The Flyboy Podcast: Keith "Ghost" Butler

Aircraft flown: F-16, F-117, B-2

Join us as Keith Butler, a retired Air Force Colonel and former B-2 pilot, shares his incredible flying career, including combat missions, flying the F-16, F-117, and B-2, and lessons learned from decades in the cockpit. Discover insights into stealth technology, long-duration sorties, emergency management, and advice for aspiring pilots.

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 Keith Butler. Keith has flown the F-16, the F-117, the B-2, and some other interesting airplanes. He has 2,200 flight hours, and he is a retired Air Force Colonel and the former uh commander of the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, home of the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. He is now uh Senior Uh Director at ENSCO Incorporated, an engineering and technology company. And he and his wife Diane now call the Space Coast of Florida home. So, Keith, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Never, thank you very much for happening and having me here. It's an honor to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Tell me about the first moment you knew you wanted to be a pilot.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

I'm told the first moment that I wanted to be a pilot was when I was pretty young. My grandmother, who's since passed on, would share a story often, especially after I became a pilot, about how when I was six, seven, five years old, somewhere in there, I would sit on the back patio of their house and planes would fly over on the way into Ontario Airport. And I would point up at them and I would say, Grandma, I'm gonna fly those one of these days. And like most good grandparents, they yep, yep, fantastic, love it. Uh lo and behold, it actually worked out. I'll show my age a little bit. Uh I was one of those few that was able to see the first Star Wars in the theater, and I distinctly remember that. And I'll tell you what, I was hooked. Fast forward a couple of years, Battlestar Galactica, right? The the Cylons and the Top Gun, a very standard plot line for a Gen Xer who grew up in the 80s and really wanted to be a pilot in the Air Force. My story is very similar to others.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Except you major is a reality. Of the three airplanes you've flown, the F-16, the F-117, and the B-2, put us in the cockpit. Tell us what each of those uh airframes are like.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Yeah, boy, how much time do we have? I'll tell you, they're similar in a lot of ways and they're very unique in others. The F-16, of course, single seat, single engine, 9G, air-to-ground, air-to-air, multi-roll fighter. There's a reason that Viper pilots will say that they're going to strap the airplane on their back and go fly. Because when you're sitting in the cockpit of an F-16, that bubble canopy really envelops you. And when you're sitting in the cockpit, you can look over the nose and you don't actually see it. You can look off to the sides and you don't see the side of the airplane. It's getting the feeling that you're actually completely in front of the aircraft. And when you're flying around, you have a just wonderful view, which is why it's a dogfighter dream, because that's unobstructed view all around you. Learning to fly that airplane right out of pilot training was daunting to say the least. Going from a T-38 and then from Introduction to Fighter Fundamentals, the AT-38, and then transitioning into a just massively powerful engine. All the avionics, the radar, the gun, the bombs, the missiles, just a really neat airplane to learn how to fly. And it was forgiving in some areas and unforgiving in others. And you learn how had to learn how to tame that beast.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Could you say a little bit more about that? Unforgiving in what ways? What's an example?

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Well, I'll start with the forgiving. The forgiving one is uh the EM diagram, the the uh energy management diagram. In most fighters, there's there's a peak airspeed at which you have maximum maneuverability, whether that's the radius or the rate of a turn, your ability to maneuver in an air-to-air environment. The F-16 is unique in rather than a particular point where there's a certain airspeed, it's actually a plateau. And so you've got about a 50-knot window where you're going to be able to have maximum maneuverability. And so if you're looking over your shoulder in a dog fighting scenario, you can get a feel of the aircraft and it will help you slide across that airspeed. So if you get 20 knots low, you still have the same amount of rate and radius of turn that you do if you were on speed or 20 knots fast, as opposed to other aircraft where you've got a very specific point. Unforgiving, if you were in a stall mode, you had to be very careful about that, especially if you were carrying stores or weights on your fuel tanks outside. There were envelopes you had to be careful of for flying it. A lot of the avionics were very nice because, of course, you had the hands-on throttle and stick, the hotas mentality. So that was forgiving rather than having to look inside the cockpit to switch from air to air or air to ground. It was one flick of a thumb or an index finger, and all the switches would change. You could instantly go from navigation to air to air to dog fighting to air to ground. But you had to know what you were doing. And boy, if you got it wrong, and the that there's you remember the old phrase, the little brain in your finger. If you got that wrong and it hit the wrong button, you'd look at it and go, especially in training, what is the jet doing? How did I get here and how do I get back out of it? And at that point, in a training environment, you were probably dead because somebody was swooping in to come kill you.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Now contrast that with the F-117 and then the B-2.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

The F-117 compared to an F-16, two engines, right, but still single seat, no afterburner. And because it's stealth, you want to make sure that you're doing everything you can to not be seen. And so one of the ways that the F-117 did that was to take that exhaust in the exhaust session, smash it down, and it would extend it across the back end of the tail of the aircraft. And it was doing that for a couple of things. One, it was for IR, one it was for acoustic, a couple of other things in there as well. But the result of that was less power. So when it was a hot day, as you very well recall in New Mexico, there were times where that barrier had to be up and available in case you lost an engine on your initial takeoff. Otherwise, you'd be going across the New Mexico desert at about 20 to 30 feet off the ground while you were trying to gain just enough airspeed to actually take off.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

It's funny you say that because I had that exact experience on my first night takeoff.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Lost an engine on takeoff and wound up skimming over the top of the uh white sands at about uh 100, 200 feet in the air. At night. Airspeed first, then we'll get altitude.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Absolutely. Now, the difference of the 117 versus the 16, uh, it was a maneuverable airplane, right? We we had to wear G-suits. You didn't always need them as far as the general flying, but that airplane was capable of pulling up to six G's. Air show profiles, you could get up around four or five, five and a half. But most of the profiles in an operational environment, three, three and a half G's. But that wasn't what that aircraft was designed to do. It was designed to very quickly get in, face a radar, do a very quick maneuver to break track, go on to the next section. And you were stitching segments of flights together to work around an enemy's air defense system to get to your target, drop both of those bombs, if needed, or one and then the second, and then come back home. I will never forget walking into the hangar of Holliman, climbing into the 117, and I'll I'll give another Star Wars reference here, in the black jet, and you climb up inside it, and you remember when you would start the engines up, you would leave the canopy about halfway down, and the engines were really starting to spool up, and then you would close it the rest of the way. That sawtooth edge on the front of the windscreen, and when that thing would come down and lock into place, and then you would take the safety handle and lock it into place, and you were ready to go. It it truly felt like you were Darth Vader. I just I just always had this feeling like I'm about to go mess up somebody's day right now, and it's awesome. I felt like that every single time. Call it a Gen X in memory or whatever you want. But uh going to red flags, for example, my first night red flag sorting and flying around uh in the middle just around the farms, around the middle of the knitter, the Nevada test and training range, and we would push out, and then the F-16 guys would come out from the adversary side, and the F-15s or whatnot would come out from the blue side. And there were times I'd have the night vision goggles, and I could, you know, harder to see because of that that saw the the canopy that was top of you couldn't see over the top of it, but you could kind of look out in the top. And through the NVGs, you could see an F-15 and F-16 in the middle of the night doing 180-degree turns before they had to stop. And they're a half mile away from you, 3,000 feet. And that's not that far of a distance. They're talking about air traffic and the air battle managers and what's going on, and cocking them to the fights and talking people on, except no one's talking about you. Absolute silence. And that's when you truly get confidence in the stealth characteristics of the 117. I didn't get there until 2005, so by that point it had been well proven in combat, as many of your previous episodes and the post people you've interviewed have shared great stories. But even with that, when it's your body that's in the aircraft, you really want to make sure that it works. And the red flag exercise was a great way to do that. Now, only a couple of years on the 117, and then it uh was flagged for retirement. And I had the opportunity to apply for and get selected for the B-2. The B-2 is similar to the 117 in its stealth characteristics, kind of a mentality, but it's a 117 on steroids. By far the most complicated airplane I've ever flown in my life. Four engines, 10 sources of power, 19 different computer systems, backups to backups all around. And uh in the normal configuration, up to 40,000 pounds of weapons. So 117 you can carry too. In the V-2, we could carry up to 80, eight zero 500-pound JDMs or joint direct attack munitions. We could carry 16 of the 2,000 pounders, eight of the 5,000 pounders, nuclear weapons, of course, for the nuclear mission. And then uh what was made famous last summer was through Operation Bin Knight Hammer, the MOP, the GBU-57, and we could carry two of those. It was a bomb that was purpose built for the B-2 Weapons Bay, 30,000 pounds each, 25,000 pounds of Eglin hardened steel, 5,000 pounds of very advanced types of explosives for a 15-ton bomb, and we carried two of them. And very similar to the 117, mission planning was the name of the game, right? So different aircraft for different reasons. All of them had wonderful characteristics, and I am very humbled, honored, and blessed to have flown three of the Air Force's neatest, coolest, most important airplanes.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

So a little story about Midnight Hammer. You retired from the Air Force on June 17th, my oldest son's birthday. And I was out there for the retirement ceremony. And after we'd finished it, they were letting people go take a look at the B-2, you know, which you had set up behind the stage and so forth. And they had a couple of pilots out there, and I was talking to him and I said, Hey, you know, back in the day when I flew the 117, you know, we could do this thing where we'd we dropped two 2,000-pound bombs and we timed the second one so it would, you know, explode in the vacuum of the the first detonation to get greater penetration. I don't know if you guys are doing anything like that, you know, in the B-2. And the pilot just kind of looked at me like, dude, we're so all over it, don't worry. And then four days later, Midnight Hammer. So remember, you had to apologize to Diane during your retirement speech that, you know, honey, I'm sorry, I was in the yeah, I was in the vault on the weekend before my retirement ceremony. And of course, now we know why. Of course, my favorite, personal favorite moment from Midnight Hammer was when the news broke and we heard what had happened. I texted you and I said, Wow, tell your team uh amazing job. And you texted back and you said, They're not home yet. Because they're all they were still on their way back. And so that that brings me to a question about uh how how long a sortie have you flown? Because the the longest I've heard about yet uh on the Flyboy podcast was talking to uh Gary Waltering, single seat flying all the way to Al Jabber, Kuwait, 18 hours. What's the longest sortie you've ever flown?

SPEAKER_01 13:17

In the B-2, the longest sortie, well, of any aircraft I've flown is about 24, 24 and a half hours in the air. And that was a stateside mission. We hit all four corners of the United States and a whole bunch of it in between. And it was an opportunity to see how your body reacts physiologically, how you react, as you're familiar, and some of your listeners probably are about the concept of a go pill and a no-go pill. Um making sure you put the go pills in the airplane and put the no-go pills in your case and don't take the wrong one. There's there's stories. Um to make sure that all of that is the way it's supposed to be. Now you don't get to do the 24 hour sorty until you do the 24-hour simulator.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Oh my gosh. So even more fun than 24 hours in the airplane is 24 hours in a simulator, which I assume is the same size, same dimensions, and you can't leave for 24 hours. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

That is true. It's not as quite as robust as perhaps maybe it was back in the earlier days. And then, of course, you know, pilots being pilots. Uh you'll be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean, wherever that training sortie in the simulator happens to take you. And uh you'll get a little knock on the door of the simulator, because it's a full life-size replica cockpit of the B-2. And uh the door will open and then the door will shut. And you're a little busy, you're not looking behind you, and then you start to smell Domino's or McDonald's. And you're like, this is not how it's supposed to go down, but I'm not gonna turn it down. And then a few hours later, somebody will bring something else in. So there's, and of course, uh, a 24-hour mission, one of the standard questions is well, how do you go to the bathroom in a in a in a B-2 in a simulator? Uh there's there's ways to do it. And it's a little bit of an inside joke of how much can they make you try to go to the bathroom while you're there just to pressure test all of the systems, doors included. Yeah, yeah. Pilots being pilots, right? So now on the actual 24-hour mission, it's quite different. One of the goals that you're doing in the air, you're taking high protein, low residue foods is the goal. And you want to try to do that a couple of days in advance. You want to bring more food than you could possibly eat. You've got your uh ice chest full of water, you've got your trusty thermos of coffee or whatever people would choose to bring with them. And you figure out what your body enjoys, what it doesn't. I uh that's the wrong way to put it, because you don't really enjoy a 24-hour sortie. It's not that. It's how do you how do you get your your your body and your brain to work through that? Now, plenty of 24-hour missions that have been done. The Operation Midnight Hammer Sortie, that was upwards of 36, 37, 38 hours missions. Going to Libya, low 30s. And then, of course, we have our world record during Operation Enduring Freedom against uh Afghanistan taking off from Missouri. That was a world record 44 hours in the air. And they landed in Diego Garcia. An interesting side note of that was opened the cockpit door, basically poured out the two pilots because they were just a couple piles of goo at that point.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Couple cans of air freshener, recycled everything, oil in the engines, gas in the fuel tanks, two fresh pilots, closed the door, took right back off, and flew home to Whiteman. So the engines have an even longer record. Those engines were running for over 75 hours nonstop.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

B-2's an amazing airplane, it really is.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

What is your favorite flying memory?

SPEAKER_01 16:58

I'll tell you, it's hard to pin it down to one. It really is. Three airplanes and some really neat experiences. Um I'll I'll give you a couple of examples. Um one is your your first solo in a T-37, in my case, that's the culmination of years of work to take this, the tweet to break the earth, to break ground, to suck up the gear and do some pattern work, have an approving look from your typically a fape, a first assignment instructor pilot on the ground, nervously biting their fingernails, making sure you were doing everything right, because it's their wings on the line as well. That was right. That was a great, great day. The first non-grade sheet ride I ever had in the Air Force was also a great day. So every sortie in pilot training, IFF, F-16s, even through mission qualification training at your first operational base, which for me was Aviano, Italy, Molto Bene. The first ride I flew was a ride of two F-16s that had to go to the depot up in Belgium. And it was just a very vanilla sortie, but flying that thing and not having to sit through a grade sheet-oriented debrief was just a lot of fun. I've got some combat runs that really stick out in my mind. But on a personal note, I'll give you two, and that is one, being from Southern California, the Rose Parade was always a big deal in our house, and it still is. And a handful of years ago, I got the opportunity to actually fly the B-2 down Colorado Boulevard of Pasadena with an F-35 on each wing to kick off the Rose Parade. That was a two o'clock in the morning wake-up in Missouri to get there, to actually fly from there to Pasadena and pull back into the house at about 10 o'clock at night that night. And boy, what a rush. The whole day was fantastic. And then, of course, the Finny flight, multiple Finney flights across my career. But the one when I finished up my tour as wing commander in my final flight in the Air Force in the B-2, I was an old Civil Air Patrol cadet. Uh, and when I was a youngster, and there happened to be a large group of CAP cadets that were visiting Whiteman. It just so happened to be on the same day that I was flying my Finney. So it came in, landed, a couple of touch and goes, right? Uh my family was there. My daughter marshalled me in with a marshaling vest, which was absolutely fantastic. And uh got out, got the hose-down treatment, the champagne, all the normal things that go with that. And then to see about 150 CAP cadets was truly a full circle moment of my career and be able to share that with them about hopes and dreams and hopefully invigorating, inspiring, motivating a few of them to continue down that path. So I can't say that there's any one particular sort of that was my absolute favorite, but I've just been very blessed to have multiple throughout my career.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Those are all good ones. Well, let me ask you, what's the worst emergency you've had while flying?

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Listening to the other episodes and other pilots that I've I've known folks that have ejected, I've known folks that have ejected in combat situations, I've known folks that have had airplanes break up around them. It's none of my emergencies or IFEs would rise to that occasion. Um, a few in the 117. Uh the seven deadly sins right on the left side of the cockpit. I got to the point of having three or four of those on one occasion, and that's that'll get you that'll get your attention. Uh but I would say the one that really sticks out in my mind the most was actually a B-2 sortie. A good friend of mine and I were flying, it was a night sortie. It was probably 11, 12 o'clock at night to come back in and land. We we dropped the gear for our first touch and go. And when you drop the gear handle, you're expecting a couple of lights in the cockpit to do what they do, and you hear a bunch of things in the background, a normal cycle. And what I got instead was all the screens just started flashing and lighting up. You're taught over time to the old the old notion of wind the watch, right? There's no crisis that requires an immediate response, especially in the B2 because it's so redundant. And so we sat there for a moment, just what is this airplane doing? And then we realize that I've got one gear down, one gear up, and one gear kind of halfway. But I have what is coming what's after we figure it out, we've got a dual hydraulic failure. So the primary and the secondary mode of that jet's hydraulic system failed on us. There's two ways to get out of that. There's an emergency gear extension, and thank goodness for the Northrop engineers that back in the day thought, you know what, we we probably had to have a get out of jail card of just that last one switch, and that's accumulated air bottles that when you hit that thing, it blows everything down, and that's your one last chance. And the second one is well, you pull the handles, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:47

And eject.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Yeah, and eject, that's right. And in that case, we uh because we had time on our hands, we we talked with a supervisor of flying, we talked with maintenance, we talked with the op supervisor. Other airplanes were coming back in. So you do the right thing, you go up and hold. Everybody else comes in so they can clear the runway, which is a little bit of a risk because if somebody else has a problem, well, now you got a bigger problem on your hands. But uh B-2s are shy. We want to bring them all back home to Whiteman. So got everybody back on the ground, got the fire department out, get every everybody's in place for the big parade, right? And then uh flip the switch, fingers crossed, we're kind of looking at each other, and then one green, two green, three green, indicating all of the gear were down and locked. You know, the old saying, don't mess with three green. So uh the moral of that story was we were one switch away from ejecting out of the B-2 because as opposed to some other aircraft, you cannot land in an unlandable configuration because of the design of the B-2. One gear's down, one gears up, you take the wingtip, you could cartwheel, there's especially the front gear. Again, thanks to the Northrop engineers and the people who built that aircraft with that last little switch, and it worked.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

We appreciate that uh redundancy. Saved two billion dollars that night. So you mentioned combat uh a few minutes ago. Um tell us about your combat experiences. What are some of the the sorties that stand out in your memory and sort of paint the picture for us, put us in the situation?

SPEAKER_01 23:16

My first combat, I would call it combat with air quotes, they were logged as combat time, and that was Operation Joint Forge. So we were at Aviano, Italy. We were still doing the peacekeeping mission over in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And so we would fly Operation Joint Forge sorties. And my first one happened to be a wintertime night sortie. That was a particularly uh fun one as well. That's the first time where the bullets in the gun are real that you plug into your survival vest. You're wearing the thermals, you've got the anti-exposure suit or the poopy suit, as we call it. You've got the combat vest, you've got the G-suit, you've you kind of feel like the stay puff marshmallow man walking out to your airplane. But there's so much adrenaline going that you don't care, it doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

And uh so I've done some operation joint forge sorties. Uh but in 2004, we deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Then we went to Al-Udid over in Qatar or Qatar. Uh so during the course of that three-month deployment, we did both Iraqi freedom sorties from from Aludid and Qatar. About an hour and a half drive up the Persian Gulf through Kuwait, up into Iraq, a couple of hours on station and a couple about an hour and a half back. We would also do enduring freedom. Those were longer sorties because that was about a three-hour drive to get from Qatar into Afghanistan, three or four hours on station, whatever we needed to do, and then three or four hours back. Those made for some long sorties. Uh the one that your listeners might uh might be remembering of, again, this is 22 years ago, but when Fallujah was going on, I happened to be flying that day. And myself and my wingman were uh quite involved on the close air support. And close air support is near and dear to every fighter pilot's and bomber pilot's heart because the core of that mission is air support and you're doing it close in. You're protecting the friendlies on the ground from folks that want to cause harm and kill them. And so there's a tremendous amount of uh overwatch and guardian angel aspects that come into doing a close air support mission. I had several opportunities to do that. Um, there was one in Afghanistan that I distinctly remember as well, and that was we were tasked to go support a special operations task force way up in the northeast corner of Afghanistan. And as soon as we checked in with command and control, they said, Hey, get ready for your nine line and start cooking up to the northeast. Thankfully that night we had a dedicated tanker, so he went with us as well. Plugged the data in, pull up your radar, look at your navigation systems, got the NVGs on, and sure enough, you look out and all you see is just lightning. And it was right over where a thunderstorm had decided to park itself. And any sane-minded person would go, Nope, not tonight. Well, we weren't sane, and my wingman and I uh decided to go give it a shot. So he and I intentionally, at about one mile trail with single target track, every bit of radar energy you can have going into the other person, uh, flew into a thunderstorm to try to attempt to assist some special operations folks that were in a bad spot. The airplane was shaking so hard that the air-to-air missiles that we had on the wingtips were just flapping back and forth. The upfront controls where you could change altitudes and frequencies and whatnot. I I actually had to hold my hand against the side of it to just use my thumb because it kept falling off because the turbulence was so bad. Uh I could feel the airplane just shaking itself. And I said, look, I not only am I not helping the guys on the ground, this is gonna turn into a class A mishap. So turned around, left out of the thunderstorm, and uh you feel terrible about it, but it doesn't do any good if you're now on the ground in a parachute and they've got to come save you as well. The second half of that story was the um opposite side of that coin. There were some army infantry folks that had been ambushed, and we had an advanced Tarkany pod on the F-16. It was called the sniper pod. A lot more upgraded features from the previous legacy one, not the least of which was we had an IR flashlight, is a better way of saying it. So we made contact with them, got an update of what they were doing, and uh they had some MVGs as well. So we actually started shining our IR light onto the ground so they could see where we were coming from. And there was a couple of enemy combatants that were on motorcycles that had ambushed them and then peeled off. And the terrain was pretty rocky, and the infantry folks felt confident that they were still in the local area. And so what we did is we set up an orbit or cap. The two of us did. We were off opposite sides of the circle. One person talks to the person on the ground, one person's in a supporting role. I happen to be the person talking on the ground at that day, that night, and got a feel for what they were doing. And the targeting pod, you can steer it from the cockpit with a screen, you can see the environment around you. You can have it on electro optical, you can have it on IR, so infrared, so you can have it as white as hot or black as hot. And then you figure out, kind of like the 117, just what works best for that scenario. We were able to find the three motorcycles with two people each hiding behind some large rocks, thinking they were safe. We asked the folks on the ground, we said, okay, we see them. How do you want to handle this? And they said, We want to roll them up. We don't want to kill them. Okay. So I worked with them and I said, All right, here's what I want you guys to do. I want you guys to form up in a line, and I'm gonna tell you to turn, and then I'll tell you when to stop. So I got them in a line and said, just start turning. And they started to turn, and I could watch them in my targeting pod, and I said, Stop. Now you're facing the right direction. They're about 150 feet, and in the other case, they're about 500 feet in front of you behind a large boulder. So start walking, and I would talk them on, and they would pincer around this boulder, catch them, roll them up. We'd do it two or three times. So, what started off as a really bad situation of trying to help some special ops guys and not being able to do it turned into us being able to save lives later that night. And at the end of the day, nobody had to die. They were able to get rolled up and uh taken away. So truly we felt like guardian angels in that close air support role.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

Indeed. Uh you mentioned uh Fallujah a few minutes ago. Can you tell us a little bit about that? You said you were flying uh that day. Tell us about that mission and and delivering close air support there.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

So Fallujah was the there were two sets of Fallujah. There was April of 2004 and there was the second one in November. They were both the big pushes into the that city. We were part of the first one and there was a call for close air support, and then after that came the term tick or troops in contact. And if if you're not already getting excited when you hear the term, hey, we got a close air support tasking, when you hear tick, that means that the troops that you're going out to protect are under fire. You don't know much about the situation, but you know you need to get there in a hurry. And so we did. And it involved uh a facility in the middle of Fallujah. Um, I don't want to get too much into the specifics, even though it's over 20 years old for various reasons. But um we had uh myself and my wingman were able to uh do what's called yo-yo ops, where one person's on a tanker, one person comes off the tanker, so you have constant contact with the folks on the ground. In this case, it was the Marine Corps. They were basically pinned down, and we did everything we could to help them while minimizing collateral damage, because in this particular situation, it was in the middle of the city, and the particular target area of interest was in the middle of a residential neighborhood. And so we were trying to do what's called collateral damage estimate or CDE to minimize the amount of exposure or shrapnel or uh other people getting hurt or killed that didn't need to be. And so we started with the 12mm cannon in the F-16. I was having problems with my heads-up display that day. I would roll in in a very deserty kind of background. My brightness and contrast on the HUD wasn't working real well, took the jet anyway. So I wasn't able to use my gun because I couldn't confirm exactly where those bullets were gonna hit the ground. My wingman was able to take a couple of runs at that and uh empty his gun on that. Well, unfortunately, it didn't solve the situation. So uh he used his GBU-12s, 500-pound laser guided bombs, and working toward the target, used both of his that he had. Um we had on one side of the jet two 500 pounders, and on the other side we had a 2,000-pounder. You don't want to use the 2,000 pounder because it's gonna put a lot of shrapnel and debris on that. So I ended up using mine as well. What was really uh poignant in that scenario, that mission, the person who we were talking to on the ground, the Marine, is what's called a JTAC, a joint terminal attack controller. That is a person who has been trained and certified to call in airstrikes to work with aircraft. It's a special training and certification that you have to have because there's a lot of rules, a lot of law of armed conflict and appropriate response and things. That person had been hit by enemy fire. Now, he was conscious, uh, but he was not ambulatory. So they were putting him on a litter trying to work his way out, and you could hear the comms still going. And it really brings it home, Dave, when you're helping people on the ground and when you're listening to them, you can hear people yelling in the background. You can hear gunfire coming in, you can hear ricochets, and then you can hear good guy gunfire going out. There is no more serious scenario in my mind in a conventional mission set than when you're dealing at the tactical level like that, knowing that decisions you make, the speed at which you operate, the ability to lay down fire, the faster you can do it accurately, the better you are going to help save lives. And so he was yelling at his fellow Marines to say, put me down, this isn't finished yet, put me down, put me down. Uh and he stayed, he stayed in the fight and was able to help call us in to more strikes and more strikes. It was a long day. It was incredibly rewarding, and I am confident that to this day there are people who are alive because of our ability to help them on the ground that day back in April of 2004 in Felicia.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

Thank you for that. Welcome for then and for sharing it with us now. So I have just a couple more questions. Let me ask was there ever a moment uh when you were flying when you realized you'd just broken the accident chain and that if you hadn't, you would have crashed?

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll share I'll share one where it was me. Uh and I'll share one where it was it was somebody else. So during that same deployment, different day, different jet, we were a late night sortie and we were coming back home, and it was around sunrise by the time we came back. And uh it was an uneventful night, so had all my stores, all the weapons were still on the airplane. And uh there's there's always these things called training beams, these training events that you have to log throughout the year for different certifications and whatnot. One of them is called uh sing simulated flame bound. And uh the the goal, you could enter it from two different ways, and it was a way to practice losing the F-16 engine, and then you could use hydrazine to get you back on the ground and a normal event that you did. And so um I made the stupid decision to, you know what, there's nothing going on. It's kind of a quiet morning, it's real soft, nothing's big outside. Let's just I'll go ahead and knock out an SFO real quick, log the bean, and then you know, be all good.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

A training event that needs to get away.

SPEAKER_01 35:59

A train event, very minor, very minor. Just very routine, nothing to it. Well, what I didn't take into account uh was one I had been flying all night or a good part of the night, now it's sunrise, your body clock and circadian rhythm, decision making and things like that. Uh probably not the best time to do something like that. But what really I still to this day, uh what I when you're normally doing those, you don't have thousands of pounds of ordinance on your airplane that's going to affect the flight characteristics of your airplane. And so I do the maneuver and I find myself uh having to stay closer to the airport than you normally do. Uh at the time it still wasn't clicking. Uh maybe it's just colder than what it is, environmentals, whatever, you know, just whatever. Chaff it off and keep coming in. And I get to the point where like, all right, this, I think I've got this. I think I got this wired uh training event complete. You don't land out of those, you do a low approach and then come back around. So I push the throttles forward, engine spools up, and not a whole lot's happening. And I realize uh pretty quickly that I'm continuing to sink, even though I got the engine spooled up, uh, and then it hits me, I've got a whole bunch of extra weight that I'm not used to having. The jet is not acting the way I expected it to. And so I faced it now with two decisions, or one really of two choices. One, I can go full afterburner or blower and salvage this, knowing the F-16's afterburner is gonna save me. Um, or I can stay back at idle and not cause a big ruckus on the airfield because there weren't any takeoffs at the time. And so there was the, I'm gonna acknowledge that I made a stupid decision, uh, hit the afterburner, wake everybody up in the area, uh, and and and highlight the embarrassment. This is nobody's knowing at the ground at the time, but it just felt like that. Or I can try to stay in idle and try to salvage this thing and maybe land out of it and land out of it after going back to mill power too and trying to salvage. So now you're in this situation where you're not in a good landing position, you're not in a good takeoff position. And so for those couple of seconds, you almost have this what's better, embarrassment or death.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

And it's a close call.

SPEAKER_01 38:13

It's a sometimes it's a close call. But I made the right decision, hit the blower, uh, full afterburner, climbed out of it just fine, licked my wounds, uh, put my tail between my legs, and ended up coming back around. Did not do a second one, landed the way you're supposed to land, and everything was fine. So that was the one that I would say was on mine. A little bit less funny was the second one. I was in Aviano, this is an F-16 situation. It was me and another guy. We had gone over the age radic to do some air-to-air intercepts, uh, bad weather on the ground, came back in. We were doing a radar assisted approach. So I'm in the back a couple of miles, he's in the front. I'm watching him, making sure the spacing is good. He comes in and lands. We're both in the in the soup, we're in the clouds, we can't see anything. And then I'm watching him, and we go to on an instrument approach, what's called the final approach fix. And that was the day where you're supposed to be able to call it out. And then in this situation, we're gonna do a non uh a non-precision approach. So you're gonna go to a mid-descent altitude, fly along until you can get to the visual descent point, you're up you're below the clouds, and then you come in and land. We practiced the visual descent, we briefed it up of what it was gonna be, but the ceiling was lower than anticipated. So we did the non-precision approach, and you go down to that minimum altitude to then fly along straight to watch the airfield come into view. And I could not see him because again, he was a couple miles away, and I was still on my way down to the min and descent altitude. And what I noticed on his aircraft, and in the radar screen, it shows you who you have locked up and shows you their altitude, and it shows you their airspeed, his altitude kept descending and it was getting significantly below the min descent altitude. And so you're the wingman, right? You trust your flight lead, but it just wasn't making sense. And so on the on radio on our on our private frequency that we have that's not ATC, I said uh uh lead to confirm MDA or minimum descent altitude. And within two to three seconds, I saw him pop back up. And I am pretty confident, and we debriefed this, um, that he had not reset his altimeter when we came out of the sortie back to the local altimeter level, and he was going lower and lower to what he thought was the right MDA, but it was actually lower because his altimeter was there. Now, would would he have crashed into the ground? Would he have caught it? Uh, you know, who knows? It's hard to say. But when we debriefed that part of it, he was a little bit less color in his face when we got out of the aircraft than would normally be the case, and uh slapped me on the shoulder and said, Hey, thanks, man. I owe you one. And that's taking care of each other, right? So see something, say something type of an environment.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

Well, Ghost, thank you so much. Let me uh this is my last question for you today. First, please. When you talk to young people who say they're interested in learning to fly, what advice do you give them? Yeah. It's a good question.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

I will I reflect on that quite a bit, and I think about what I wanted to hear when I was in younger shoes as a kid, as a teenager, as a young adult. And there's a common question that I will I'll answer their question with a question, and somebody says, What what advice do you have? Or you know, what does it take? What can you give me? And I say, I'm gonna give you a very simple question, man, and that is, how bad do you want it? It's a reflective question, and it's a little bit rhetorical. And I said, Look, I don't want you to answer the question, but I'll ask it again, how bad do you want it? And I go, I'll give you a follow-up question, and that is, are you willing to do the things that most people won't do now, so that later in life you can do the things they can't do. And so the lesson, the takeaway, the answer to the question is just look, man, you're gonna want to be a pilot in the Air Force. I can promise you, it's a long road. It is hard. You are going to work harder at this than most anything else you're going to do in your life. And that's the way it's supposed to be, because the Air Force only wants the best people flying multi-million or multi-billion dollar aircraft. And so you have to earn the right to do it. You have to be willing to sacrifice sleep. You have to be willing to sacrifice sometimes part of your social life. You have to be willing to sacrifice um hunger. And I mean a deep sense of hunger, that when things get hard, you keep going. You have to keep going. Because if and when you make it and you're in the F-16 over Fallujah, and somebody else's life is on the line, and you're the one who's saving them, you're you're the border between life and death. Or in the case of a B-2, you're responsible for potentially a 16 nuclear weapon payload in a God forbid nuclear environment of World War III. They don't want people who are going to fold. They want people who have been tried and tested. There's an old saying, a knight in shining armor has never had their metal tested. This is the man in the arena piece, right? That's what it's going to take. And are they going to have it right off the bat? No, they're not. It is a culmination of small decisions that you make every single day to establish habit patterns so that you understand what hard looks like. And it's about a 10 minute conversation that I give them. And then I wrap it up again and I say, again, how bad do you want it? And you can often tell when somebody just gives you that stare back in their eye and it's their soul that they're showing to you, you can tell that they've got. The look. They've got that eye of the tiger, if you will. And those are the ones that you want to continue and invest in. And everybody doesn't do that. And that's okay, because this job isn't for everybody. Whether you're a private pilot, whether you're an airline pilot, whether you're a 25-year Air Force pilot, it is a professionals game, truly. And I'll re I'll refer back to uh Ken Tatum's episode. And when he gets asked that question, he talked about how being a risk manager to those young kids, and it was a wonderful response to the question. He was one of my squander commanders back at Holliman in the 117. And I thought that was a very reflective response that he gave. So to answer your question, that's the advice that I give. Walk them through the path. Give them an understanding of what it's going to be like. It's not all pom-poms and rainbows and unicorns. It isn't. It's not supposed to be. Getting them prepared for that hard life.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

Yeah. That's an amazing answer and what a great piece of advice. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, that was pretty damn cool. Thank you. Ghost, thank you so much for being on the Flyboy podcast with us today.

SPEAKER_01 45:13

Never, thank you for the opportunity. I was tickled, truly, when you asked me to come on the show and to share some really neat stories. And as I was going through in my mind, pulling out old file cabinets in my brain and going through folders of different aspects of flying and different airplanes and different phases of my life, uh, my family, everything else that comes along with that. It just truly brought back some wonderful memories. And there's a few in there that you probably would like, you know, that's gonna went back in the box. That one's that one's that one's stays off in the border. But you you gave me a really neat opportunity to bring those things out. And thank you for giving me the chance. I hope this is gonna be a good episode. Thanks for the opportunity to come on the podcast. I am honored.

SPEAKER_00 46:01

Absolutely. No, uh just great stuff. Thank you so much. You're welcome. 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 Flyboy Podcast drop every Thursday morning, and you can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com. Until our next sorting, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.