The Flyboy Podcast: Guest Greg Feest

Aircraft flown: F-111, F-15C, F-117, A-7, F-15E

Join us as we explore the incredible flying career of General Greg Feest, including his experiences with the F-117, F-15, and other aircraft, his combat missions in Panama and Desert Storm, and the secrets of stealth technology.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 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 General Greg Feast. General Feast has flown over 5,600 flight hours in the F-111, the F-15, the F-117, the A-7, the AT-38, and the F-15E. He also has the distinction of having flown the first combat sortie in the F-117 during Operation Just Cause and dropped the first bomb during Operation Desert Storm leading the F-117s. So with that, General Feast, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Thanks, David. I'll call you David or never, as your call sign is, and that's how I knew you before. Thanks for inviting me on today.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Greg, what was the moment you first knew you wanted to be a pilot?

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Well I grew up in Wisconsin, and there was no military bases in Wisconsin, and there still aren't. I was close to Lake Michigan, and I would ride my bike down to the beach on summer mornings and uh hang out, and I would watch the fighters from Great Lakes, the Navy fighters, fly along the shore, not over the crowd. Not that we had a crowd, but uh real close. And I thought, man, I gotta do that. And then I also was would be driving with my family down highways in southern Wisconsin, and B-52s would fly over very, very low. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool too. So uh right then I decided I wanted to join the Air Force.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

So let's talk about some uh bad situations and then some cool ones. What was your worst in-flight emergency?

SPEAKER_01 1:46

That's interesting. I was the 19th Air Force Commander at Randolph Air Force Base, and I was gonna fly to Columbus Air Force Base to do a change of command. And I was getting ready to leave this assignment in a couple weeks, so this was going to be one of my last sorties. Because I was an instructor pilot in the IFF Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals course at Randolph, I was allowed to fly solo. I did not need an instructor pilot with me. But I did have a wingman. Well, it was a low, low clouds that morning, and we did a formation takeoff. After takeoff, I went through a flock of birds. My right engine rolled back. My wingman yelled, a fireball came out of your right engine. I immediately just looked at my engine instruments. I was worried because we were getting ready to, I had brought them in to fingertip and we were getting ready to go into the weather. And so I stayed below the weather and I said, Okay, I stared at my other engine instruments because to me I just reverted to what we used to do in the simulator. And this emergency happened every time you did an emergency procedure simulator, heavyweight after takeoff, and either you lost both engines and you had to eject, or you lost one, and either you had to come around and land heavyweight. I watched that left engine and it was fine. We went through the weather and started to climb, and we got to about 5,000 feet, and I was out of the weather a little bit. Well, I immediately started back home. He looked me over, he said, I don't see any damage to anything. And I said, Alright, I want you to hang out here because I'm gonna put my gear and flaps down, and then if you say I'm okay, I want you to get out of the way and get away from me. So we did all those things and I cleared him off. Well, in the meantime, I'm talking to the tower and radar control because I'm in the weather, so I've not visual flight rules. I can't just see the field and go land. I have to actually do an instrument approach, which is what you would do in a simulator if you were practicing. And I was heavyweight, the tower is I got two radios, and the tower's on one and RapCon's on the other one, and the tower's going, the thunderstorm's here, it's terrible, you can't come in here and land. You there's no way you can land here. And I said, I'm coming in. I only have one engine, and this one could quit at any time. So, you know, there's nobody else out here, so leave me alone, I'll be coming in. So I proceeded to fly the approach exactly like I would have done in the sim. Landed, it was heavy rain, but the winds weren't out of limits for crosswind. The T-38 back then had brakes that were terrible. You would hydroplane, and then your brakes wouldn't work, and you'd end up going into the barrier. Well, I wasn't gonna do that. So I landed as sh, you know, as soon as I could on the runway. I left enough runway in front of me. I aerobed as much as I could to try to get the speed down, and then I lowered the nose, and I got on the brakes, and I couldn't hit them too hard or I'd start a fire. So I got on the brakes and slowly pressed them down, and finally I started to slow down, and as I came closer to stopping, I was hydroplaning and I did a 180 on the runway. And thankfully, because I was using differential brakes at the time uh after that happened, I was able to stop and uh and recover, which meant uh just sitting there for a few minutes, not worrying about anything else except I'm fine. And the fire trucks came out, I'd shut down and they came out, and then they took me in, and it was point rain. And uh it was just unbelievable that to me that was exactly what I would have practiced in the simulator. And and uh we got into the squadron, my wingman was already there. He says, uh, yeah, we got to spare, we're just gonna go in one airplane, but you still got to go because we're gonna go do that change of command. So we got in the airplane, he was in my backseat, and we went and did it. But uh that was probably the uh so let me ask you this.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Uh given the number of different airplanes you've flown between the 111, the F-117, the F-15, put us in the cockpit of a couple of those airplanes to give us a sense of what they're like.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Well, the 111 was uh a low level using terrain following radar uh aircraft. Our mission, I was at Upper Hayford, that was my first assignment, and our mission was, you know, to run the fold a gap. This was back in the Russia days, and and we're gonna we're gonna take our weapons, and you could guess what kind of weapons we had on the F-111 at the time, and we're gonna go into Russia and drop them, and then probably never make it home. But we all figured it was gonna be a one-way mission. That mission was unique because you'd fly at night and you'd put the the radar, the terrain following radar on 400 feet, and you'd stare at again your radar scope and your we had an escope, which would tell you where the terrain was so that you could make sure that you were not gonna fly into the terrain. But there were there were several F-111 accidents in the days that uh people did hit mountains or the ground because they weren't paying attention to their equipment. So I was a WISO in the 111s. So then I went to pilot training, a WISO weapon system operator. And for those that listen probably know that they just rescued a WISO in the F-15E in Iran.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

So I was gonna say right now, the acronym WISO is about the best-known Air Force acronym out there.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

So um I went to pilot training and I got an F-15 C model at Langley Air Force Base, and that was the most fun I've ever had flying fighters because our mission was dog fighting. Where there was no bomb dropping, there was no learning how to do these other kinds of things. It was just go out, and usually we'd fight the uh F-14s and later the F-18s that were at Oceana from the Navy, and we would go out over the water, and first ones there would go to the far side of the area, and then the other ones would show up and it's fights on, and you know, or when when whenever somebody was having their last sortie in the F-15C, and we went against the Navy, we just called it guns only, no missiles. It was guns only, so the only way you're gonna get a kill is by gunning somebody. And again, it was a lot of fun. That is an amazing aircraft. The 117 is obviously a uh fighter bomber. Um, our mission was to drop bombs. We could only carry two, but we did a good job with those, and we can talk more about that later. But that was a unique mission, and then the F-15E model, I flew that at Cutter during the OIF and OEF, uh Iraqi freedom and enduring freedom. Again, it was it was it was wonderful to me because now I'm the pilot up front and I got a whistle in the back. But again, that was a great mission as well. And people ask me what were your favorite airplanes? What's your favorite airplane to fly? And I always say peacetime, the F-15C model, and combat, the 117.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Let's talk about that. You're wearing a uh a pin there on your jacket lapel. Tell us about that pin, and then we'll then let's talk about that airplane.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Okay. That pin, right there, is a nighthawk pin, which is is a symbol of the F-117. We were the Nighthawks. And this one has Ruby eyes. Whenever a pilot got checked out in the 117, they got a bandit number. And because when you got checked out, you were solo. There was no two-seat F-117s. So you got a bandit number, and then you got given one of these Nighthawk pins with the Ruby I.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

In the F-117, you had the honor, challenge, and frightening task all combined, of being the first uh pilot to fly in combat at Panama, and then the first during Desert Storm. So we'll come back to Panama in a in a minute, but let's let's talk first about Desert Storm. Can you tell us about that first night and that mission?

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Yeah, and and and I'll just m mention Panama here to say that that mission, we did not even stealth up our aircraft. And I'll tell you what stealth up means in a second. But we had the beacons on the airplane. We didn't have them lit up, and we were talking to each other. We had our radar our radio antennas out. So there was no threat. So enough said on just cause right now. Desert storm was going to be a totally different situation, and uh and it was. We all got there, well, my squadron got there in August. We thought we were gonna be home in 30 days. Well, Desert Shield lasted from August till January. So uh we we weren't home in 30 days, and then Desert Storm started. So, but the advantage of being there that long was we got to do a lot of practice. We got to practice using our infrared systems against a desert environment where it was hot, blowing sand, smoke, all kinds of different terrain that we were not used to. So we got to experience that during Desert Shield. And we also planned our missions. We had a lot of time to plan the missions. Once a week, we would take several F-117s up to the Iraqi border. So we were probably 500 miles from the Iraqi border, 400, 500 miles. But we would take off, join up on a tanker, and then fly up with the tanker to the border, and just fly up and down the border a couple of times, and then take gas and go home. And the reason we were doing those missions every week was to desensitize the Iraqis so that when Desert Storm was gonna start, we went up there with the tankers. If we had stealthed up, they they wouldn't know, but the tankers can't. So they're gonna see the tankers. So we wanted to desensitize them.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Can I ask you when you did that? Did you have your uh did you leave your antennas out while you were doing those those missions along the border, or did you stealth up? You know, we left up.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Because we we wanted them to be able to see us and think that they could find us, just trying to fool them.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Nothing like a good deception plan.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Thankfully, uh, you know, in the middle of January, we got told, called into where where we slept, and said, Don't come in until a certain time. And we figured, ooh, something's going on. And you know, we knew what was going on because of the news out there, and you know, there was no uh iPhones or anything, but uh we used to call home on you know on those radios where you have to say over and out on them so that they know when to switch the radio so you could talk to your family. In any case, uh we got told to come in late, so we knew we knew something was gonna happen, and we went in and they said, Okay, you're starting tonight. I won't go into a lot of detail on the planning. I mean, I like I said, we spent some months months planning this. I was part of the uh mission planning cell and we had our we had our I'll say shit together. Uh we knew what we were gonna do. We took off though, no talking on the radios, no taxi lights on when we taxied. We used our infrared systems to see the taxiways and to get to the end of the runway. We got armed up, we took off in two ships, we were calm out the whole time. We did the rendezvous with the tanker. Again, communications out, we never talked to them. The only time we talked to anybody was when we were on the boom taking gas. There was an interphone system where we could talk to the boomer and we could talk to the crew on the KC-135 or the KC-10. And that was it. And then we would fly up to the border and we would one of us would be on each wing, and at a designated time that we knew we would stealth up. So stealth up means bring in your antennas so there's no radar cross section of an antenna sticking out. We didn't have the beacons on, they were but during Desert Storm, because we didn't have new antennas, conformal antennas, once we sucked in the antennas, we could not talk or hear anybody. We were on our own. Once we did that, it was a go. So in my case, I entered Iraq before H hour. H hour was 0200. I ended up dropping my bomb at 0151. And my target was Nukay IOC, Intercept Operations Center, which was just about 50 miles inside the border of Iraq. And the reason I had that bunker was because that bunker controlled the fighters of Iraq. They would be targeting all the non-stealthy aircraft that were going to come in several minutes later. So I had to take out that bunker, and I also had a wingman who was one minute behind me. We had different aim points for the bunker, but we were both hitting the bunker. The key part for me was finding this bunker. Bunkers are sometimes not easy to find. Thankfully, I found it. I armed up my weapon system, I tracked it, had the laser going. And then, right before it was time to pickle off the bomb, I thought to myself, do they really want me to drop this bomb and start a war? And I go, well, I don't care if they do or if they don't. They can't stop me now because I don't have any communications. So I'm doing it. I've been planning this. So I dropped a bomb, 2,000-pound GBU-27. We called it the bunker buster bomb. It can only be carried by the F-117, and it was a great weapon because it could go down deep. Rarely, if ever, did anything fail on that bomb. 95% of the time, it went right where we aimed it. So I watched the bomb hit and I knew it went in because I watched the smoke come out of the air vents, different positions of the bunker, and I could see that. And I thought, oh, thank God I didn't miss. But now I'm going to do a 180-degree turn and go out to the west. It was called the H3 area. And the west is where Iraq had their scud missiles that they were going to launch into Israel. They also had a sec an SOC, a sector operations center, which was another command type kind of thing. And that's what my second target was going to be. So as I made that 180-degree turn, I I thought, well, my my wingman's a minute behind me. I'm going to watch his bomb hit and see what happens. So I look back over my left shoulder and I see these red fireworks coming up. And I go, what the heck did I hit? You know, what is what is causing that? Well, it took me about three seconds to figure out, wait a minute, those are tracers. They're shooting anti-aircraft artillery at me, triple A, and this is crazy. And right then I said, Sorry, Dave, who was my wingman, I said, I'm no longer watching you drop your bomb. I'm getting out of here as fast as I can. And I pushed the throttles up as far as I go, and I got the hell out of there. It was amazing because then I looked out my right side and I could see Baghdad, and the sky was lit up. And a lot of of us have seen the what the media showed. And uh, you know, it I always described it as have others that it was like flying through the fireworks at Disneyland. It was unbelievable. And you could see, I could see SAMs being launched, surface-day missiles. The key there was if a SAM was launched and it was uh just a light, a pinpoint coming at you, it was coming at it was then it was aimed at you. But if it was line of sight and was going left or right, they didn't see us. So I didn't worry about that. Now I will say up front that we had no electronic countermeasures, we had no radar warning receivers, we had nothing that would tell us we were being tracked or targeted or shot at. It was all eyeball. And so the defensive countermeasures that we used were lower the seat and don't look outside anymore. I thought, well, I'm not going to Baghdad, thank God, because that looks terrible. So I looked down in front of me and I had another 150, 200 miles to go. I thought, oh my God, there was a small spot in the in the sky in the ground where fireworks were coming up, but it was a real small area, and I thought, oh, thanks. That's where I'm going now. So they had AAA and Sam there as well. So I continued to the target, hoping that my wingman made it through. Surprised that I made it through. But the first one, again, they didn't know I was there, so until the bomb hit, doesn't it wasn't scary, I'll say. So going to the second target, though, I thought there's no way I'm gonna make it through there. We had tapes, you know, that recorded everything we said. I said goodbye to my spouse and that tape. Don't know where that tape ever ever ended up. I have no idea. But uh I didn't think I was gonna make it out of there. And I went into that area, dropped a bomb, hit it, did another turn south to head out of Iraq as fast as I could, and hoped again that my wingman would make it through. So as we crossed the border, we would de-stealth, put our antennas back out so we could talk to each other. So I waited a few minutes after I crossed the border, because now I have to find the tanker or I can't make it home. And I have to join up with my wingman first. So I check him in and he answers. And I go, Oh my god, this is awesome. He's coming home. And I had a knee board on my right leg, and on it I had the whole first wave pilots. As I went to my tanker, I listened to all of them check in. And every time somebody checked in, I put a pencil mark next to their name, and after about 30 minutes, everybody had a check mark next to their name, so I knew we were all going home. And now that I have communications again, I could hear other fighters diverting. We have emergency, we have emergency, we have damage, battle damage, gotta go here, gotta go there. And I'm just thinking, oh my god. So we joined up on the tanker, topped off, and then split off the tanker and went home. While we landed, by the way, my wife was deployed as well. She was the acting uh uh RM resource manager, uh manager, and uh she met me at the plane, and that was pretty outstanding. And uh we both agreed that everybody was coming home because she had been sitting in the command post, nobody declared battle damage, and it turned out we had no battle damage that first night. We never let anybody fly two nights in a row. So in a 43-day war, the most anybody got was 22 sorties. This second night, I was gonna be on the mission planning cell, and I thought, oh great, this is great, because I do not want to go do that again because we're not gonna be so lucky next time. Well, the next night, no damage. The third night I went out again, came back, no damage. After about a week, we all thought the engineers were right. They told us that we were stealthy, they told us if we mission planned correctly, we could avoid threats. It didn't mean we would never get hit. We flew 1,271 sorties during a desert storm in the entire wing, and we had no damage on any aircraft. And to me, I thank the support command support staff, the maintainers, the Lockheed Martin engineers, our engineers, and the the we call them the uh, well, they put the ram radar absorbent material on the airplanes. We called them the Martians, and uh obviously they had to keep those aircraft pristine so that we did not show to anybody's radar.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

And I think you bring up a really important point there, you know, describing flying the squadron the wing, flying night after night, and the fact that on average you flew twenty-two or so sorties over the course of what turned out to be forty nights. Members of the army like to talk about how Desert Storm lasted 100 hours. Well, that was after the 40-day air campaign that preceded the ground war. So and and by the way, when the Army crossed, you know, there were certainly some fights, but in many cases the Iraqis were ready to surrender after what you guys had done during that lead up to the ground war.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

And we had air supremacy. I mean, they didn't have any fighters up there, so the the ground troops didn't have to worry about that. I I didn't I failed to say, David, that when I saw that uh the tracers of the triple A, I thought to myself, how ridiculous it is at Red Flag. And red flag, for those that don't know, is where fighter fighters would go to practice for combat. And it's a great, great training scenario. But it was always just talk. Okay. We'll jinx and we'll do this to avoid AAA. And if a SAM gets launched, we'll do this and we'll do this maneuver. But at Nellis, at the Rangers there, you never saw AAA, and they would send up like smoky SAMs, they called them, little rockets with smoke on them and go, There's a SAM launch. Oh my God, let's let's avoid but when until you actually see it, and then you feel like what what the pilots saw in Vietnam.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

And it was a let's shift gears for a second. Tell me uh w when you flew the F-117, it was uprange at uh Tonopah, correct?

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Yeah, I I mean I I had two tours. So I had one there when we were a black program, and then I had one at Holloman.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Aaron Powell Tell us what it was like uh flying uprange to give people a sense of the F-117 community during those years when the program was unacknowledged and it was completely secret and nobody knew about, not even those of us who were in the rest of the Air Force.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Aaron Ross Powell It was an experience. And when I got picked for the program, I had been flying the F-15 C model at Langley Air Force Base, and a pilot uh came into the squadron uh towards the end of my uh three years. He had been one of the original F-117 pilots. And I was getting ready to go to Luke Air Force Base to be a F-15 C model IP. Our one of our previous wing commanders was there, and he was going to hire me and my wife, so that would have been nice. Well, in the meantime, uh this pilot shows up and we we did we went hunting together and things, we did a lot of talking, and he said, You need to go to the 4450th. And the 4450th was the group at Nellis that was the cover story for what we did at Tonopah, and that's where the A7s were based. And so our cover story was we just flew A7s and did different kinds of tests and tactics training. He started talking to people and I ended up getting hired. They said, Yeah, we want you to come. And now the only issue is, well, we were both going to Luke, my wife and I, so what's she gonna do? Well, my wife was currently on an assignment in the Pentagon, so I get a call saying, Hey, does your wife want to come to the 4450th? And I said, Well, call her up and ask her. I said, But before you do, I just want to make sure we're not gonna be in the same squadron, are we? And they said no, and I said, Okay, I'm good with that then. Because that went to work.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

So anyway, we both end up going there. So she gets there in January of 88, and I have to go to Tucson to check out the A7. So she was there for their ORI and helped them get it through, get through the Ori, and they got an outstanding, and she knew what I was gonna do before I did, because I ended up coming back from Tucson in March, and then they finally put me in a room and showed me a video and said, This is what you're gonna fly. And you know, for those that can remember, the first time they saw this, they go, There's no way that thing flies. I mean, when you see it parked on a ramp, it doesn't look like it can fly, and it can't without computers and fly by wire. But in any case, so she knew what I was gonna do. So my situation was unique because we had no kids, and she and I both knew what I did and what she did. And we would go up there on Mondays, sometimes at different times, and we'd go home on Fridays. You know, somebody said to me once, you should just put all your household goods, all your furniture in storage and just stay in casinos on weekends. And I thought, well, I could do that, but my wife would not go for that. So uh no, we had a home. What was amazing about the whole Tonopah thing was that all the workers up there, the people that lived in Tonopah that worked there, they kept the secret and it never got out. And it it is a unique situation. I mean, you know, again, we can we could talk about the shoot down in Iran. Somebody leaked that there was a guy trying to evade and escape and get rescued, and by leaking it, you know, they almost got him. And and that's why you have to keep certain things close hold. So the secret never got out, which is an amazing story. But finally in uh early 89, they decided it's getting too costly to keep this as a top secret black program, and they put out that black and white photo that was kind of fuzzy, and then uh they slowly started showing the airplane at different locations and started with Nellis Air Force Base so the families could come and see what we all had been doing.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

Let's go a different direction now and talk about Panama. This was Operation Just Cause, Christmas 1989. This was the first combat employment of the F-117. How did you get picked to do that? And tell us about what happened.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

You got an hour? What happened was my squadron commander, I was a flight commander, my squadron commander called me in and said, they want you up at the wing, just be up there at this certain time. And so I went up there and the 06, the colonel, was there. He had me, an electronic warfare officer, eWO, because the EWOs were the ones that helped plan our missions through a certain system to avoid threats, and then a guy from mission planning. And he briefed us, all three of us, on just cause, what it was gonna be. Now, this was in the spring of '89, well before the mission. My squadron commander didn't even know what I was gonna do. So the three of us spent uh several trips going to uh Fort Bragg and talking to the JSOC and planning the mission. Well, the reason I was chosen because I was the wing top gun.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

So That's a good reason.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Yeah, that yeah, that was a good reason. So the JSOC guys say you can't tell them you can do things, you have to show them. So they came to Tonopaw, they brought me in a room, and they said, Here's your target. We're gonna be on the range, you're gonna drop this laser-guided bomb, inert, not a live bomb, and we're gonna be out there and we want you to hit this target at this time, okay? So I go fly the mission and I do it, and I come back and they look at my tape and they say, Yep, we were out there and we see it on your tape, and you did it. All right, the 117s are gonna do this mission, the part that we did. And you had to have laser-guided bombs, and there was only a few of us that did. The F-15Es did not have their targeting pods yet. The F-16s, I don't want to badmouth the F-16s, but I was never checked out in one, so I guess I can because you know, F-15C guys and F-16 guys, you know, we knew we were always better. They uh were given the same mission that I was given and said, hit this target at this time. Well, I won't say how they did. I don't know how they did, but they weren't chosen. So they picked the 117. Now, the reason the 117 was picked for this mission was because it wasn't uh, I think I already stated, but we did not stealth up for this mission. We did not suck in our antennas, we did not even take the beacons off. But we dropped GBU-27s, which as I said earlier, never fail, rarely fail, I should say. They go where we aim them, and they do not cause collateral damage. And that was the issue. There's a lot to this story, a lot of mission planning, you know, a lot of arguing between the services. Remember, there hadn't been a conflict since Vietnam, and uh, you know, Grenada wasn't our conflict. So everybody trains to go to combat, everybody wants to go to combat, Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force. So all we wanted to do was be part of it. Well, because the JSOCs were the planning people, they said the 117s are gonna go in first and they're gonna drop bombs, and the goal of the mission was to capture Noriega, not to kill him, to capture him. So we sent eight 117s down to Panama, two spares and six others, and we had six possible targets. The targets consisted of barracks, two on barracks, two on his Riojato house, and two on his mountain house. So six of us, but they were not gonna let us go drop bombs if they didn't know where he was, because they did not want us to to kill him. It turned out we flew all the way down there, very long mission. When we got down there, only two of us were executed, me and my wingman. Being the mission planner, I kind of knew that the first two were gonna go no matter what. So it just so happened that I was in the first ones because just so happened. Yeah. Right before takeoff, we had all intentions of hitting the barracks. And uh and at one point during mission planning, this is this is how uh strange this whole thing was. The uh planner said, Hey, 117s, can you just drop some practice training bombs? We're talking about 33-pound bombs, 25-pound bombs on the building, and then we'll tell them if they don't give up, we're gonna drop heavier stuff. And I said, No, we're not doing that. We're not doing that. Okay, okay. Right before we took off, the wing commander called me in and said, Hey, you're not allowed to hit the barrack. I said, What do you mean? Well, they don't want to destroy the barracks, they want to keep the barracks. Okay. Now, did I really care? No, because I just wanted to go. And he said, I want you to aim 50 meters short of the barracks and drop in a field. I said, Well, what am I aiming at? He goes, I don't know. Figure out what you think 50 meters is and just drop it in a field. I said, Okay, all right. And I had one barracks and my wingman had another barracks off to the left side of me, and he was told the same thing. So off we go. Now the Army was in charge of this whole thing. So I'm speaking as an Air Force guy, but you know, nobody was happy that the Air Force was gonna be first. But once my bomb hit, one minute later, the Navy SEALs, the Army Rangers, and others are jumping out of C-130s and whatever else they jump out of into those same fields to go into those barracks and get all the Panymanian defense forces. So we couldn't be late. We had to be on time, and uh they accepted that you know, we're gonna be first. But the Army is the ones who decided not to hit the barracks, and I think that was to intentionally make the, I'll say, the Air Force look bad, in particular me and my wee man. So we dropped on the fields, we got home, and then you know, it was analyzing the tapes, just like Desert Storm, and you know, okay, well, you were 60 meters away. Yeah, okay, you know, I wasn't aiming at any bushes, you know, but I didn't take out the barracks. And it turns out, after the fact, they weren't in the barracks. There was one guy in the barracks, and he was sleeping, and the the bomb in the field shook him so hard if he fell out of the cot. At least this is the story I was told. And I, you know, 90% of what fighter pilots say is true, right? Well, no, I guess it's 10%.

SPEAKER_00 32:43

10%. 10%. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

So in any case, um, they were already gone, and it turned out the uh the PDF, the Panaminian Defense Forces, they knew the whole thing was coming because they had people uh at islands on the way up and saw the whole armada of aircraft coming up. And so, you know, but it was a success. They got Noriega. So anyway, I get home and it turns out my upper UHF antenna is sheared off. And they said, What happened? And I said, Well, after I dropped the bomb, I rolled inverted because I wanted to see the bomb hit, and they were shooting at me and they shot the antenna right off. Now, that's the 90% that's not true. That you know, there was no there was no threat. They weren't shooting anything. And what really happened was the boomer, because it was dark and he wasn't used to 117s, he used a boom and he knocked it off and just sheared it off. But but but I had the lower antenna so I could still talk to everybody.

SPEAKER_00 33:41

So you've heard of creative license. And I think I shared this with you before. You know, I've written a novel about the F-117 that'll be coming out later this year. And of course, Panama figures as part of that story. The creative license I have taken in recounting the action is to say that actually you didn't get the word before you took off in the novel. You're gonna get the word on the way down to Panama. So the tanker says over the intercom, hey, we got a SATCOM message we need to read you. And what's the message? To miss the target.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Because um, again, the 06 uh DO, director of operations, was on the tanker, and we were again not using our radios, but when we were on interphone, we could talk to him and the crew and the boomer, and that's how he targeted, that's how he tasked us. The last time we refueled, he said, only one and two are going, the rest of you are gonna stay in the tanker. And so they knew they weren't going because he had the radios to the comms that said, you know, they knew where where Noriega was or where he wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

I hope I do the whole night justice.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

I look forward to reading your book.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

Well, how long was the sortie to get down there?

SPEAKER_01 34:53

So it's the longest, longest combat sortie that I ever flew, but I would guess would be any fighter ever flew, where you actually flew and dropped bombs, you know, on the same sortie. Um it was some of this is still classified because the army owns the classification and they will not open it up so that we can tell everything. Um but it was uh way more than 10 hours.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

Got it. Got it.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

Okay, and that was a long way. It was a long way, yeah. And it was it was it was um took a lot out of us because going down there, the weather was bad. I mean, the tanker went down below 5,000 feet because the weather was so bad. And you know, and so we're flying one on each wing, and you know, it's just turbulence was crazy, and then we'd have to refuel. And I mean, it was it was it was a pretty exciting uh experience in sortie. I mean, but uh it all worked out.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

That reminds me talking about the uh the bad weather. I think you shared with me uh there was one time you had spatial disorientation. Uh I think it was at Nellis. I've only had spatial D once, but it was so alarming and so impactful. I was wondering if you'd share that story with us about uh I believe you said it was the only time you've ever come close to ejecting.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

Yeah, yeah. It the closest I ever got, yeah. Had an experience in 111 because of pilot buffoonery, but we won't talk about that. Okay. But uh in this case, I was um I was just getting ready. Back then we would fly Sorries, we would go outside to Nellis Ranges and talk to air traffic controllers, and we'd hear we'd hear other uh we couldn't talk to the commercial airlines because they were on VHF radios, but but the air traffic controllers would simulcast so we could hear what they were saying to the commercial airlines and and we'd hear them say something like, Nope, that's an A7. I don't know what you're looking at, but that's an A7, because that's how we filed our flight plans when we were black, black program. In any case, we'd go off range and then come back to the Mellis ranges and usually drop some type of inert weapon, uh G B 12, G B 10, 2,000 pounder or 500 pounder um on the range and then go home. Well, in this case, I was dropping a bomb uh just south of Tonopah, about 60 miles. I forgot what the range was there, but I dropped the bomb. When you're dropping your bomb, the airplane is flying, is following where your laser goes. So if I move the laser, because we have to fly right over the target to be able to drop drop on that target, the aircraft follows where I aim. And in this case, I dropped the bomb and coming off the target, the aircraft went into a 60-degree bank turn to go to the next point, which was home. So as it went into that turn, the computers, we have three sets of computers fly-by-wire system, computers operate all the avionics, and uh the redundant, but all three failed. And my displays went blank as I went into that turn. So I looked down, and the computer switches are down on the right side down here in the console, and and I reset the switches. I had a utility light that comes on that was shining, that I could see the because my lights in the cockpit were gone. And I had my standby ADI, my standby uh airspeed, and my standby altitude. And uh that was it. So when I came back after after resetting them, they didn't reset, and it takes a while. And now I'm like, what's going on? And it turned out the airplane, because as it went into that bank, it continued and rolled inverted because computers didn't stop it from and and roll it out when it was supposed to. So I'm upside down and I'm the and the ski on Nellis Ranges in a clear night, there's there's strobe lights on the Nellis ranges that look like stars, and then there's stars. So you really can't tell what's what. And I'm having trouble figuring out what's what, because I think I'm straight and level, but I'm not. I'm upside down, and I look at my altimeter and it's going down, and it's going down kind of fast, and my air speed's going up, and I go, uh oh. So now I I and I have standby ADI. So I grab the stick with both hands and I fight myself to well, to roll the ADI the way the ADI says I should be. So I rolled 180 degrees, but I didn't that didn't feel right. And when I did that, I pulled the nose up and I saw the altitude wasn't decreasing as much, and my airspeed had stapled off. And so then I continued, and I'm fighting it the whole time. And it took about a minute, and then I could look out and I could see the lights at Tonopah in the runway area, and then my mind finally said, Oh, you're you're straight and level, you're fine. But until that time, I was fighting it, and it was hard to, you know, I thought I was upside down, but I wasn't. It was it was it was a unique situation. And the computers never came back on, and they they ended up impounding that airplane after I landed. But uh that was the one time I mean I got down pretty low, and and I don't know what I would have done. I mean, you gotta eject at some point before you before you're upside down and you eject into the ground, right? That doesn't do you any good. So yeah, that was probably the closest.

SPEAKER_00 40:19

So just one or two more questions for you today. What's the worst weather you've flown through to land an airplane?

SPEAKER_01 40:27

These are all good ones. Okay. This was even worse than the T-38 at Randolph when I lost the engine. Um flying sea models at Langley and F-15s. F-15 C models, I'm sorry, yeah. And the weather is bad, but because we were in sea models, we were manly men, and we would we could fly in anything. And so they said we need a weather ships, two of them, to go out and check the weather. Because if we can get above 40,000 feet and do high-altitude intercepts, which is something we did training in, then we'll do that. Okay, fine. So, you know, I want to fly. The rest of these guys can sit around the desk and do nothing. So me and my wingman again go out. We take off, and he goes to the south, and I go to the north, and we both get above 40,000 feet, and I go, and now I'm up to 45,000 feet. And we're not supposed to go above 50,000 feet, as any fighter probably knows, unless you're in a pressure suit. But we're above 45, and we both go, this is this is not worth it, because the the turn radius of an F-15C up there is like a B-52. It's it's a long turn radius. You know, why fly through all that weather to get up here to do a couple intercepts? And then in the meantime, the soft calls us up and says, the supervisor of flying and says, Hey, the winds are out of limits at Langley. And then he says, Well, actually, the crosswind limit, I think, was 30 knots for the F-15. And the F-15 has giant landing gear and giant wings, and you know, the F-16 guys used to call us the flying tennis court because you could play tennis on top of our wings. But we have we have great brakes and uh big rudders, so we could take a lot of crosswind. But the problem was the crosswind was every once in a while going out out of limits. So the decision was made. I'm sending my wingman in first, he's gonna land, and then I'm gonna come in and land. And the soft is gonna keep us posted on the crosswinds. If it goes out of limits, you got to go around and come back. Well, he lands and he calls me back and says, Hey, I stayed on the runway, but just barely. And I'm going, now I know where the wind's coming from, so now I'm gonna land not in the center of the runway, but in the center of the left half, because the winds are coming from the north. And uh I said, okay, thanks for that great, great words of wisdom. Thanks for telling me he could have just said nothing. But I came in and landed, and uh it was fine. And as I pulled off the runway, I'm taxiing back to where we park, and I'm looking at all the F-15s parked on the ramp, and a lot of them, the the gear doors are broke off their hinges because of the crosswind. They're just sitting on the ramp, and the wind is so strong that it's blown them off their their hinges, and they're laying there, and I'm going, Oh my god. So uh we both made it home, but that was probably, and it wasn't necessarily the the the rain or the you know lightning or anything, it was the the winds, and then having a wet runway and heavy rain.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

Uh so Greg, I just have one more question for you. How important is being a pilot to your sense of identity?

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Well, I think it's except for my family, which I'm that's my identity, having a family and two sons. But other than that, um it's the key. You know, what would I tell young people about joining the Air Force? I would say, well, first off, having a military career is an outstanding career. You can do very well in that career. It's not like it was when you and I entered the Air Force and we were struggling from paycheck to pay. Paycheck. Mostly because we spent all our money in the bar, but that's another story. They get paid well now due to you know our congressional leaders and our presidents that have up the pay for everyone in the services, and that's a good thing. But I've always, always said, find a job that you love. Because if you don't like to go to work, it's not worth doing it. And I can honestly say that never did I say to myself, I don't want to go to the squander today. Because even if I wasn't on a schedule, I would stand around a desk and hopefully somebody would get sick and I'd go take their sortie for them. And that happened a lot. And uh so I mean you gotta love what you do. Having a military career, especially today, is is a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

General Feast, it's been great having you on the Flyboy Podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 44:50

You bet, and I'd be happy to come back anytime.

SPEAKER_00 44:54

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 fulfilled that mission today. New episodes of the podcast drop every Thursday morning. You can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com. Until our next sortie, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.