rules and regulations as the group of guys in a in a room where you're designing the test and figuring out how exactly are we going to conduct a test, you also look at the rules and say, okay, what are these rules do we need to get waivers for in order to have an accurate test? So for the night vision goggle test, we were we asked for waivers to fly at 100 feet on night vision goggles. But you may say, Cliff, that's crazy, you know, 100 feet at night. But on the NVGs, it was actually it was actually doable. So I I love the fact that our bosses trusted us enough that if we asked for a waiver to one of the flying regs, that they would routinely give us that waiver, which was kind of kind of awe-inspiring, really.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Well, so obviously all of these uh changes and modifications you worked on at the 422 were to optimize and enhance the combat capability of the jet. So tell us about your experience taking the A-10 into combat.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

I I've had some opportunities a few different times. I I was over in a lot of the uh former Yugoslavia uh when we were primarily over in Kosovo where it really got hot. I remember my first sortie in in that arena, and I didn't get a lot of flying there, but the one sort that I got, you know, you your nerves, you got you kind of say, Oh, well, here we are. This is what we've been training for, and they they're going to be shooting at us. Unfortunately, in the Kosovo conflict, I was sent off to set up a detachment up in Hungary for combat search and rescue in case anyone was shot down in the northern uh portion of uh Kosovo. But my real combat, what I consider the real combat, was when I flew in Operation Iraqi Freedom back in 2000, end of 2002 and 2003. I that is when I really realized that that you're that is a risky damn business. You know, I remember flying one of the earlier sorties, and I'm flying northbound, and we're all, you know, we did all of our fence checks and we're heading inbound. And as I'm flying, I'm looking out and I see black puffs. And I'm like, well, those are interesting clouds. What the what what are these black and then I'm and then all of a sudden it dawned on me, oh heck, that's uh triple A, they're shooting at us. So uh again, a great uh respect for the A-10 and the fact that it has that titanium bathtub protecting you, but you also realize that heck, people are shooting at us. So I had a uh quite a few memorable sorties uh in Iraqi freedom. So one of the earliest sorties, the Marines were moving up to An Nazaria in southern Iraq, and they were trying to get into An-Nazaria and then continue on up to Baghdad. And as you recall, Ann-Nazaria was where the Marines took a lot of hits, where Jessica Lynch was captured. So this was before they actually got into the town. And there was a two ship of uh A-10s from the 75th Fighter Squadron that was flying at the base of the clouds. The clouds were down around 5,000. So they were flying at the base of the clouds and they had a missile shot at them. So they were bugging out and they said, Hey, we need we need people down here, and the army was screaming, hey, we need people down here. So my wingman and I were next in line, and we did our, you know, remember in Germany you'd get a letdown with a radar controller. Well, we did our own letdowns in Iraq. You know the land was flat down below, and the A-10 had a radar altimeter by then. So we did our own letdown over an area that we knew was flat. It got below the weather, and I asked that two ship to lead us back into the target area to give us an idea of what was going on. And they were, I thought, incredibly brave to turn around and go back in after having a missile shot at them and almost hitting their flight. But they turned around, they showed us the area, and then they bingoed out. Um, for your listeners, bingo means it's the fuel at which you need to head home so that you can land. They bingled out, had to head home, and we proceeded to stay in the target area. I didn't think that staying at 7,000 feet with the big cloud layer above us was the best way to employ the A-10 when I know that they're firing at us. So we dropped down, my wingman and I, and we proceeded to do high threat, low altitude, close air support. And that was, you know, I didn't think I would ever be doing that, those type of uh missions because we, you know, everything in Iraq was uh stay high, stay at 20,000 feet again to avoid the threat. But in this case, flying at 6,000 or 7,000 feet isn't avoiding any threat, it's just highlighting you uh your hot aircraft plume against cold clouds. So we employed Maverick, we uh we both shot, uh fired two Mavericks, we fired off the rocket pods, dropped four Mark 82s, and emptied the gun. Wow. So we came back a lot lighter than when we took off. And apparently we did a good thing for the Marines that day. They were able to move back into Nazaria. So that was one mission that I found. My wingman, uh Jason Keeler, Jason did a great job. He was young, he was the youngest, most inexperienced guy, probably, probably even with the active duty in it. He was on my wing. So here he is on his first no-kidding combat mission in Iraq, providing cover mostly, you know. He did a bang up job. I remember another mission. I was flying with Bobby Pugh. Bobby Pugh was one of the test guys out of Tucson in the A-10. So he was a really highly experienced A-10 driver when he showed up in theater. And Bobby was my wingman, he had a lightning pod. I said, Bobby, it's not this is not a test flight. We're going to combat. Just leave the pod turned off unless we find a reason that we really need it. So we're heading up north, well, north of Nazaria, heading towards Baghdad, and I get a call. They said there's army guys under fire and they need support now. So I said, Okay, let's go. When I checked in on the radio, you could actually you hear the guns firing and you hear people screaming, and so you really knew that you know the uh as the proverbial crap it hit the fan down there. And I tell you, that that particular mission kind of reminded me of watching the old World War II P-47 strafe missions where we watched a lot of those when I was at the Air Force Academy because we wanted to go off and be pilots, the gun camera film from the P-47. This mission, my first pass was just strafing along a tree line. That the Army, our friendlies were on the road. So I rolled in with guns and did a few passes with guns. And when we proceeded to stay in the target area, uh the the the Alo said, Hey, anything that's in front of us, in front of our lead vehicle, shoot that their enemy, just shoot them. So Bobby and I stayed in the target area. I put a couple rockets down to make sure that the Alo, I said, okay, anything in front of anything east of those two rocket smokes? And he said yes. So I knew that I wasn't, you know, attacking any of the uh our friendlies that might be out in that direction. And Bobby and I stayed in that target area and gave them support to the point where we reached bingo, but we had more ordnance and we did a quick calculation and realized that we could land at uh the Iraqi airbase that the U.S. was now stationed at. So we landed short, got fuel, towed the guys taken off about where the where these uh Marines were at, and said, go up there and give them more cover, and then we refueled and went home and landed. So that was a very memorable sorting. The other sorti that I recall bought um, I had flown two sorties, and then after we landed, I was uh going to go on CSAR alert. Combat search and rescue alert. We are totally dressed and ready to fly. The aircraft are totally prepped and ready to fly. And we sit in a shack with a bunch of the maintainers and we play cards or we snack or we sleep, and we're just we are there ready to run to the jet and jump in if some if if uh there's somebody shot down, they need somebody on station for search and rescue. So uh Brian Teflon, who ended up as a two-star up in Michigan, by the way, Teflon Teflon, a great guy, but he he was my wingman, and we were both exhausted, and we didn't think we were gonna launch for search and rescue, but they called, we got a call from the ops, and they said, Hey Cliff, there is a real need for support right now, and you and Teflon are the only aircraft that are fully loaded and ready to go, and you guys are dressed and ready to rock. Can you take this sortie? And I looked at Tef and I said, Teflon, you know, you you're the wingman here. Are you okay? You know, of course I knew he was gonna say yes. And he said, Of course, Cliff. So we ran out and jumped in the jet and proceeded northbound. And this time the Marines were on the other side of Nazaria trying to cross a bridge, and they were taking a lot of fire uh as they were trying to cross the bridge. So we stayed in the area. We did some passes and did uh did a little bit of destruction in that area and then went home, but that was a long day. Recall how many hours that uh day was, but it was probably pushing 16, 17, 18 hours of flying. So not of all flying, but you know, of flying and deering, taking off.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Oh yeah, that they almost had to drag us out of our cockpit after that sorting. I talked I talked to Teflon just a couple weeks ago, and and uh he's since retired up in Michigan, and he said, Cliffy, I remember that sortie well. And he goes, That was that was quite a day.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

I said, Yeah, that was I don't believe you uh ever had to eject out of the uh A10, but I believe you did have to eject out of another airplane.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

I did, yeah. I I ejected out of the A T 38. A T 38. That's actually the town number of the jet that I jumped out of. Uh sitting back here in my bar. I'm sorry. I was uh going to fighter lead in. This was uh gosh, it had to be the fall, October of 1984. I had just graduated from pilot training at Shepherd through the uh URL NATO Joint Jet pilot training program, and I I wasn't even on a student sort of. I was so I was one of those young gung-ho guys that wanted to learn and be the best possible pilot you could be. So I was uh getting every backseat ride that I could in the AT-38 on primarily air-to-air missions because I knew in the A-10 we probably weren't going to fly much air-to-air. So I was just trying to learn and become a better pilot. So this particular mission was scheduled as a 2v1, and I was going to fly in the backseat of one of the aircraft in the two ship. And again, for the for the folks in the audience, uh the 2v1 is uh two aircraft are flying as a team, and then there's one bad guy aircraft, one bandit aircraft that it that attacks the two ship, and you do multiple setups, multiple dances in the sky uh to practice different maneuvers. So I was walking, uh I was waiting for the ride to the jet, and my the instructor in my jet said, Hey Cliff, you know, you'd have a lot more fun in Smokey's backseat. Smokey Rosso, an XF-15 uh pilot who was an instructor there at Davis, I'm sorry, at Holliman Air Force Base. I said, Okay, yeah, why not? I'll go in Smokey's backseat. Uh it'll be a lot of fun being the attacker. We blasted off, and I think it was our second setup, and we were doing a hit and switch. Two ship was line abreast, about 6,000 feet apart, and Smokey is the bad guy. We dove down and then we attacked and got behind one aircraft, and they picked us up visually and made a made a uh a brake turn to try to defeat us. We went into the vertical and rolled around and came behind now the trailing aircraft. And there we are, talking with our hands. And uh just as we were closing in for a gunshot, uh, we hit a little weight turbulence, just a little burble, and then the next thing, all it you know, the plane just basically pitched over to about a 60-degree dive, very violently pitched over, to the point where uh one second I was sitting in the cockpit, just like I am right now, and the very next second my back was peeled, was stuck to the top of the cock canopy, and I was looking down into the cockpit at the control stick and and everything, and for a brief moment I said, Wow, okay, I I guess this is how you're gonna die, Cliff. And I wasn't frightened, I wasn't scared, it was just matter of fact, but I didn't think there was any way that we were going to recover from that. And Smokey, what a I mean, what an incredible thing he did. He was able to pull himself into the seat. This was the time in the T-38 where you had to raise the hand grips to eject and then squeeze the reach around and then squeeze the triggers. I guess that's changed since then. But so hand grips raise, trigger squeeze. He raised the hand grips, didn't squeeze the trigger, and pulled himself into the seat and was and went idle speed brakes on the throttle. And now we're in about a 60, 70, 80 degree straight down dive. And as you recall on the T-38 at high airspeeds, the speed brake causes the nose pitch up. So as a second lieutenant in the back seat, or if I was by myself, would I have thought of that? You know, I I may have gone idle boards just to try to slow the airplane down and got lucky that that caused the nose to pitch up. But Smokey, being a highly experienced XF-15 guy and an experienced AT-38 pilot, saved the day. And he caused the nose to pitch up. We became we came back under positive G forces. I sat back down on my seat. I tightened all my straps immediately, tightened my chin, tightened the oxygen mass, tightened my chin strap, tightened everything up. He did it because now he's fighting the aircraft. And here's another quick aside is that in the AT-38, you know, you know that when you're doing air-to-air, you spend a lot of your time turned around like this, turned around in the airplane, right? And in the A-10, it's not bad. You had you had the little probe back here for the ejection seat. I'd I'd pull on that thing and to turn around to do air to air. But in the AT38, you wore a you wore a parachute that was about that thick off your back, and it sat in a pan in the seat. So, in order to turn around, you had to lift that parachute out of the pan, and then you could turn around. So the guys out at uh Holoman, you wore all your straps pretty loose. So you could, you know, uh fly defensive uh air to air or turn around if somebody was on your six. So he didn't tighten that down. I did. The airplane is now back under control, and we and we called the knock it off, everything stopped, and then we were going, we made a call that we're gonna try to turn towards Roswell. And when Smokey, well, he gave me the control of the aircraft for a couple seconds because it was, you know, he was really fatiguing trying to keep that thing under control. What he did is he put the aircraft on its side, and now he was using the rudder, in essence, as an elevator. Now, I don't think either one of us knew that that's what was happening. We just knew that that was keeping the aircraft. Somewhat in controlled flight. So when he tried to roll out to head towards Roswell, of course, there's no elevator authority.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Uh because uh Did you say the elevator had broken off?

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Is that right? Yeah, that was I didn't get it. I probably should have led with that. Yeah, the elevator had totally come off the aircraft. Apparently, uh one of the bolts that was supposed to be safety wired on didn't quite wasn't safety wired on and it worked its way loose over time. And when we hit that little wake turbulence, it was enough for the bolt to come off and everything uh came off. The the elevator is what causes the nose to pitch up and down on the on the uh T-38. So when that falls off, of course, the airplane just drops. And when we try to make that turn towards Roswell, of course, there's no elevator, so now the plane went out of control again. And Smokey uh directed bailout, bailout, bailout. Second lieutenant Cliffy Latta thought in his of course I'm probably in shock at about that moment, that I was supposed to wait until he said the third bailout before I bailed out, but um, so which you're not supposed to do that, you're supposed to go as soon as he says bailout. Uh he said when he says bailout, bailout, bail out, I saw the fireball in front of me and I went, whoa! Uh and then I I kind of ducked to try to not get burnt up, and I counted about what I thought was about three seconds to try to get some separation from his parachute, and then I ejected. Um one of the reasons I went through a little bit of time to tell you about smoking, not tightening everything down, is that once he was in his parachute, he also wore his parachute straps pretty loose. And uh when I was in my harness, I was strapped in very tight. But I was also uh this was not my first time jumping out of an airplane. This is about my 835th jump because I was on the uh Air Force Academy parachute team. So for me, once I was out of the airplane, it was I was very comfortable. And when I was underneath the canopy, after I uh got out of some line twist that I had, I was as I looked up, my seat almost came down and almost hit me. And I was shocked by that. And then I looked to see if I could see the seat, and when I looked down, I saw the the aircraft flying inverted, just not flying, but just going straight down. And interestingly, sort of, I looked down and from the parallax from where I was and seeing the aircraft, there was one shack. And I looked down, I said, Oh no, this airplane is gonna land right on that shack, and there's you know, who knows there could be there's probably some guy in there, maybe an outhouse, and he's about to get a lap full of T38. Well, it that was parallax error, and it hit a mile from that from that little shack. But when I looked over, I saw Smokey, who had gotten out before me, he was quite a bit higher. So he was coming down very fast in his parachute, and he had blown some of the panels out, and I recognized, I saw that he that his one leg was his the strap instead of being around your groin was around his knee. So he had only one leg down and one leg stuck in the up position, and he was coming down pretty fast. So uh, you know, again, I this was my 835th jump. I maneuvered my parachute over towards him and circled around him and uh so I could land right next to him, uh which I did. And as I was coming down, I had the thought, you know, I think I'm gonna stand up. I'm not gonna do a parachute landing fall, I'm not gonna do a PLF, I'm gonna stand this up so I can tell all the guys that I was on the team with that I stood up after an ejection, which would have been a big stupid thing to do. But about a hundred feet up, as I'm coming towards the ground, I said, you know, I survived an ejection, I survived my seat almost hitting me. I think I'll be much better off doing a really, really good parachute landing fall. Uh which I did. I landed next to Smokey. I did a I did a picture perfect PLF. He landed and dislocated his hip very, very badly. So when he saw that picture-perfect PLF, he was a little, he goes, I can't believe you did that. And uh I went over to Smokey and we spent about four hours on the ground waiting for uh somebody to come out and pick us up. The time on the ground was also interesting because you know you're you're under a lot of shock, as you can imagine, when you're out on the ground and we um after ejecting and being out of control, got out our emergency beacon that was going off, and we got out the radios, and we're trying to turn the beacon off, but the radio on, and we're like, what the hell do you turn you turn that off and turn that on? And you know, so I that was just a lot of shock talking at the time, but we finally figured it out and talked to uh a couple of our two ship had ahead home, they reached bingo fuel, and a pair of F-15s who were in a training area next next to where we were fighting, flew over and they started providing a cap for us and started to look for us. And one of the things that I did is I cleaned up the drop zone. I coiled up our parachutes and I stacked everything all nice and neat. And before they checked in, I pulled out the flares and I, you know, we were shooting, I was shooting the flares off and having some fun and trying to keep Smokey just in a good mood because he was in incredible pain. And then when the F-15 showed up, I gave them the vectors to fly overhead and gave them the countdown uh and everything that we were trained to do. And then I realized, they said, Well, we don't see you. And I realized, uh, yeah, maybe I had to put these big parachutes and put them out. And as soon as I put those out and put a couple of rocks around it, they said, Oh yeah, there you, you know, there you are. Oh yeah, there you go. So yeah, we see you now. So, you know, it's funny the things when you look back on them, you go, Yeah, there's a lot of, I'd say there's a lot of adrenaline, a lot of stress at that particular little mini mistakes made. So that was my ejection story. And I tell you what, if um if any of the folks on your podcast are Air Force types and you have are in touch with Smokey, tell them that I've thought about him often since 1984, but I totally lost touch after I went off, did my A-10 career. I'd love to talk to him and uh thank him personally for saving my life.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

With all of your time in the A-10, you were actually selected to be the demonstration pilot uh to flight airshows and and show the capability of the A-10. Can you tell us a little bit about that uh that type of flying as compared to you know the more traditional flying that A-10 pilots do?

SPEAKER_00 28:57

Yeah, sure. That was uh it was again what a great opportunity. Uh I you know, I didn't think I was going to be selected. When I was, I was shocked. And Sean Jeurin was the uh A-10 display pilot right before me at RAF Bentwaters over in England, and he was the one that taught me how to do the demos. So the demo was a very, very strict, rehearsed um series of maneuvers that we did at air shows to show off the A-10 turn capabilities and overall capabilities of the A10. And you didn't really deviate from that plant from that set of maneuvers, but you had to practice it a lot because uh you were part of the maneuvers were diving at the ground out of a Cuban eight that uh inverted, you know, brought it right down to 45 degrees, nose low, and then recovered at 300 feet. You had to be precise and you had to be on your game, and so you practiced a lot. The positive side of that was I got to travel all over Europe and to go some to some really cool places. Downside, in my opinion, the only downside was that there was no more tactical flying for that period. So you you maybe had one tactical sortie a week if you were lucky. But as the as the air show pilot, normally you were on, you were at the air shows, you would leave Friday afternoon and you would do air shows, two or three or four, sometimes in a weekend, and you would come home Monday morning, throw my clothes in the in the laundry. Tuesday was a practice day for the next week's air shows. Wednesday, we did the air show in front of the the uh group commander at the airfield, he would watch you actually on the airfield, then review your tape. Thursday, if I was lucky, I got a sortie with the squadron to go to the range and drop some bombs. And then Thursday, of course, now I'm flight planning for my next my next air show weekend, and then Friday, off you go again. So I missed I missed the tactical flying for that for that time frame that I was the uh demo pilot. But I love fly, I love flying the air show display and being able to show those capabilities off. And it's another example, I think, where you were in the Air Force, where you were giving a lot of responsibility, and other than the operations group commander looking watching and making sure I knew uh and wasn't violating anything at the air show uh when at the practice, you pretty much were given a green card. Go go to the air shows. Uh I didn't get to select them. We had a scheduling uh committee that selected which air shows I would I would perform at. I've seen the A-10 air shows now. I was up at Battle Creek last summer and they had the A-10. Uh she put on a great show, by the way, but there it was just different. There was a cast. They had an announcer, they had crew chiefs, they had supervisors on the ground, you know, approving her, pulling inverted towards the ground. Back in Europe, back in 87-88 timeframe, it was just me and my wingmen, and we went to some pretty obscure airfields without a lot of military, with no military support. So we had to learn how to how to pull our own oil samples, hanging onto the canopy, climbing along the spine of the aircraft, hoping you don't fall off, and then doing a lot of that little minor maintenance that normally your crew chief would do. We did all of that at small little airfields. So it was a lot of responsibility, a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 32:20

Your wingman you mentioned, uh, did they serve as the narrator while you were flying? Was that how it worked?

SPEAKER_00 32:26

No. Here's what happened is they they flew the spare aircraft and then they stood by the static display. They couldn't really do the narration because there was a different line, you know, different language.

SPEAKER_01 32:35

Yeah. Every base, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 32:37

Yeah, so there wasn't really a narrator at all.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

It was so can you tell us about the air show at Rammstein on August 28th, 1988?

SPEAKER_00 32:46

Oh my gosh. Yeah, that was one of the air shows I was at. Yeah, that was yeah, that was quite a day. I'll I'll just tell you a little bit leading up to that. This was almost towards the end, the end of the air show season was uh late September, early October. So leading up to that, there was already a number of air show accidents. And on that same day, Bell G F-5 pilot crashed at an air show. John Sikkowski, I he was also, I trained him out into to do the air show, so we both ended up being air show guys for that season. Uh he was there and the F-5 guy crashed, and I had been at a couple air shows earlier where a Chinook helicopter crashed. So, you know, it wasn't unusual to have uh these accidents. It wasn't didn't happen every time, but there were a lot. Looking back on it, there was that season in particular, there were quite a few. I was at the Rammstein Air Show, it was huge, it was one of the largest air shows in Europe. So there were uh probably three, four hundred thousand, maybe a half million people at the air show. Big, big air show. And I had just finished my display, and Randy Ricardi was the F-15 uh airshow pilot. He was flying out of Bitburg, and uh Trulinair was the F-16 pilot, he flew out of Hahn Airbase. So the three of us had finished our air shows, and we were standing at Show Center, and we were, I don't even recall what we were talking about, standing there uh yapping about something. And I was watching the Italian team, the Frecatriculore, and they did a maneuver called the Piercing Heart, in which four aircraft went up one way, three aircraft went up the other way. When they came down the backside, it looked like a big heart when you had smoke trail. So, you know, if you imagine they come up, then go around, that looks like a heart, and then they meet at the middle at the bottom. Another aircraft peels off and it goes supposed to go right through the middle, like an arrow piercing through the center of that heart. Very romantic. I was standing there and I had seen this maneuver before, and I watched the the four ship come down this side, and I watched these guys coming down this side, and everything looked right, and then I looked at the pilot that was supposed to do the piercing heart, and I remember telling Randy and True, hey guys, look at this. This doesn't look right. This this isn't gonna be right. He was much slower than he should have been. And just about the time Randy and and uh and uh Babalu turned around was when that solo pilot went right through the formation and they had perfect timing. He plowed right through the formation, and then his aircraft went tumbling into the crowd at at Rammstein. And uh I don't know the exact death count, but there were quite a few people that were killed. Kind of a really fortunate uh I mean nothing was fortunate about this, but the when it tumbled into the crowd, it hit a big truck that was, I think, one of the food vendor trucks. And had it not hit that truck, it probably would have killed all many, many, many more people. And then another aircraft crashed behind us and crashed into a bunch of Army helicopters, and a bunch of guys, a bunch of the U.S. Army guys were killed. Uh, we were standing at Show Center with our, oh my god, what just happened? And parts of aircraft were fluttering down all around us on, you know, flaming parts of aircraft. True's wife, Debbie, was walking towards us with their newborn, and he ran over and jumped on top of her, try to protect her from the falling debris, which he did. And uh after that, you know, as you can imagine, it was just chaos after that. So, anyway, yeah, that was that's not that that was not a good day. That was not a good day.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Indeed, not. And I understand uh that was the last time they ever approved air shows with the planes flying toward the crowd. Uh my understanding now is you better uh fly parallel to, never directly toward.

SPEAKER_00 36:51

Yeah, that that actually that was a rule change. I I don't know if that's is still in effect. I mean, that was a long time ago, and sometimes people forget that sort of stuff. Yeah, that changed the the air shows, uh at least for the foreseeable future in Europe. Yeah, everything has to be per at parallel to the crowd line.

SPEAKER_01 37:10

I'm sure, like all aviators, uh you've lost close friends over the years. Who should we uh remember today?

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Oh my god. Well, yeah, just the the number is uh it's unimaginable sometimes when you think about it, Dave. And you you know as well, you've had dozens and dozens of folks that were killed. Um a quick story one of the things that that we do every other year at the hog smoke competition is we read a list of all the A10, anyone who's ever flowed the A-10 who's passed away. And that list is that's a pretty significantly long list now. And when you read it, yeah, you realize how many of those people you knew, how many of those people meant something in your life. It's pretty awe-inspiring and pretty humbling as well. Um, some of the other guys, uh, when I was enlisted in the Toledo Air National Guard before I uh went off to the Air Force Academy, there was a pilot. Uh, he was a captain, and I was uh you know an airman basic, so I didn't I we weren't friends, but he just meant a lot to me. His name was Andy Gross. He flew the F-100 when I was enlisted in the unit. He would, I I was in the operations, I was ran up, didn't run up, I was an airman nothing in operations. But when the aircraft fly back, they would have to call when they were 10 minutes from landing and give us the status of their aircraft. You know, how much gas they have left, you know, is the aircraft coat one or code two, meaning what's the maintenance status? Is it good to fly the next go? So Andy would always come back, and you knew he was coming back because he would play Willie Nelson on the radio before he would before he would check in and give his call sign and give his uh status report. So I thought that was pretty neat. And then I ran into Andy. I was in Tucson with the Air Force uh parachute team on spring break, and I just inadvertently he was out with his wife at a restaurant, and I was there with the team, and we were all in our jumpsuits, and it was I had just really odd to run into him again. But now that I was off and on my way in the academy, when he was very instrumental in my early career trying to get me a pilot training slot and then the Toledo Guard, you know, he meant a lot to me because he had helped me quite a bit. So he ended up crashing in an A7 uh early in my career. So that was one of the first pilots that I knew that I actually that went, you know, he was a hell of a hell of a pilot. He flew, he crashed his A7 up in Ohio. This wasn't a this wasn't necessarily a pilot accident, but one of our guys on the team was in pilot training, uh, Rod Lambert, and he he actually died in a parachuting accident, unfortunately. But boy, that stung. That was really hard to lose a team member. And then, you know, there's just I can give you the whole laundry list of guys that we've lost, and they all hit hard. And they really hit hard because at that time we were all young and we had families or you know, had kids, and a lot of the memorial memorial services, the funerals, uh, you know, the young kids show up, and I distinctly remember uh uh Lance Romance on his funeral. His I remember hearing his young son uh ask his mom, Mom, mommy, where's daddy? And oh that hits hard when when you hear that, you know. So yeah, there was I I you know I wish I could give you a whole lottery list, but uh there's just too many. Too many. It's a it's a risky business. We all know the risk going into it. Uh you hate losing anyone because it's it it really is a part of a family when you're in the flying business, and you know, it's a tough, tough loss. So Nickel.

SPEAKER_01 40:52

Nickel. So I have one more question for you. How important is being a pilot to your sense of identity?

SPEAKER_00 41:00

I tell you what, it was huge when I was an A-10 pilot. You know, I was fortunate enough to get to get to go to um uh fighter weapon school. Again, if a lot of your listeners may not know what that is, they probably know Top Gun.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

There you go.

SPEAKER_00 41:15

In the movies. So in the Air Force, the Air Force version of Top Gun is fighter weapon school. So I was fortunate enough to get to go to fighter weapon school, and then uh as a graduate, you kind of take up the banner, you are gonna be the guy that that helps other pilots as much as you can to learn how to tactically and safely affect or fly the aircraft. So it became very much part of my identity. You remember being in the squadron, it wasn't unusual to do 12, 13, 14 hour days, uh, even on days you weren't flying. You were working, you were studying, you were, it was just part of your life. And when I knew that I wasn't going to fly the A-10, I said, boy, I need something to fill that. That was, you know, I was married more. In fact, it probably cost me my first my first marriage, unfortunately, because I think I was married more to the Air Force and to being an A-10 pilot, being a pilot in the military, and probably didn't do justice to my to my family. So it was very costly, but it was a huge part of my identity. And I had to find something to fill that void when I knew I wasn't going to fly the A-10 anymore. And oddly enough, that's when I got into sailing boats, because again, that's a that is a gigantic area that there's so much to learn. And then also I had the airline fly.

SPEAKER_01 42:35

Thank you, Cliff. Really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

Thank you. You really you you may you brought you uh maybe draw out a lot of memories, and some of them pretty tough, as you could tell.

SPEAKER_01 42:44

Thanks for being willing to share them with us. We appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

You're welcome.

SPEAKER_01 42:49

You've been listening to the Flyboy Podcast. This podcast is brought to you by our parent organization, the Flyboy Lab. The mission of the Flyboy Lab is to elevate awareness and appreciation of aviators, their service, sacrifices, and contributions, and hopefully we've met that mission today. New episodes of the Flyboy Podcast drop every Thursday morning, and you can find all of our previous episodes on our website, the FlyboyPodcast.com. Until our next sortie, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.