The Flyboy Podcast: Guest Wayne Mudge

Aircraft flown: F-111, A-7, F-117, T-33, T-38, MU-2, F-15E

In this episode, Wayne Mudge shares his extensive flying experience with the Air Force, including flying various aircraft like the F-111, F-117, and F-15E, and discusses the evolution of military aviation, training, and pilot culture. He also recounts memorable missions, in-flight emergencies, and insights into the life of a fighter pilot.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:10

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 Wayne Mudge. Now his call sign, like mine, is a play on his last name, Smudge. And even today, many of his students refer to him that way. Smudge has 6,000 total flying hours in the Air Force, flying the F-111, the A7, the F-117, and the F-15E. And since he retired from the Air Force back in 2003, he's been flying light aircraft. So Wayne, Smudge, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Thanks, Never. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

So let me ask, how many different types of planes have you flown and where?

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Started with the standard airplanes in pilot training. Back in the day I went through pilot training in 73, we uh flew the T-37, and then I went on to the T-38, and that was done at Webb Air Force Base in Big Spring, Texas, which has since closed. Then I went to the F-111 at Wonderful Cannon Air Force Base, where Clovis by the Sea, uh flying the F-111 as a pilot weapons system officer, a PWISO. Much like the F-4 days, they didn't let students straight out of pilot training go into the front seat. They did the same thing with 111s. You went in the right seat, and after some time then you'd go into the left seat. And when I went in, you had to have a thousand hours of fighter time to get in the left seat of the 111. And certainly didn't have that after pilot training. Then I flew the T-33 when the F-111 started to shed turbine blades. They brought in some trainers to get us some flying times for the young guys. I flew a T-33 and T-38 on those programs. And then I went on to fly the A-7 at uh Nellis, uh, the MU-2, as we went into and out of Burbank, uh, and then uh with the F-117 up at Tonopah, and then ended up flying the F-15E at uh Lake Air Force Base in England.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

You know, you mentioned flying the MU-2 uprange. Uh I have heard that early on in the F-117 program they didn't have instructors or uh flight simulator even, and so the pilots would fly down to Palmdale or uh over to Edwards to meet directly with the engineers uh flying in in the MU-2. Is that was that your experience?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

We actually flew into Burbank, went into Lockheed. We it was a civilian airplane. We used a civilian call sign. We got trained at flight safety, so we're figured out how to fly this high-wing turboprop. We'd uh go into the meetings, talk with the engineers, and back and forth. Uh and they didn't have simulators, but they had things that were basic stuff that we could learn to fly, but uh we didn't have simulators back in those days.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

It was uh literally uh bringing a program online from scratch. Well, thanks for all the groundwork you laid. You made it easy for the rest of us coming later. When you uh learned to fly in the 1970s and did a lot of your flying in the 70s and 80s, and I'm wondering if you could contrast for us, what was it like during the era of the 1970s flying in the Air Force versus later on? Could you uh compare and contrast for us?

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Well, it it was uh a very different world than what we live in now. Uh uh so here we were ending up the Vietnam War, and that's who my instructors were. Uh all the folks that flew in Vietnam, uh 100s, F-105s, some F-4s, there were some other airplanes, some uh A-37 instructors, uh, and so on. And uh they brought a completely different attitude to flying airplanes, and of course, that was all informed and brought on by uh the Korean War. And there were still a few World War II guys left, but it was primarily Korean War vintage pilots and Vietnam era. And things were a little different back then. Uh for example, I showed up as a pilot weapons system officer, so I'm having to learn how to do INS and radar in the right seat, and also had to meet the pilot qualifications. And on my first rejoin, I start doing a rejoin kind of ATC or AETC back then. Standard, not real fast, not real aggressive, and my instructor says, that's a wussy rejoin. Let me show you how to do a rejoin. So he takes over the airplane right after takeoff and starts flying with his knees because he's reaching into his flight suit pocket to pull out a cigarette. So he's flying with his knees, flips off his mask, lights up a cigarette, and gets it done, puts the lighter away, grabs a stick, and comes in on a what was for me a very aggressive but standard fighter rejoin to join up on lead. And he says, that's how you do a rejoin when you're flying fighters, boy. Okay, a little different. And of course, uh the club was a major feature back in the day.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

The officer's club?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

The officers club. You know, even in pilot training, there was a the standard was you'd get done flying, salt rings uh on your flight suit, you'd go in the bar, have a couple of beers, and then everybody would meet up with their spouses, and we'd go into the main bar and have more drinks and often dinner. Back in the day we used to have a band almost every Friday night. In fact, about the third night I was at the club, I'd had one too many. Asked the bartender to hand me the phone, because they had one of those corded phones with a long line, the weren't cell phones back in the day. And I was uh trying to die on my wife to have her come get me, and my flight commander, you know, the guy who I want to emulate and be like, says, Smudge, are you some kind of wuss? Can't you drive while drunk? Slammed down the phone and said, Why, of course I can. Luckily I made it home, didn't hurt anybody or myself. But that's just the era that we lived in. You you pushed every possible limit in everything you did.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Some traditions may be better left behind.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Yeah, well, I started my own tradition, uh, and I started it at Clovis riding my Harley Davidson motorcycle in the officers club.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Uh I'm sorry, would you say that again?

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Yeah, rode my Harley Davidson motorcycle into the officers club.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Into the officers club.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

And at Canon, you had to go up about a dozen, fifteen steps to get in. I did that in Germany, I did it uh in England, I did it uh Vegas, but uh when I got to Langley, they wouldn't let me do it at Langley. I was disappointed.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

I see. Well, if the entire squadron arrived on Harley's and rode into the club on a Friday night, that would be something.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

So it was just a different era, and uh, one of the things that I think we lost was the flying discussions and debrief outside of the debrief room. There were a lot of things that you could learn just by talking about flying and fighting, and one of my favorite stories that I relay to young folks to get them to continue to talk about flying outside of the formal brief and debrief was uh I was hanging around with Tony Bullett up at the Tonipaw, we called it the To Cackle, the Tonapah Officers Club on Chinese Laundry. And it was about five in the morning. We'd flown till four or something, and we're having uh a beer and playing kribbage and talking about refueling the A7, because uh, as you got higher in altitude, it could be a little bit squirrely, especially in the K model, just because of the dynamics uh behind the 135. And we were talking about that because I'd gone up and uh had a challenge flying the K model, and uh said, hey Tony, who was the ops officer down at Nellis, and he was a longtime A7 guy. Uh flown with the Navy, was uh went through fighter weapons school and taught at Tucson. A good guy, uh, knew the airplane, and he said, Next time you run into that, ask them to pull back the inboards.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Pull back the inboard engines, huh?

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Yeah, pull back the inboard engines, and that will stop some of the airflow that's impinging the tail of the A7 because it didn't get into a Dutch roll, rolling back and forth on the boom, and it could get into a real PIO.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

Pilot-induced oscillation.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

That came very helpful about three months later in uh testing procedures that we would use in the 117. We flew six airplanes down to uh Homestead Air Force Base, and we weren't to make a single radio call.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

On the entire flight across country?

SPEAKER_00 9:25

An entire flight across country, not talking to us. How did you do that exactly? We joined up with tankers, they flew down the runway, we joined up with them, followed them, they handled all the calls with center and everything else. Our squawks were off.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

They squawked, and they took us uh down towards homestead. We had to keep climbing uh above where we had planned because we were running to clouds. And on the second refueling, it was a little squirrely for me, but not bad. But one of my wingmen was having challenges. Now, it may have been the rigging of his airplane, uh, don't know, but he was challenged. And then we climbed another 2,000 feet for the third refueling. And as I went in there, I said, I'm not comfortable with this. This is gonna be a challenge. Got on, and I was floating back and forth a little bit, and I remembered what Tony said. And I said, pull back the inboards. Well, I just broke the rule of no radio calls, but it made an instant difference. Airplane smoothed down, it was smooth as glass, no problem. So we get to the debrief, and I won't tell the whole story about how we landed a homestead at night without talking to anybody. In the debrief, I said, I owe around. I spoke up and I said, and I didn't mention the wingman at all, I just said I was getting a little skittish on that last refueling. It's gonna start a little Dutch rule on me, and I remembered something Tony told me, called, told him to pull it back, and it worked. Rest guys debrief, the last flight lead says, Smudge, good on you for fessing up. Let me tell you what happened to me. He was on the boom same time I was. We all did it the same on a different tanker. Yeah, he was in the back. And when I called pull it back, he was going stop to stop in a Dutch role, and the boom would not disconnect. The guy was trying to disconnect from his A7, and when they called pull it back, his airplane settled down and quit doing it. And he said, The rest of this weekend, you will not pay for a single drink. You saved my and that's all from talking about flying and fighting after the formal debrief.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

You've opened this question. You gotta tell us how did you land without talking to anybody at Homestead? Which, by the way, used to be in southern Florida, other side of the country.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

So how did you do it?

SPEAKER_00 11:51

We came in uh and when we turned on our landing lights, we got a green light from tower. Okay, sure. And we just landed in a stream to get on the ground and we knew exactly where to taxi. They pulled him into hangars like we would have done if it was 117s.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Let's talk a little bit more about the difference between flying in the 1970s and later in your career. What changed and was there a particular person that drove the change?

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Back in the day with World War II, Korean and Vietnam pilots, it was uh you don't trust the government, you do what you have to do to make things work, and you push yourself as hard as you can all the time. And some of it was foolish things like the alcohol abuse that went on. Uh was just a little bit overboard. Did it need to get completely torn out of our way we live? Probably not, but that's the way the uh folks reacted to it. Uh quite frankly, we grew up a little bit. Often I thought, you know, we're not officers and gentlemen anymore, we're just fired up fighter pilots trying to save the world.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Was that before or after?

SPEAKER_00 13:02

After.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Nothing wrong with being fired up fighter pilots there to save the world. That sounds pretty good to me.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

You want that. And I you know, I always said that I'd rather have folks that I'm having to pull the reins on than having to kick them in the tail to get them to do what they need to do.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

I don't think I ever saw that. It was much more the former than the latter.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Yeah, it was. And uh that was good, but we just overdid it. I mean, the stories of everybody getting fired up and throwing all the lawn furniture around the pool at the club into the pool. Uh why do you need to do that? You don't need to do that.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

I agree. There there were some silly things that uh that occurred over the years.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

We can still do it smartly and responsibly, and we don't have to do some of the stuff we used to do. Uh to prove yourself it was manly macho, you never wanted to show anything other than full bore. You know, you gotta be smarter than that. And I think we we did get smarter and better, but there's still that underlying drive that uh your typical fighter pilot has. And some people I've always said fighter pilots are not the airplane you fly, it's your attitude. I've met lots of tanker guys, C-130 guys that are they fly a different airplane, but they're fighter pilots by their attitude, and that's who I get along best with.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

So, Smudge, tell me, what's been your worst in-flight emergency?

SPEAKER_00 14:30

This one's a horror story. We had uh taken uh seven F-111Ds from Cannon and flown them to Korea, and we're operating off a Seichon on the south end of Korea. So now we're gonna head back to the States after doing our fun things there in Korea. We've got a seven ship, and uh good news, bad news is they're all IPs.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

All instructors, okay? That could be good news or bad news. You're right.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah. Uh except for the flight lead who was the Wayne Vice Commander. And I'm not even gonna mention his name because I can't say it without spitting, and you'll find out why in a minute. So, anyway, things did not start well. We took off at night, so we're doing uh rejoin over the east coast of Korea with these tankers, and there's clouds everywhere. And they're trying to find the open area. And I was uh number three of a three-ship heading up to the tanker, and all of a sudden, between us and the tanker we're rejoining on, a four-ship goes right between our altitudes, about 200 feet above us, about 200 feet below the tanker.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Same type of airplane or different airplanes?

SPEAKER_00 15:41

F-111s going the wrong way. The lead got goofed up.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Oh my.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

So that was the start. So we finally got that taken care of.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Wait, I I let's just I just want you to paint this picture a little in a bit more detail. So there you are, you're bringing a foreship up to the tanker, you're looking ahead of you, you see the tanker above you, the size of an airliner, you're coming up to it, and all of a sudden, a foreship of F-111s comes between you and the tanker, go in the opposite direction.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Right. They had just come out of the clouds.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

And this was still at night, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:14

At night. And of course, anybody that's done that kind of thing, we didn't get to sleep all day. There, you know, the Koreans were flying airplanes, so we're taking off at night into weather for refueling with little or no sleep.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

And what's your destination, by the way? Where are you going?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Uh we're headed to Mountain Home.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Mountain Home, you're gonna go all the way back across the Pacific in a week.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

11.7 hours.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

But it gets more interesting. After that, we got out of the clouds, it was nice, it was a beautiful sunrise to watch over the Pacific. Unfortunately, the tankers for our last refueling showed up about 200 miles too early. They showed up over the Pacific, not closer to the West Coast. So they started the refueling. We got a full load of gas, except for the fact we're further out than we're supposed to. To make uh matters worse, part of my problem was back in the day in the F-111, you didn't call out your gas based on what Leed said. You didn't give your number of gallons you had unless you were a thousand pounds difference. Well, I had 900 pounds less than everybody in that flight. So it was three. That's all I said. I was 900 pounds.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

Because that was the standard, you're within a thousand pounds. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

So we're looking in and uh we get the information from the tankers about the weather at Mountain Home. It's not VFR like we thought it was gonna be. It's 500 feet and going down. Well, our alternate was Fairchild. And we are, I don't know, 100 miles from Fairchild. It's sunny, it's nice, everybody's tired.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

And Fairchild is in eastern Washington, as opposed to southern Idaho, your destination.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

He says, nope, we're going to Mountain Home because that's where we told him we're gonna go. Well, between uh more headwinds than we thought, getting refueled too early, we're heading into Mountain Home with the weather 400 feet going down. And so we're gonna have to shoot individual approaches, and I don't remember how far out it was, but lead cold emergency fuel, two cold emergency fuel, onside. I'm number seven, and I don't declare it emergency because I'm tailing Charlie, they're gonna put everybody else in line. It's not gonna make any difference. They started to vector people down early, and I said, uh-uh, I'm not going down early. Nope, I'm not doing it. I'm climbing. So I throw the wings forward, I bring the power back, and I'm starting to max perform the airplane to save as much fuel as I can. Everything was working out okay, but of course I'm 900 pounds short of everybody else, and I am already starting to suck up a seat cushion. My right seater and I are talking about options. Can we go somewhere else? Can we do something else? But the weather didn't allow it, and so we're just gonna go ahead and mountain home and see what happens. So I stayed high. I told him I'll come down when I'm ready, and so it was gonna be a non-standard instrument approach, but I wasn't gonna get close to the ground and drone around with the power up. Because I'd slowed down, I was a good distance behind the other guys, which is all good in my book. But as I'm coming in, I'm watching the ILS, and I told him, Oh, by the way, uh, I have less fuel than everybody in front of me, and I cannot afford to get overshot on final. You know, about that time it looks like he's gonna overshoot me. And I said, I'm turning to the ILS course now, and the voice changed. A different controller got on and gave me great instructions on how to get back to the course because I couldn't afford to go around, I couldn't afford to miss the approach. And I told him, Oh, by the way, my gear aren't coming down till on short final, and I break out of the goo. So I'm flying this airplane down towards the ground, and uh I tier and I decided that we would not pull the handles because you go out together in the 111 in the capsule. We are not going to pull the handles until the second engine flames up. So we can land single engine, it's okay as long as we have enough fuel. Well, we break out of the goo just under 300 feet, and it's geared down, flaps, landed about a third to halfway down the runway, it's 11,000 foot running. I'm not worried I'm so light I can jump on the brakes without a problem. I go to the end, text in to go up back to the ramp, and on the way back to the ramp, the left engine runs out of gas. We should have been smarter and probably as soon as I landed gone to one engine, but I was just so glad to be on the ground. All I want to do is kiss it. So then we're pulling in, we've got six airplanes all lined up neat, and of course I'm a little bit later than the others. I come in, they stop me short of where they want me, so they can do a rollover check of the tires, and my right engine shuts down. I just ran out of gas. The maintainer, the croochie, comes up the rails and the ladder, and he is livid. You made us look like really bad. You're not lined up with the airplane, as I said. I ran out of gas. He said, Sir, you didn't line up. I said, We ran out of gas. And then it dawned on him that there was nothing left. And it turned out the next morning they refueled they put more fuel in it than the airplane said it could hold. I will never forget that day.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

Sponge, would you share some of your most memorable flying experiences with us? They can be in different airplanes, but uh give us give us the examples of a couple if you would.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

Yeah, one that uh that stood out to me uh was in the 111. Uh I went through fighter weapons school at Mountain Home, and we had a GATT-8 sortie, it's our graduation sortie. And we've got a force ship of uh 111s with a live mark 84s, and our target is an airfield in the Nellis Range Complex. And we've got some thuds that are going to lead us into the range and provide decoy. And we've got some uh uh F-4s back behind us uh to help fight off the uh F-15s.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

So a thud is an F-105 Thunder Chief, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Uh a Vietnam Air Fighter.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Yeah, and it, you know, the good news is it could go fast low like we did. You just couldn't go about a quarter of the distance we did.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

You guys had much better legs.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Yeah, we had much better legs. We got in there and were able to pop, drop light bombs. Uh my wingman and I uh destroyed that airfield. All our bombs were basically shacks on the runway, and we're exiting the area at about 1.1 Mach at about 100, 200 feet, going across the Mellis Range eastbound. We get uh called some uh F-15s trying to shoot us down and catch up with us, and of course, we're close to the ground, we're a speed of heat, and we left them in the dirt at that point. Got back home to Mountain Home, and that was a fun, memorable sortie. In the A7, we didn't do a whole lot of stuff with it, and of course, we didn't try to keep the airplanes up to uh the standard that the guard were at that time, the Buckley Guard, who eventually went on to win gunsmoke because they had the A7 and it worked so well. We didn't keep ours up, but we had a couple that would could hit anything on the nail. And I went up with Dutch Riffler, God rest his soul. He had been an F-15 guy. He couldn't spell air to mud, so uh we're getting him used to doing the mud thing. And uh we go out to one of the ranges and our target happens to be a tank. We talked about the airplane, what Cadoo can't do. On that day, uh everything worked right in my airplane, and it drove nails. Six bombs had five shacks. The only non-shaq hit the turret. So it wasn't called a shack, it was a five-meter bomb. Otherwise, it was five shacks, and of course, Dutch comes back in the debrief, is going, Smudge, you made it look easy. I'm going, trust me, it wasn't me. It was pure luck. It was the airplane really did well. And but it was nice because Dutch always remembered that sorted, which is good because I had lots of bad sorties that he could have remembered, but he remembered that one. In the F-117, our ORI was remarkable. Of course, we were still super secret, we're at Tonopah. We may have still been tacked, decided that uh before they could declare us combat ready, they really needed uh to do an ORI.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

So this would have been 1983, correct?

SPEAKER_00 24:46

Uh 83, 84, something like that, yeah. So uh they uh came in with a very small team because we'd only in-brief so many. Everything went really, really well on that. Everybody hit their targets on time, as the 117 could do. And we'd worked hard, we'd uh refined what we were doing, and uh uh the airplanes worked well, and the party in the tocackle afterwards was uh a significant uh release of emotion, and there's a famous photo that they took of the first group of us in the club that night uh and uh it uh it was special.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

Do you happen to have a copy of that photo?

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Somewhere I have.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

Yeah, there's a few guys that uh are not alive that were in that photo, but it's passing an operational readiness inspection, an ORI, is essential to getting the F-117 combat rated and uh ready to go to war. And so that's quite an achievement.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

It was it was the maintainers were great, everybody put out did very well. It just and the airplanes held up, the the pilots did what they needed to do. That was special. But it's interesting because they did a study. They asked some psychologists to take a look uh back, and this is back in TAC.

SPEAKER_01 26:07

Tactical Air Command.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Yeah. Bob Jackson, Berner Bob, a different fella, but he kind of drove the initial cadre. And they had some rules of who they could go for, who they couldn't, and so on. But they did a study to say what happens if we bring the best out of all these wings together and put them together. And they just wrote on and on about all the ego problems they're gonna have and they're not gonna get along and they're gonna fight each other. Uh, it'll never work. That was part of at the end of this, here we go, yeah, we were all pretty good at what we did, but you know, we work as a team. Some are better than others. I was on the lower end of the skill category, but we all did what we had to do, and we got along great, and even still today, my best friends.

unknown 26:54

Excellent.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Sponge, tell me about uh the flying you've done in the years since uh you flew with the Air Force. You said you retired in 2003, and then you've flown a lot of uh general aviation aircraft since then. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Yeah, uh uh I got started. My wife and I had decided I was gonna get back into flying uh when I retired, but I was flying uh uh using rental airplanes for a while, took one of my rentals that I had planned, and I got it back up a second. I was the uh region commander for ROTC. So I had to travel to the debts in Southwest U.S. And I had uh rented uh a Mooney to go up to Texas Tech and was gonna take some of the kids flying. And so I'm going up there to see how the debt's doing and so on. And they rented the airplane out from underneath me, even though it'd been on the schedule for a month. And I came home and said, Hey, we ought to get an airplane. She said, Yeah, but you can't have a boat. Okay, that's fine. Of course, a little boy me, a little boy me is going, jet ski, jet ski. But uh, so I got into light airplane flying and uh found a partner, and we bought, ended up and bought a Bonanza 36. It's a six-place single-engine airplane, started flying it, and about a year into flying it, heard some stories about uh a group of bonanza pilots that were flying formation together. And I said, Oh, that ought to be fun. And it's too long a story to tell you why they got into that, but they did.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

It's a simple reason. Because it's fun.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Yeah, because it's fun, that's exactly right. And uh so uh uh starting in uh late 2003, I got checked out with them, uh, first as a wingman, a year as a wingman, and then uh the next year I was a flight lead. And since then I've been a flight lead, and now the organization that runs it is called Formation Flying Incorporated, and now I'm one of their check pilots. And what we do is all four ship stuff that's fun. I mean, we do fingertip, close trail, extended trail, echelon turns, pitch outs, rejoins. What FFI allows us to do is if we're qualified, is we can fly in wavered airspace so we can go to air shows. That is absolute a hoot. And often we're not in wavered airspace, we just get four of us together and go have fun.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

And so is this how you are uh enjoying your retirement years?

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Yes, I never fly enough. Too many other things come up, but it that's my passion is uh getting to fly. In fact, uh last month up in uh Tyler, we had our spring clinic, and I got to fly a whole bunch of four ships with different guys, and it's you're pushing yourself, you're trying to do better all the time. It is a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

So, smudge, I have just one last question for you. How important is being a pilot to your sense of identity?

SPEAKER_00 29:48

I've already gone through a couple of questioning periods. I lost uh my medical, oh, got about 10 years ago. They didn't like some of my blood work, and so they said, well, you gotta do this, test, that test. Unfortunately, it happened during uh Desert Storm. So a lot of the aeromedical examiners, AMEs in uh FAA went off to the war. So it took them eight months to get my physical back so I could fly again. And it worked, it was fine, it was not a problem, but uh it meant that I didn't get to fly as much, so I went through the okay, what if I can't fly again? What'll I do? How do I do this? And realized it's not the end of the world, it would be disappointing. And so I'd been through that a little bit thinking through that. So after that, every sortie was a good one. Uh enjoy it. Uh, and then uh back when I was 65, so that was 11 years ago, I was flying a force ship, we were doing an echelon turn, and it was the worst echelon turn I'd ever done. And I was embarrassed. So I started to do some research because up until then, you know, I've got 4,000 hours of formation time. It's I don't even think about it. It just kind of happens. So I started to do some research and find out how at 65 the average in American male reaction time is doubled. And that doesn't include any cognitive delay. So I said, okay, from now on, you've got to show up on every sortie with your A game on, your adrenaline up. And that's what I've been doing for 11 years. But I realized after having to ask a fellow that was 83 not to fly with us anymore, because he was just not very good at thinking and flying anymore. And so I've thought through that. So every sortie I fly now is is today the last day. So every sortie I enjoy realizing that I'm no longer able to define myself as a pilot, but pilot logic and way we do things is part of me.

SPEAKER_01 31:54

Smudge, thank you for being on the podcast today. Really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 31:58

Well, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

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. Hopefully, we've fulfilled that mission today. New episodes of the 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.