The Flyboy Podcast: Guest John Venable

Aircraft flown: The OV-10 and the F-16

Join us as JV Venable shares his incredible journey from childhood fascination with planes to leading the Air Force Thunderbirds and flying combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Discover insights into pilot training, aircraft cockpit experiences, in-flight emergencies, and the dedication required to serve as an aviator.

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 John J. V. Venable. J. V. has lived a life like a few others. He's a retired Air Force officer who started in the OV-10 and then went to fighter weapons school in the F-16. Later he spent a year leading an expeditionary group flying combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And perhaps most notable of all, he was the commander and demonstration leader of the Air Force Thunderbirds. JV, welcome to the podcast. Never it's great to be with you. JV, what was the moment you first knew you wanted to be a pilot?

SPEAKER_02 0:52

Well, it's uh gonna sound odd, but uh I was on the roof of our house when I was four years old, running around like I was looking for a baseball that was in the gutter that I had thrown up there, and and uh three Kingfisher um float planes right out of World War II flew over the top of our head, big radial engines, low guys were actually waving out of the cockpit at me, and I almost fell out of off the roof. I was so excited about it. And I got down from that as the first really airplane I remember ever seeing, and I just never lost sight of it. I said, that's what I want to do. And you know, from there, um never I I didn't read very well, and my parents would get me books, and in 1969 we got the World Book Encyclopedia, and I turned right to the section on the United States Air Force, and there, uh right underneath the uh title was a picture of four F-100s painted red, white, and blue, and it was F-100 super sabers, uh, and I pointed at the lead jet and said, that's what I want to do. Wow. I just never um was foolish enough to think that the Air Force wouldn't be smart enough to pick me. I I just said, I'll just gotta figure out what I gotta do, three or four steps, and I fell for it enough times where I finally got there.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

You flew the OV-10 and you flew the F-16. Could you give us a sense of what those cockpits are like? Put us in the cockpit of each of those airplanes.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Well, the OV-10 was my first assignment out of UPT, and uh you fly the fast, sleek T-38, and then you move over into the A T-38 for fighter uh lead-in training for the OV-10. And then you get in the airplane and it is very loud, uh 120 decibels in the cockpit. If you opened up the windows on either side, you can actually touch the propellers. That was they were that close to the uh to the cockpit itself. Tandem two uh two-seat, but no GPS, no anything other than an ADF, uh TAC-an, and the fundamental instruments that you would find in any other airplane. We shot Willie Pete rockets, we could drop bombs off of it. If uh we went to war, they could put 7.62 miniguns on it. And so it was a f a lot of fun to fly. But our primary mission was to be Ford air controllers for the Army, and I was a ground fact as my primary role, and I deployed to Hohenfels, to Grafenvere, and then to Fort Irwin. We called that Planet Irwin, uh, which was about um about an hour and a half drive north of us in Victorville up to the complex there. And so that was a fabulous and interesting tour. And as much as I didn't want to be involved with the Army, I kind of fell into this passion for close air support, and I kept that throughout my time in the service, and that that served me well.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

So, how is the F-16 different? Can you sort of give us a side-by-side comparison? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

I would equate the OV-10 to getting into a uh your dad's Cadillac from uh a 1965 Cadillac that when you turn the steering wheel, the car would actually wallow before it made the turn. Um and so that was kind of the O V-10. It was a little bit, it was responsive, but not quite the uh the sports car that you'd hoped for. And then getting in the F-16 was like strapping on um uh the the airplane of your lifetime. Uh glass cockpit, completely no glare shield. Really, you could turn and look on either side of you all the way check six. It was an amazing airplane to fly fast. As the engines got better and better, it got faster and faster. And I just loved the the feel of it, and I love fighting in it. I loved the air-to-air, the BFM, and then the surface-to-air employment or air-to-surface employment that we uh so readily prepared for during the Cold War era of coming in and doing pop attacks.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Let me just interrupt and clarify for our listeners BFM is basic fighter maneuvers. So it's kind of like the uh the mechanics, the uh the foundation of what you do in dog fighting. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 4:57

And it's right out of World War I. It's uh dog fighting with another airplane, and it is so much fun, so physically demanding, but you ended up finishing most of those engagements, giggling like a little kid on a roller coaster ride because it was so much fun to fight. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

So, JV, red flag is a uh demanding, high-profile exercise where fighter pilots and others go out to participate in a two-week exercise in the Nevada desert doing simulated combat missions. I understand that back in 1994, you had a very unusual red flag experience. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Now, and I understand there were a few other things going on at the time in your life.

SPEAKER_02 5:38

Right. Well, I was at Pope Air Force Base. We were part of that composite wing experiment. And so we were a squadron that wasn't declared uh mission ready. We were uh not not even uh in the the the initial stages of that because we were basically building the squadron up one airplane at the time, and we probably had 19 of 24 jets that we were supposed to get. And this opportunity to go to red flag, a red flag deployment came up about a year out. And I was a the wing weapons officer, so I got to do a lot of the planning for it, but I was engaged, uh, we we set a date, and it just so happened that the date that I was getting married was right in the middle of this two-week deployment. Now I I didn't think so much about that never when I when I sent invitations out to every fighter pilot in my squadron because I knew they weren't going to be able to go from Pope Air Force Base out to San Diego where our wedding was, but logistically, they were in Las Vegas and they had the weekend off. And so at my wedding, every guy in my fighter squadron showed up that was deployed from Nellis. And and my wife had been a flight attendant, so you have this mixture of fighter pilots and flight attendants, which is always dangerous. We got we got married and we go out to this beautiful location right on the water in San Diego. Sun is setting, one of the most romantic periods. But I take a break from the crowd, walk out, and just look out on the water. And then the next thing you know, my squadron commander Cuddy Ely walks over, puts his arm around me and says, Oh, great day. What are you doing tomorrow? And I said, Well, me and Miss Lil, we're gonna head to Atlanta, make a right-hand turn, and what am I doing tomorrow? And he said, Well, you know, we've we've been recalled. We're not supposed to be going because we're not IOC, uh, initial operating capability as a squadron, but but they need us in the Persian Gulf and we'll be there and we'll deploy there in two days. Would you like to go? And I looked at him and I go, Well, I'm gonna have to talk to Miss Little about that one. And he goes, Already talked to her, she gave you the green light. So two days later, as opposed to being in St. Lucia for my honeymoon, we went up to uh back to Pope and I took a six-ship ship sail and landed in uh Ramstein and then one hop from there into uh Daron, where we spent the next five weeks waiting for something to happen. And this was Vigilant Warrior 1994, and Sodom never came south, and we actually redeployed shortly after Thanksgiving that year to head back home. Very eventful, and and my wife, for whatever reason, has never forgiven me for that.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

So have you taken her to St. Lucia since?

SPEAKER_02 8:12

We have.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Well, I hope you guys got to celebrate when you did get back after that deployment to Daron. No idea. Usually they send it, uh if not in the middle of someone's wedding, uh right around Christmas time. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

Yeah, just as as horrible as it can get for families. But you know, as a warrior, you're gonna go every every time you get the call. So fortunately he backed down that time, but but later on he didn't learn his ways, and and we got the better of him.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

So JV, what's the worst in-flight emergency you've ever experienced?

SPEAKER_02 8:59

Well, I've I've had my share, but the the one that kept me on the edge and kept the adrenaline way up was in an OV10 of all things during an instrument sortie where I'm riding in the back seat, being the safety observer for a guy who's shooting instruments in the in the front seat. And Stevie McElhannan and I went out, we knew each other very well. I was an IP at the time, and and he was going out to basically do stalls and falls, basically slow the airplane down, handling characteristics, and really boring. So 5,000 feet was the minimum altitude. He's got this airplane configured in the stall configuration, gear down, flaps down. We go to about uh probably 150, 140 knots in the airplane. And then he goes, Well, that's about it, and then he powers up. And the airplane had some pretty good thrust on it, you know, with the the the twin engine propellers. And when he pushed the the power up, the nose started creeping up. And he goes, JV, are you messing with me? Those weren't his exact words, but I think you can and I said, No, no, I'm not doing anything. I actually had my feet on either side of his ejection seat because it was much more comfortable to ride like that for two and a half hours. And he goes, Well, get on the stick, something's wrong. And so I got on the stick and I tried to jam it. It was frozen in a pitch-up attitude. And so for whatever reason, uh nobody had ever trained me on this. I knew to kick a rudder, and I kicked a rudder and we did a rudder over and went from about 55, 5700 feet, and now we're going back down to try to recover some altitude. We we got the altitude back and we started in a left-hand turn because the stick was frozen in a pitch-up attitude. We controlled that with bank. We went down to about 400 feet AGL in this recovery mode, and we I were basically holding that and gaining about a hundred feet every minute or so. So cactuses are going by, we're we're slowly climbing, and we're right at the western edge of the Edwards complex, and there's a mountain range that separates the high desert from that uh basin around Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and the winds are blowing us into the mountains, and we're not climbing fast enough to get above them. And so we get up higher, higher, higher, and now we've got to basically do more rudder overs to go back to the east, rudder over, rudder over, rudder over, and now we're back to 400 feet. And we're we go back through this over and over again. We're in the high desert, the thrust of the airplane, because of the weight, the uh all of the armament that's on the OV10, we was holding us down. And so we counteracted this by putting a centerline tank on the airplane. And if you lost an engine on takeoff, you could jettison the tank and then climb with one engine in theory. With a full load of gas, you couldn't do it. And so we're we're basically holding this up and we declare an emergency with Edwards. They get a radio relay airplane in between us and George, which was about 200 miles away. And so we had start having this um, you know, this whisper campaign. You know, you're playing that uh bar game where you whisper something and wonder what comes back to you. And so we tell him we've got a uh stuck uh stick and we're controlling it with bank, and we're wondering whether we should jettison the tank. And I said, I don't know if the CG is going to change and if it's going to give us more of a pitch up and we can't take that. I will stall. And so we have this discussion with this major that I thoroughly love. His name was Bounce Burnett, Dave Burnett, and Dave is on the radio back at home, and he's getting this Rayleigh back with another airplane. So we go back and forth, back and forth, and go, so are you sure you want us to jettison the tank? And he goes, Jettison the tank. And so I punch the tank off and we watch this tank tumble down. I just have this incredible vision of this beautiful sunny day with gas coming out of this tank as it's flipping, flipping, going down. And we started climbing. We go up to about 12,000 feet, and now we try to get the stick unstuck, try to get the stick unstuck, and can't. So we there's two dry lake beds out there. One's Rogers Dry Lake Bed, which is right next to Edwards, and there's Rosamond Dry Lake Bed, which is about 30 miles southwest of there. And so they ask us to head back up to the Rogers Dry Lake Bed and go through the ejection, pre-ejection checklist. And so we've got probably 40 minutes, 35 minutes of gas. This has been going on for about an hour, and and we we are now going over the Rogers Dry Lake Bed, and now they've got three helicopters up circling us. They had deployed the fire department, which kind of looked like Keystone cops to us, a bunch of cop cars and and uh rescue vehicles and then fire trucks. And so they make the decision: nope, nope, don't jump out over Rogers, go to Rosamond. And so we go, we start heading back down, and we watch this entourage make this U-turn, and they can't, it's 20-point turns for all of the vehicles to go on this two-lane roadback. The helicopters follow us down. We get over the Rosamond dry lake bed. They go, no, no, no, come back up and eject out over uh Rogers Dry Lake Bed. So Stevie and I are talking this whole time. I go, Stevie, I don't want to jump out of this airplane. And that jet and that airplane, you eject it and you went through the plexiglass roof that was above you. And I said, I just don't want that. And he goes, What do you want to do? And I go, let's unstrap and let's let's uh we we had the the parachute riggings on the top, which were on our harness, but unbuckle and let's put our backs against the seat and jam the stick with our feet, and we'll have this the seat with which to leverage. And so we we do that, one, two, three, boom, nothing happens. One, two, three, boom, and this time it's like physically breaking a bone. And we can feel it go through, and it pin, it pinned us against that nose over pinned us against the roof of this airplane. And so we pull it back, still holding on the stick, we pull it back and it lodges right in the same place and goes lock. And they go, no, no. And so we do it one more time, and this time it breaks free. So we do a controllability check, we land with about five minutes, ten minutes of gas, and we touch down at Edwards, and one of those helicopters that had been waiting for us picks us up and takes us back home. And when we land, literally the entire base seemed to be on the ramp next to the helicopter. They had all been listening to it on the radio. Chicken Thunderburke, this massive man major, just a wonderful guy, legend from Vietnam is out there, Goldie, um, our uh ops officer or ADO is there. And then there's Dave Burnett, Bounce Burnett, and uh and we go through this process of talking it up, everybody's congratulating us, and we go inside and we're talking at the front desk for just a second. And I go, hey, bounce, how did you know to justice in the tank? How did you know that that wouldn't put us in a more dire situation? And he goes, Well, it was easy. You were controlling the pitch down with bank. And I went, Pit pitch down? Pitch down. It was a pitch up. And he went, he went, Oh, oh, I messed that up. And so that was the you know, the bad relay. It was a bad um bar game. And we and we go back, and me and Stevie are writing this up, and and this is how I knew about the adrenaline rush. And he and I weren't thinking anything about it. They tell us to go in and hand write everything that happened that uh that afternoon. So we're writing it down, and both of us at the same time looked up, and it was like we got hit in the head with with a bucket of tar. And it was just everything decelerated, we were out of energy. And our ops officer opened the door, Joe Pat McCaskill, a thud driver from Vietnam, and no credit cards at the time, nobody had them, but he had one of those blue club cards, his club card, and he threw it on the table and said, Drinks are on me tonight, boys. And so me and Stevie and Stevie's wife, Susan, we went over to the officers' club at George Air Force Base and we had a big night after that. But but that was the that was the one and it that whole thing lasted just under two hours from the IFE to touching down.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

So that is an in-flight emergency for sure. I want you to take us back for a minute. Uh I mentioned earlier that you had it the uh privilege and opportunity to lead the Thunderbirds, but that didn't happen right away. I understand that there were some other changes along the path. Can you connect the dots for us between uh your deployment from that red flag where you went over uh to Daran and later becoming the uh commander of the Thunderbirds? How smoothly or roughly did that process go?

SPEAKER_02 17:51

One of the things that life has uh for most people is the opportunity to throw forks, and you think it's gonna fork you away from the career path that you wanted or towards it, and it goes in a in a direction you weren't uh thinking. So uh I go to fighter weapon school. Um, you know, the Thunderbirds uh weren't really high up on the totem pole and the average FWC instructor's mind. And I got I got to meet a bunch of Thunderbirds, and you know, I'm honestly I started moving away from the thought process of going to fly with the Thunderbirds. Uh 1995, I get to go to Air Command and Staff College, and at the end of that year, it was a horrible year for our family. We had um uh a hurricane hit, uh, full-fledged in Montgomery, Alabama, uh, Category 2. Um, a baby that came early, um, incubator for six weeks, a tornado hit the back of the house in March. And about the time we thought everything was clearing, I really started feeling, you know, like something was wrong. And you never want to go to the flight dock, but I I I went to the flight dock and and they run some tests and they as as with all things, they check the oil, they they they they check the pressure in the tires and go, hey, you've got a hernia, so we need to repair that. It's a double hernia, so we're gonna put you in a hospital on a Wednesday and and cut on you. And and oh, you by the way, you've got something in your throat. We're still looking at that. We're gonna we're gonna do a a dipstick check on that and uh send that away and see how that works. And so on uh on Wednesday morning I'm in for a double hernia repair, and I'm not kidding, I'm not making fun here. The the anesthetist nurse name was Hiawatha. And Hiawatha was the funniest person I've ever met in my life. So before they give me the gas, she has got me in tears. I just I I just am impressed with her to no end. They put the mask on, I go out, I wake up, and now the operation's over, and uh couldn't compliment her more. I go, you've got to be the funniest person I've ever met, and you were wonderful to deal with. And she goes, Great, really appreciate it. Good luck on your recovery. Well, that Friday, so three days after this, I get called and said, Hey, we think you've got something wrong with your thyroid, and we're gonna put you back in the hospital on Wednesday, and we're gonna take half of it out, we'll send it away for a biopsy and see how it comes out. So the next Wednesday, I'm back under the knife, only I'm in the anesthesia room with Hiawatha again. And she goes, Hey, you know, I I really appreciate you telling me how funny I was, but this is a show you can find at other locations. You don't have to come back here. I really and so she just killed me for another um probably 20 minutes before she put the mask on. I wake. And so the next Wednesday, I'm back in again after they they discovered the cancer, and I gotta tell you, Hiawatha was just wonderful because she was just incredibly funny, and she kept me bubbling up. And when I left the recovery room, I was in a great mood. I get up to my my hospital room. There's my wife with our new son, who's seven months old at the time, my mom, stepmom, whose husband had died of cancer, my dad, whose wife had died of cancer, um, both of my grandfathers died of cancer, and now I've got it. And they're all looking like I'm just weeks away from dying. And I looked at him, and my uh the godfather of my oldest son, I believe you know him as Coach Allison.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

I do know Coach Allison.

SPEAKER_02 21:23

So I'm so I'm sorry. Um Coach Allison was part of this entourage, but uh but the godfather of my son is a guy named Chris Chambess Chambo. Okay. And he's there with his wife, and they're holding my son. Uh and I looked at Chambo, who had been a Thunderbird, and I was trying desperately to think of something funny to say, never. And what came out of my mouth was, well, I guess this means I'll never be a Thunderbird. And I fell asleep right away. I don't remember anybody laughing over that. Uh and so when I tell you that that was a traumatic experience, it was over the next several weeks and months. Was told I would never fly again with my family history. It would be the battle of my life and to prepare for that. And so some really good friends helped uh help me recover from that. And then one little sign after another, I started seeing Thunderbird stuff everywhere again. And um I looked at my wife and I looked at my son and I said, I've got to figure out a way out of this. And I put that dream of being a h a Thunderbird back up on the horizon. It was completely unrealistic. If I had told anybody at the time, they would have laughed at me because the Thunderbirds hired people with astronaut physicals, not with somebody with two encyclopedia volume set. So I I uh I spent the next two and a half years uh building my way up to an FEBO. Flight evaluation board. Right, where a bunch of doctors were going to determine thumbs up I get to stay in the Air Force and not fly. Thumbs down I get to leave the Air Force, and then my days are numbered after that. And so I beat the FEB, very surprising to me, they returned me to fly, and I went to Nellis to be the Air Warrior ops officer that fed the fight at uh Fort Irwin with close air support. And then lo and behold, the Thunderbirds send out this this uh message requesting applications, and I put in an application and stumbled into uh the best job of my lifetime.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

So tell us about that job. Tell us what it is like to be Thunderbird lead. But I think uh to really set it up properly, you need tell us about the squadron itself, its mission, and then your role as the leader, and then let's get into the the actual flying.

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Yeah, so uh a little bit of the history of the Thunderbirds is important. So the hit when I got in, the Thunderbirds have been around for 48 years. So this is 1999 when they hire me. I'm gonna be the commander starting January of 2000. But you go back to 1982 and the Thunderbirds had the diamond crash, which almost shut the team down. General uh Bill Creech was the commander of Tactical Air Command, now Air Combat Command, and he took responsibility for the accident. Four pilots dead, he went to Congress, he fought the Air Force who wanted to close it, and then for the rest of his life, he was the godfather of the Air Force, Thunderbirds. And so he was in Las Vegas when I came on board. Very unusual because I had a history of cancer, and uh and he stayed engaged with that the entire time. And so there's so many political dynamics. I worked for a one-star, unlike anybody else who was a lieutenant colonel on base. And then his boss was a two-star, and then his boss was a four-star, and that was my chain of command. And then there was General Creech who was in the wings there at uh Nell. So every time I flew a jet demonstration team, they took a tape of the entire show and they sent it to the one-star, who sent it to the two-star, who sent it to the four-star, who sent it to General Creech, and they all reviewed it every week. So you could say that um uh I I couldn't hide anything, and that was probably true. Uh General Creech was amazing, and he could see things um that most people couldn't see. He had been the uh jet demonstration commander in Europe of the Sky Blazers, identical to the Thunder Thunderbirds in 1950. Uh he flew not just the four-ship lead position, but then he would land and fly the solo demonstrations that they did separately. And he did that for three years and never lost a jet. And the Thunderbirds probably lost seven during those three years. And the Sky Blazer or the the uh uh Red Arrows, everybody else was dropping jets like there was no tomorrow. But but he knew the jet demonstration business and uh he kept us out of trouble.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

So the the Thunderbirds are unique. Can you tell us a little bit about how you you build the team? They come from across the Air Force and they are literally the best of the best.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

I really found the process of how they brought a new hire into the the squadron into making them either a jet demonstration pilot or a show line crew chief just fascinating. And they started out slow um and then uh methodically built closure. So if you you think about the gaps between two airplanes that are uh combat-coded fighters, three to five feet, generally speaking, and we would start at that distance with two jets uh and then go through maneuver after maneuver. For me as the leader, I had to learn to talk before I did something. So if you can imagine driving home this afternoon and and before you put on the brakes, say slowing, and then every time you increase the the pedal pressure on the brake, you would say slowing, let's bring it to a stop. Everything, left turn, right turn, everything had to be preceded by a command. And so learning that for me, two jets over and over, doing a loop, then we would do a roll, then we would actually do a pass and review and start adding maneuvers and aircraft. And we started this process out at a mile above the desert floor, and then slowly whirlwittled our way to where we were flying all six jets in a 36 jet demonstration maneuver package down at 500 feet. And then we got certified to fly a demonstration, and we dropped down to 400 feet, which was the min altitude for the diamond for about half the show season, and then we went down lower than that to about 300 feet. And the entire process was just magical. That closure, that building commitment, and then loyalty, and and finally the kind of trust you could bet your life on was the way that the team did business. And if you were ever looking for an onboarding program, uh the Thunderbirds knew how to do it and they did it right.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

You mentioned that typically fighter aircraft in flying in close formation will be about three feet of wingtip separation where wingtip to wingtip. How close would the Thunderbirds fly?

SPEAKER_02 27:59

We started out at five feet, something like that, like everybody else, three to five feet, and then we would slowly start moving it in to where there was no wingtip clearance. So the wingtips were aligned when I was flying the demonstration. And this was largely a Creech limitation following the uh the loss of all four jets that year, the same year that the Thunderbirds had lost four jets, they lost three more and killed two other people. So six jets in one year. And if you could imagine six pilots in one year, trauma and the the want to preserve the team. So General Creech stuck us with wingtips aligned, and we probably had uh three feet of separation uh this way, uh, and then a stack of probably 18 to 20 inches. And that was for the normal maneuvering, but when we came in and started doing echelon formations from the the tip of my tail uh on my airplane or on the airplane behind me to the ventral fins on mine. So we were in stack like this, was about 17 inches. And we would put four jets in a stack that way. And so what you'll see today is the General Creech passed away in 2003, I believe it was, and it they have slowly started uh doing overlaps, and now they're their their formations at the end of the season are very tight, back like they were in the 1950s and 1960s. So the uh demonstration can be incredibly demanding to fly on a clear day when everything is going right and you're doing a high show. It's one of the greatest joys I've ever lived in my life to dance those airplanes across the skies, and I did. We would go with the the Delta formation in repositions, I'd get that 70 degrees nose high to keep it in close to the crowd to where there wasn't a lot of time to go get a cheeseburger in between maneuvers. And with the the diamond uh on repositions, at the end of the show when we were doing the reposition to come out and pitch out and land, I very often got it to 70 to 80 degrees nose high. And then because we had no gas on board, you could just continue that vertical vector until you had clearance, rolled the jets in and come in just for the most wonderful, graceful pull-up to uh to a pitch up. And I I will tell you that of all of the things I've done, I was very I was very good at doing BFM. I loved the air-to-air, I loved the air-to-ground, but the the mission that I would fly uh every day for the rest of my life would be the high show and the Thunderbirds. It was the greatest, most challenging thing I've ever done.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Aaron Powell I have heard that the Thunderbirds actually reposition during a maneuver so that the perspective continually looks correct from the crowd's perspective. So, for example, from a certain angle, you'll actually ride higher in some uh phases of the maneuver than you would in others. Is that true?

SPEAKER_02 30:54

Yeah, we call those shifts cheats. We called them cheats because from the ground perspective, it looked like we were just flying the perfect diamond. But because if you're coming in across the crowd like this, the left wingman is very close, and his wing looks very, very close to the number two man in that formation. But number four looks like he's way out of position, either low or he's out. And so sometimes we would fly higher and further away to make it look like everybody was in a perfect diamond. So it doesn't make sense, but we would actually adjust it to the crowd's eye at show center. Now, if you were four miles or three miles to the north or south of that position, you could see those cheats, but the crowd couldn't. That's even more impressive.

SPEAKER_01 31:41

So you're not you're not just flying a specific position when you're on the wing, but you are constantly adjusting with the respective of the crowd in mind. So after leading the Thunderbirds, a few years later, you were in the Middle East, back in a combat role. Can you tell us about those uh combat missions that you and your team uh flew when you were there?

SPEAKER_02 32:05

Yeah, so um the average combat sortie, um, I probably flew, I'm gonna guess 70 missions over Iraq in the F-16. Um and the average combat mission was to go up uh as a two ship and you would check in uh so out of Al-Ud, it was almost an hour drive to get in country. You would refuel just as soon as you got into Iraq, go up to Baghdad, about 50 miles away from Baghdad is when you could talk to the ASOC, which was very odd. You would get relays, radio relays from tankers, and then you would go up and if there was a troops in contact, you would move to it and then you would engage as required. If there wasn't, then you would do pipeline patrols looking for terrorists that were going to blow up a pipeline or something like that. And so the average sortie was going up and uh dwell time over Baghdad, which was fascinating. To take your targeting pod and actually look at all of the different facets of that city, um, just amazing. And then on occasion, we would be called uh troops in contact. Um this is 2004 when I got over there in August. Fallujah too happened on a November time frame, and so we were in stacks right over the north, south, and east and west points of Fallujah waiting for calls, and we would come in and drop ordinance uh on um the Anglico, the the uh ground fact for the uh Marine Corps calls. Uh and funny because one of those orbits was right over Baghdad International, and you and be in these stacks and watch airliners come in and fly around you to cut to do a visual approach into the runway, which is just fascinating. And it would it wasn't quite be doing a basic fighter maneuver to avoid them, but you it they did get your attention, right, coming in. Um and no one wanted to fly low for a long period of time, and so they would come in and spiral over and uh and the likes. But but we dropped uh munitions there in the preparation for that. Uh we dropped munitions on safe houses where you had munitions storage facilities. And I gotta tell you, when uh one little 500-pound J Dam going through the roof of a house that has um lots and lots of rockets in it would go up like uh like the Fourth of July. Those those engagements were all uh interesting, but the ones that really got your attention were the troops in contact. And when guys are yelling at you on the ground, we are um actually uh merged with the enemy. Um there's nothing you can do to drop ammunition. For whatever reason, Al Qaeda, when they heard jets low coming right over the top of them, they automatically assumed that we knew where all of them were and we were going to start raining terror from above. And so we would drop down to 50 feet and we would go right over their heads and afterburner as fast as we could without, you know, uh over speeding the stores on the airplane. And very often that caused everybody to clear out and to give our guys the the time they needed to extract themselves from a bad situation. We did drop several times in troops in contact, but but uh the there there are a bunch of stories. Uh the longest story, the longest sortie I had was a troops in contact situation. Just wonderful event. And over the course of that year, I never wondered what I was doing there. I was always there to to make sure that the guys and gals that were deployed on the ground got back home safely and and I knew that that was my role and I loved it.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

So you mentioned Al-Udid. Can you tell us where that is and then uh tell us about your longest sortie?

SPEAKER_02 35:54

Well, it's uh probably one of my my favorite sorties of all time. Al-Ud was uh um it's off the coast of uh Saudi Arabia. It kind of like looks like a little football um that's off the the uh the right on the edge of that. Uh and it's a a wonderful country. Um it's uh um two basically population centers, but Doha is the their capital, and that's where the vast majority of people uh reside. And our airbase was just on the outside of it, Al-U-D. And so we would take off um a normal sortie there. Um we would go out and pre-flight the airplanes, and David, you've heard about heat in Tucson and heat in the desert, but uh this heat was something I'd never felt before. Because at Al-U-D'd, you had the highest level of humidity coupled with the highest level of heat. And so I would drive my vehicle out to the flight line to to talk to troops, and one day it it had on my thermometer, on the car, 148 degrees on the black tarmac, and these guys were out turning wrenches without thinking about it. You know, they're they're they're shirtless, they're in shorts, but they are they're working their tails off in that scene, and you get acclimated to that. So I would get out, do a walk around around the airplane. By the time I got out of an air-conditioned van, walked around the airplane, my tan flight suit was soaked, my bunny boots, which were uh kind of corduroy leather, were completely soaked, they had turned dark brown. I'd get in the airplane, the air conditioning system in the F-16 worked like a champ, but you would have it full cold. I'd take off, climb up to 22,000 feet, and every time I got to 22,000 feet, the wicking effect would happen. And I would have to turn the heat full up in order to sh to warm me up because I was freezing in the cockpit. About the time I went feet dry in Iraq, then I could go back to a normal air conditioner setting. So this day was actually December 25th. It was Christmas Day. We took off right uh before the sun came up, a two ship, and the weather was supposed to be bad uprange. And so sure enough, we take off, we're going up the coast, and as we get to the each of the controllers, v. Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, you heard expats or you had native controllers, but David, we talk about this um religious, you've got to be sensitive. Every controller said, Merry Christmas to us. It was just the most genuine greeting that you could have. We get up on our first tanker and the boomer has this big old Santa hat, and then he's got his ear muffs over the top of that. We pull up alongside after we get gas. The pilot and the co-pilot are looking out at us over the uh out of the right window, and and they both have Santa hats on, and then we cruise up to Baghdad. Well, the weather was bad. Uh the clouds were up around 25 to 27,000 feet the tops. And so we sat up over the top of Baghdad for about two hours. We'd go back, refuel, and go back, and there literally nothing was happening, but the weather had gotten so bad across the Gulf that we were the only two ship that was airborne, and we were the only two ship that was going to be airborne for several hours. We didn't know how much time. And so we're up there about the six-hour point, and we get a call that a uh troops in contact had taken place on Christmas Day in Mosul, which is about a little bit less than an hour drive north of Baghdad. And so there are no letdown plates, there was no radar controller. I look at my map, I know that there's a couple of tall antennas around Mosul. I put my wingman in radar trail at two miles and I talk to him constantly. I say, if you hear me stop talking, climb immediately. I have run into some. And I bottom out right where I thought I as low as I could go, which was about 1800 feet AGL. I dropped down to 1500 just to give myself a pad away from the clouds. And then we uh my wingman pops out, and then we go into tactical formation. We find this three striker vehicles, Marines, I believe they were Marines, um, and they were one of them had been hit by an IED, and the other two were towing or uh running gunship uh uh control trying to protect the other two. And they was running around the vehicles. And so for the next, I think, four and a half, almost five hours, we did uh basically loops around this. Every now and then they would take fire, we would go right over their heads, really low, fire would stop. And then because we couldn't let them go, I sent my wingmen up to get gas. The tankers were wonderful, they moved right overhead, and so we started doing this on and off again. Um we called it yo-yo, you're on your own operations. And so my wingman and I flew top cover for these guys as they continued to trundle toward their little casern and their little outpost there in Mosul. And when they actually crossed that fence line and went in, I we knew that they were very likely going to have a very wonderful Christmas dinner, you know, one that they they they had been looking forward to like none other before in their life. And then we went back up and topped off one more time and then headed back south. And when I touched down, yeah, you know, I had uh two young boys at the time, young wife. I'd left them for a year, and and I touched down and I knew that that was uh a day I would remember for the rest of my life as one of the most special sorties that I'd ever flown.

SPEAKER_01 41:32

So, JV, I have one last question for you. We know flying can be dangerous. All of us have lost friends along the way. Is there anyone you'd like us to be sure and remember today?

SPEAKER_02 41:43

Well, I've lost twelve friends in the business of uh flying fighters, and uh it started out uh my the first guy we lost was a guy from my flight school class named Scott Trapp, bigger than life. Uh he was a lineman for Oregon and came to the F-16 and then ended up having a G Lock at Torre Home long before I got there. And and he died uh about the time I'm getting to uh George Air Force Base three years after uh I came into service.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

But for those who may not be familiar with it, a G-Lock is G-induced loss of consciousness when you're pulling G's so hard that you literally black out in the cockpit at the controls.

SPEAKER_02 42:24

Yeah, and so I've had uh unfortunately two other friends die of G-Locks and then a variety of other mishaps along the way. Um one of uh my uh close friends at Torrehone was a guy named Danny Johnson, and Danny uh and I used to fight over crud tables and drink together at the bar. He was from the 612th across the street from us, the 613th Squids, and and uh I um uh left for a um an IG kind of assignment at uh Aviano where I was going to be flying with a unit and and grading them. And while I was gone, um Danny uh and a f another friend of mine were involved with a mid-air and uh Danny um was uh we had several modifications to the F-16, but this one when his jet went out of control, he was conscious, he pulled the handle and and the the canopy um uh left the airplane, but in the out of control position it was in, it turned, and when it did, it severed as opposed to pulled the um the cords that let the the uh ejection seat know that the canopy was missing. And so he ended up unfortunately um riding the jet in. So I several uh other friends, but that was perhaps them the most tragic for me. Uh another very good friend named Dylan McFarlane, who uh was a a legend in the the Guard and Reserve, um, and he was flying out of Hill Air Force Base, and um he may be the last friend that I've lost and and And that long line of guys. But uh Sandy, his wife, just wonderful. I knew both of their kids when we were at uh Coonsan together. They were little types at the time. Just wonderful people that you'll always miss. And and all of them, I can still see Danny's smiling face. He had just the biggest smile when he knew he was right and I knew he was wrong. And just that whole thing. People, personalities that you meet that you'll always miss.

SPEAKER_01 44:28

JV, thanks so much for being with us today.

SPEAKER_02 44:30

Never, it's always a pleasure to see you, and I love uh your podcast. Love flying stories, and I'm grateful to be part of the uh the lineage now.

SPEAKER_01 44:40

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 I know we've uh met that mission today for sure. New episodes of the podcast drop every Thursday morning, and you can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com. Until our next sortie, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.