The Flyboy Podcast: Guest John "Snag" Mihaly

Aircraft flown: F-15, F-117, C-5, T-6, T-37, T-38, 727, 737, 757, 767, 777

Join us as we explore the fascinating world of military and commercial aviation with seasoned pilot John Mihaly. Discover insights into flying aircraft as different as the C-5 and the F-15, handling an inflight emergency over Iraq, auto landing an airliner, impromptu flybys, escorting Marine One, and other memorable stories from the cockpit.

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 John Mahaley, call sign, snag. John has more than 4,200 flight hours in the military and over 11,000 flight hours for the airlines. An interesting claim to fame. During his time in the Air Force, he flew for 22 out of the 23 years he served. He's flown multiple airplanes in the Air Force, including the T 6 Texan, the T-37, the T-38, the F-15, the F-117, and the C5. In the Airlines, he's flown the Boeing 727, 737, 757, 767, and 777. He's also flown the Airbus 320 family. So with that, John, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Thanks, Never. It's uh great to be here. I I'm I'm excited not only for the cool flying stories, but for the opportunity you're doing for uh an oral history of the 117 pilots and kind of fighter pilots or other pilots of our era. So that's really kind of neat. And uh looking forward to your book as well. Although have you discussed the title yet? Did I just miss it, or is that under wraps until the reveal?

SPEAKER_00 1:31

The title is Have Blue Sky. And as you know, Have Blue was the top secret uh code name of the F-117 when it was in uh initial development. And so I I have taken that for the title of the book, Have Blue Sky.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Well, I I appreciate uh the invite, and I'm glad you're finally getting around. You know, you've had the commanders uh from on every level to include the Air Force, and then here I am the other end of the spectrum. So it's it's nice uh to include the bottom half of the bell curve.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

The guys out there on the pointy end of the spear, as we call them. In your background, you have a very interesting uh set of aircraft you've flown. On the one hand, you've flown the C-5, which is the largest airplane in the Air Force inventory. At the other end of the spectrum, you've flown multiple fighters and much smaller aircraft. Can you give us a sense of how the planes of such different sizes, how they handle, how are they different and how are they the same?

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Well, uh starting out with the the venerable T-37, it was an overbuilt dog whistle. It was good that it could uh uh I think I've seen everything oversped and the plane kept flying, no air conditioning to speak of, and just horrific human factors in the cockpit uh as far as instrument layout. But the good part was you were sitting next to an initial student. So that had uh its benefits uh compared to the T6, uh, which comparatively sipped gas uh had a standard instrument layout, but the tandem seating led to some uh difficulties with again the bottom uh end of the bell curve trying to point out references. It's a whole lot easier if you can stick your finger in somebody's uh you know line of sight and go, it's right over there, that kind of thing. The other kind of interesting thing that uh people don't talk about with the T6 is that prop arc, the fan itself, uh it flew nicely, but uh anytime you went uphill, it did not fly like a jet. It was just all this extra drag from uh the props up there. So uh I understood why they did it. Uh the gas burn alone uh made it uh worthwhile, and you could get long sorties if you wanted to, but uh not exactly a jet type feel. T-38, I think a lot of people have talked about it. I think uh when I think of the T-38, the wings being so far back really made you feel like you were just a part of the airplane, or the airplane was a part of you. I went to the F-15, big airplane, big airplane. Easy to fly, difficult to employ correctly, not difficult, but uh it was an exacting community. The radar screen was four inches by four inches, and that's where a lot of your attention lived. Interesting that uh all that uh long distance work was done in a very small portion of the cockpit.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Really? I had no idea the the radar display was that small. I mean the F-117 infrared display by comparison was probably you know the size of a giant, yeah, the size of like a notebook page, uh, you know, uh eight and a half by eleven, probably.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Both roomy cockpits. I think the thing I remember about the 117, uh very first sortie, when it started up, it did a self-test of the flight controls. The simulator, you could run through that in the simulator, but when the airplanes start bouncing around from the flight controls moving, you're like, oh, that was a little bit of a wake up. So the C5, I did 10-ish years active duty, got out, went to the guard, and I was flying C5 in the guard, and then got back in after September 11th to go back to active duty. So the C5 was my guard time in between uh the two active duty stints. It was a completely different world. I was flying with the airlines at that point, and it was even different from the airlines. The airplane is so massive. Each pilot has his own set of throttles. In the airlines, there's usually a center set of uh throttles on the center pedestal, but in the C5 you each get your own. The weird part is cockpit was so wide that only the first officer had a gear handle. So normally, again in a crew aircraft, there's one guy flying and one guy not flying or monitoring, and when he's the one who actuates a gear handle, except for the C5, because that airplane is so big. Maneuverable, I would not call it maneuverable. It was uh slow, but there was a lot of inertia. So flying that airplane was if you were flying it in correct parameters, it was a very stable airplane. And once you got used to landing, whatever it was, six stories up, uh not a difficult airplane to land. Those are kind of the major things I remember from all the different airplanes.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

So with all those airplanes that you've flown, sometimes things go wrong. Tell us about your worst in-flight emergency.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Well, I think like everyone, I've had a had a few. The one that had the biggest ramifications, I think, uh, I was flying. Most of my combat coded time is in between Gulf War I and II, Southern Watch or Northern Watch, as it was called at the time. We were flying out of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, and we were in southern Iraq. Normally you'd go up there, orbit for hours, hit the tanker, come back, orbit, come back, just making sure that uh nobody misbehaved. And uh we are in the cap, Combat Air Patrol.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

This was in the F-15, correct?

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Correct, sorry. This is in the F-15. On this particular sortie, I was a wingman. We're in the turn, and that was uh that was about as exciting as it gets, because if you screwed up the turn, the spacing between the aircraft was all messed up, and we would normally cap in the 30s, not super maneuverable at that point to fix your uh alignment, so you had to make sure you nailed your turns. And as we're in this turn northbound, something doesn't quite feel right, sound right. So I start looking inside and I notice one set of engine instruments is acting a little strange, and I get a call from the flight lead, and he goes, Hey two, you have little balls of fire coming out of the back of your aircraft. It was the right side engine, I ended up pulling that back to idle. Thought at the time it was a compressor stall. Engine was acting normally in idle. So I was like, okay, no problem. I got another engine and I've got afterburner. So uh I go to put the power up on the left engine, and as I do, the airplane starts rolling. I think I'll counter this with a little bit of rudder. Well, the rudder pedals aren't working. Uh what ended up happening is the F-15 has variable inlet ramps, and what it does is it controls the flow of air into the engine such that it's subsonic when it hits the engine.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

Let's just explain that for our listeners for a moment. So the air that's coming into the intakes for the engine, if you're going supersonic, you want to decelerate the air enough so that when it hits the fan blades of the turbine, it's actually going subsonic. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

That's absolutely correct. So the sensor that determined uh whether we were uh going fast failed. And it failed in the high mock position. So what ended up happening was uh the ramps were closed down in such a way that it was choking airflow off to the engine. So while I, you know, that's that explains the compressor stalls and the little balls of fire. The problem with uh that system also is it actually put a physical impediment in front of the rudder pedals so that if you were supersonic, you would not uh overstress the aircraft with yaw. So uh here I am highly subsonic and now decaying airspeed and not being able to use the afterburner on that one engine. So I've got one engine in the idle and one that I can't go, at least military power it. We immediately start heading south, and everything starts running through my mind now. I'm like, uh, as far as how slow can I go? How much altitude uh am I gonna lose before I can, before I need to think about getting out? Obviously, I could get rid of my stores. I didn't want to do that, but I I remember I think I was in the high teens and the low twos on the way out of Iraq. And that particular day nothing was going on, but everybody started following me home because uh had one Sam or AAA gunner decided to take a shot, I was a sitting duck. So for the 30 or 40 minutes it took to get out of Iraq, I was um ingesting seat cushion.

SPEAKER_00 10:14

As we say.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

So then what happened?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

I limped all uh limped all the way back home to Prince Sultan Air Base, and normally we come in high altitude and dive down towards a runway, but uh at this point all I was good for was a straight-in. So but I felt a little bit safer that no one was gonna take a pot shot at me in Saudi Arabia as opposed to over Iraq.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

So you mentioned that you were over there during the uh the pause between Gulf War I and Gulf War II. You actually flew in combat later in Iraq, though, is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Well, it was uh in the lead up to Gulf War II. We are now this time is uh Northern Watch, and as we're getting ready for kickoff, we were flying out of uh Turkey.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Uh this is several years later.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Yep, second second assignment in the F-15. And I remember some of the stuff was crazy. Like uh I remember the the British were tagged with dropping leaflets, and so you know we had to go see if someone's gonna get shot at because they were gonna drop leaflets instead of bombs. I always thought that was a little silly. But I think the most memorable sortie uh was uh we were capping outside of Mosul over a giant uh reservoir that uh you know everything was Saddam, whatever that was Saddam Lake. So we would cap over Saddam Lake because they couldn't put anything in the water. You know, they'd take pot shots at you.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Like they couldn't put surface terror missile systems there, for example.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Exactly. So you'd be able to look out over the side as opposed to having to do belly checks all the time.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

In a belly check, would you actually flip inverted and look down?

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Not fully inverted, but I we you'd go to check you know directly below you if you needed to. Um and I remember uh the architecture there. Uh I I was just amazed once, near the southern end of this reservoir, uh, were orchards, and we used the very secretive call sign orchards because in the orchard they would hide AAA. And it was a little bit harder to see a gun emplacement in this in these orchards as opposed to out in the middle of the desert. And I remember uh that there were space-based assets that would identify infrared events, and so we got a call from AWAX and it said, hey, there are uh infrared events by the orchards. And so I remember this time banking up now and looking at the orchards, and I was expecting to see, I don't know, something. And I remember thinking, and this is every time I think, oh, this is you know full of whatever, that's when I should go stop and think. But I remember uh I'm like, I can't be right, I don't see anything. And as I come back upright and I'm looking ahead, there's a whole bunch of dirty clouds, and I'm like, huh, they're shooting at us. And the the thing that amazed me was that we got the information inside the time of flight of that AAA. We knew they were shooting at us before it started exploding.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Okay, so wait a wait a minute, wait a minute. So you have a space-based asset that observes this phenomenon. They're starting to shoot. They see the infrared event, they relay it to AWACS, the airborne warning and control plane. AWAX relays it to you. You look down, don't see anything, and by the time you look up, it's exploding in front of you.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

Yes, it's you know, it that was the thing. Inside the time of flight, you're getting that information, and that was whatever that was. Is that 25 years ago? So, you know, uh I can only imagine now uh how much more amazing the architecture is for our warfighters.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

That's impressive. Wow. So let's talk about a different kind of challenge. Weather. What's the worst weather you've landed in?

SPEAKER_01 14:10

Worst weather, uh, that's gotta be uh an airline story. Normally, fighter world, the minimums used to be 301, so 300-foot ceiling, one mile visibility. And people may have dented the ceiling and visibility, but still you kind of had to see the runway, and you generally see the entire runway, that kind of stuff. In the airlines, they have auto land capability on these aircraft, and so it's something you practice in the simulator with simulator visibility. And uh one day I was flying into London, notorious for not great weather. So we're flying into London, they're calling uh visibility at 300, not ceiling, but visibility, 300 feet, and that is the lowest you are allowed to auto-land uh basically because uh once you land, you need some visibility to be able to taxi.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

Okay, and to give people a sense of this, at landing speeds, that means if if your airplane is traveling about say 150 feet per second, it means you can literally only see two seconds into the future with that kind of visibility.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

A category one ILS is what we used to fly in the Air Force. And you would fly it down to a decision height because you would make a decision: do I have the required visibility? Am I in the right place to make a landing? When a category three approach where the aircraft auto lands, it's an alert height, and you just need to be alert that everything's working because the airplane's gonna do its thing. And so as we come in on this approach, the radar altimeter is calling off, you know, uh gets down to 50, 40, 30, and you start to see the uh uh the throttles start to come back. The airplane is starting to flare by the time you see, and you don't see the runway necessarily, you see the centerline lights, and you only see a couple of them. So you can see edge lights and a couple of centerline lights. And then once you've decelerated enough, you get a little bit more visibility, uh, you know, a little bit uh better ability to take in the environment. But the airplane lands, and uh we were inside of 50 feet. I remember distinctly out of the corner of my eyes the throttles coming back before we saw anything. And it was one of those things where you just go, I hope this system uh hope this system works.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

I hope it works. That's a real act of faith in the technology. And it clearly it was good enough to get the get the job done. It works. You and I have talked a little bit about some of the places we've been and and flown before. I have a question for you. Have you ever talked to your wife Dana on the radio?

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Uh not directly, and this is uh, you know, uh everybody has their stories where they were Chuck Yeager, and uh this is not one of mine. Uh I was at uh Tyndall Air Force Base and I was initial F-15 student. And anytime you're an initial student in the fighter community, uh the first rule you should follow is you know, you keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut. So uh that was uh particularly true in the F-15 community. So there I was doing the BFM basic fighter maneuver or dog fighting portion of the uh qualification court. You did the aircraft qual, can you land, take off, do instrument approach, that kind of stuff, and then you start the employment or phase of can you operate the weapon system? And they start building block approach doing BFM or dog fighting. Do 1v1 before you go 2v2. And so uh this particular sortie was kind of my final BFM ride, so it's not really like a 4-8 formal check ride, but you've got to pass this ride to move on in the program. And uh because it was BFM, uh we were and didn't require a ton of airspace, we were doing this over land because Tyndall has huge overwater areas, but we're over land, uh north of the base. Tactical portion of the sorting is complete, and we get a call from uh center. I'm the wingman at this point, so I'm just following along, and center asks the flight lead to contact Panama City Tower. So he switches us over to Tower. I follow along, and this has never happened before, but uh I'm just a student, I'm gonna do what I'm told. And uh so he checks in with Panama City Tower, and Panama City Tower says, Hey, uh, we've got the wife of one of your crew members up here in the cab with us, and wondering if you'd like to do a flyby. So my wife at the time was working uh reporter and anchor for the local television station. She she just started as I had started uh F-15 training, and I immediately knew who it was that was in the tower. And I I could I there's no I I could not I died a thousand, I'm like I couldn't get any smaller inside the airplane. I was oh I I knew I was gonna hear about it. But anyhow, so we do a uh we come in and we do a formation low approach of the tower and off we go. And you know, they put uh Dana on the uh on the radio and you know, she's saying hi, and I'm like, I am not hitting the transmit button. Uh you cannot. They're I'm already in deep enough, I don't need to add to this. So we end up uh returning to base at Tyndall and land, and we're walking into maintenance debrief, and my instructor comes up to me and he's not very happy, and he goes, You know, if you knew this was gonna go down, you should have told me. And I was like, if I knew this was gonna go down, I would have killed it a long time ago. So that's about as close as I ever came to talking to my wife on the radio.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

So is that the only time you've ever done a flyby?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Okay, so um there I I've had a couple that are kind of memorable. Uh some that uh even even if the statute of limitations expired, I'm not sure the the current company would like me telling those stories, but um don't disclose any more than you need to. Yes. Um one uh one that stands out, I got to do a flyby of the National Mall uh under second Eagle assignment, yeah, flying again out of Langley Air Force Base, and uh now we're doing what's called Operation Noble Eagle. And Noble Eagle was protection of the homeland, high value assets, whether it be sporting events, politicians, whatever it was, if they need cities, you know. Yeah, they were worried about another hijacked airliner. This is a brief aside, you know. My um observation, first time I flew the F-15, I was flying armed airplanes over other people's countries. And that was true in the second assignment, but also we were flying armed airplanes over our own country, and that was a big change in mindset. This particular sortie, just when you think you can't get any lower SA, it goes lower. We take off early out of Langley, it's still dark. We were capping that day over Camp David. The Noble Eagle uh setup typically over that kind of thing was you had a 20-mile circle set up over the top of whatever it is you were protecting. There were usually two eagles inside that when we were flying. Two eagles inside that volume, we had a couple thousand feet. Flight lead would take one twenty one thousand, the wingman would take twenty two thousand, and at twenty four thousand feet they had a tanker sitting above us because we'd be up there for hours. And off somewhere a hundred or so miles away, a wax. Normally it was as boring a sortie as you could imagine. The majority of the problems came from some student pilot doing that cross-country and and running into some kind of either uh temporary flight restriction or permanent flight restriction, no fly zone.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Like Camp David.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Like Camp David. Uh tactically it was a difficult problem. The look angle for the radar, you're supposed to stay inside this 20-mile ring. Uh so you have to look down. If you're chasing a Cessna 172, he may be slower than your radar will actually display. So if he's if you're looking down and he's going sideways to you, he's essentially like notching, uh fighter would notch, he's notching, but he might be, you know, coming right at you and still be below the minimum gate for your radar to display it. So a lot of the times it was visual pickups. And also, I had heard the Secret Service had helicopters that were near Camp David that would go chase these guys down because there's obviously not much we could do. So that this particular day I was trying to figure out exactly how much bank angle it would take for me to stay inside. Like if I held nine degrees of bank constantly, could I just stay in the orbit? And that was about as interesting as it got. And uh we heard some helicopters coming in, and uh, you know, I could tell they were military helicopters because they were on the UHF frequency and by their call sign, but it's a fairly quiet morning, the sun had come up, and then uh I get a call from AWAX, and I forgot what the call sign was like, but Eagle 1 ans mean, and they said some kind of code word. And I had never heard that code word before. And I, you know, there's a big op order for Noble Eagle, and the Intel guys had made a smart pack for us. Uh of course I said, you know, Roger. But then I'm looking through the smart pack trying to find this code word. No luck. So I get on the aux radio and ask Wingman, I'm like, hey, have you ever heard of this code word? And he's nope. So immortal words. Well, if it's really important, they'll tell us again. So there we are minding our own business, and you know, AWAX comes on and says, Eagle 1, code word, and I'm like, copy. And at that point, I was like, man, I really wish I knew what that code word was. Again, if they it's important, they'll probably tell us one more time. And this time, you know, 30 seconds later, it's Eagle One, code word, southbound. And it dawned on me that marine helicopters are marine whatever, but they're not marine one until the president gets on board. So I had enough essay to go, oh, this is probably why they're excited. I think the president's on the move. So that was my best guess at the time. Turned out to be accurate, and so we start as the helicopters headed towards DC, and this was an unplanned movement. We are kind of rotating over the top of them, but keeping them in sight.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

So you're following the presidential helicopters as they're flying from Camp David back to DC. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

Now, but they're much lower altitude, and we're up again in the 20s, and uh there is uh weather now starting to get between us and them. So I really had AWAX, hey, unless you let us go co-altitude, we're done. They didn't want that presence at that time to be for us to be that close to the helicopters. But eventually they come back and said, Yeah, you're you're cleared now to descend as as needed. So now we're racetracking kind of co-altitude with Marine One as it goes to the White House. I scream in low altitude over the National Mall, and the tanker was still left over Camp Dave, and we're like, I guess we'll set up here now. So up we go, and we're like, well, we'll figure this out. Yeah. And then, well, the end of that story is eventually we get replaced.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

So what did you see at uh were you in the weather and then broke out and realized you were flying past the Washington Monument?

SPEAKER_01 25:58

No, no, we knew we were we we knew once we got below the funny part is you know, it's actually what I didn't see. And now that I fly commercially, you know, Reagan National is a busy airport. And I I I guess they had you know groundstop to all the aircraft coming out of there while he was in transit. What we didn't see was a bunch of airplane, like you know, luckily I didn't cause a near midair from the airplanes golfing off Reagan National. But then then you have to go back to your boss. At this point, it's you know, whatever it was, it's noon-ish. I walk back in, and I and I'm quite worried that they're gonna hear about me not knowing about the code word. So I I walk in first to my ops officer, and uh I'm like, hey uh boss, um I know we've been doing no belegal for a while. Have you ever heard of this code word? And he's like, No. I'm like, I think we should put this one in the smart pack. And that's how I think I stayed out of trouble because nobody else knew it either. So if it's okay with you, yeah, particular guy, his name is Papa Maw, and I owe him this is like not an apology, because this is another flyby story again in the Eagle. Now I'm I'm gonna end my second assignment in the Eagle, and I'm I think it's gonna be my last. It did turn out to be my last Eagle assignment. We were uh so we were one day I was a flight lead for uh Red Air, and we we're the training aides for the blue air guys, they go back, and normally the uh prudent and exact thing to do would be if you've got gas left over after your red air, you do a practice BFM setup, dog fight, that kind of thing before you return to base. Well, that would have been the you know, that's the tactical thing to do. I had a little extra gas. I'm like, you know, I'm not gonna fly this plane again. I'm gonna go have some fun in the pattern. So we come back to the pattern, and I decide, you know, the maintenance guys need a little cheering up. So I come in for the one overhead, decide to make it a low approach, and uh light the afterburners in the Langley air uh runways east-west. So the the maintenance at the time was kind of on the eastern side, so I had a whole lot of runway to get airspeed with, and I decide all right, this is good. I'm gonna pull up into the overhead, I'm gonna leave the afterburner cooking so all the maintenance guys would know. It was like pull closed on that one and starting to go downwind. I realized, you know, I could have done that better. So this time I'm like, okay. So I called gear down, and it was down when I called it, but I sucked it back up immediately, and uh a little surprised by how fast the airplane will accelerate when your power is up in the final turn. I got low and fast. And again, lit the afterburners, I'm going down the runway, over 500 knots indicated, and never there was not a lot of distance between you know the horizon marker and uh your velocity vector.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

Suffice it to say you were pretty low.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

I was pretty low, but at that point I'm I'm now low on gas, so now I need to land. Well, also at Langley Air Force Base is Air Combat Command Headquarters, and I don't know if I could have gotten away with the first one, but I definitely woke him up with a second one. And so again, my ops officer had to sit me down, you know, who was the one doing afterburner clothes patterns? I was like, well, that was me, you know. And I have a good idea who who relayed the message from Air Combat Command Headquarters, but it came downhill and it was his job. And I told him I would never do it again, which is true, but I'm still not sorry about it. You know, I'm sorry he had to yell at me, but not sorry I did it.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

So we know uh flying can be a dangerous business, and we've all lost friends along the way. Is there anyone you've flown with that you want to be sure we remember today?

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Well, you know, I like that you asked this question because uh uh we're all lucky. I think uh some of the knucklehead things we've done we can say we got away with, but a lot of times you learn lessons uh from other people and who aren't as lucky to be sitting around doing the podcast right now. And so there's there's a long list. Uh so today I think uh I'll talk about uh a classmate of mine who I was stationed with once as uh as uh an IP, one of my IP tours.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

As an instructor pilot.

SPEAKER_01 30:19

And her name was Amy Svoboda, and she was killed in an A-10 crash, and she was complete stud, was uh playing for the Armed Forces volleyball team, and her squadron was getting ready to deploy, so she went back to Davis Montan to do a quick spin-up so she could deploy with her squadron. And it was a uh night vision goggle right on the range down there in uh outside, I guess I think it was the Goldwater Range. And bottom line, uh she mistook up for down and ended up impacting into the into the range there. And so we lost her around Memorial Day, and I forgot exactly what year that was, but uh gone way too soon. She was the you know, there are first women to do this, first women to do that. Um she was the first woman fighter pilot to die, and uh uh it it was a shame because she did everything uh you know, she she earned it. It was uh you know, everything was based on her abilities. She earned it.

SPEAKER_00 31:26

Nickel on the grass.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

Uh I think for all of us who've flown with MVGs, you know, it was it was just another reminder that the the hair needs to go up on the back of your neck when you know the only thing that turns night into day is sun.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

John, I have just one last question for you. How did you get the call sign snag?

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Well, for a long time I was mayhem. So I guess snag's an improvement, but uh it was my first uh the Eagle guys weren't gonna take a previous call sign, so I had to earn my my F-15 call sign, and my squadron at the time was fairly famous for messing with a new guy. Kind of a weird environment to have, you know, you never knew who to trust. I mean, down to different ops officers, but he'd come in and go, hey, yeah, you need to go report into the wing commander's office in blues. And you had to sit there and pause and go, I'm not sure I believe this. You know, they were all they were all kind of they had guys go downtown to give a tour at the air and space museum, but no kids' school group ever showed up. So, you know, it was all you really had to see if it made sense. So this is my mission qualification check ride. I'm number two on the blue side versus four red air. So the four red air launch, then the two blue air launch, and we're out over the water, and we're defensive counterair, we're protecting a point in the ground, and the four bad guys come at us and off we go, and we uh shoot our missiles and our retrograde and come back around to see if if anybody got through. And there were some tactics about how we did the turn. Uh the wingman would look low and have a feature on the radar that would search high, flight lead would look high and search low. And the radar in that particular mode would lock the first thing it saw within 15 miles. So as you're coming around in this turn, you had little locked chute lights on a canopy bowing. So if there was a a negative number for SA, it would have it would have happened here. So here I am in the turn. Uh, and I thought that we had done well on the initial presentation. We had done well, and here we are in the turn, and I get locked chute lights, and I go ahead to to try and run the identification matrix and make sure, and I'm like, this is what they're gonna do. They've added extra people into the fight. That's the literal thought that went through my brain because I'm doing now again 500-ish knots as I'm closing on these two airplanes that I realize are F-14s and uh Oceania Naval Air Station was south of Langley, and so we would trade. You know, we'll be your training aide, you'll be ours. So I'm like, oh, they've got these guys in for red air. The one thing I didn't look was my situation display that would have told me I was completely out of my area at this point, and they were minding their own business in their area. So there are two Tomcats that are getting ready to do their own BFM setup just a couple thousand feet apart, and I go screaming through the middle of them, uh communicating and telling them that they're they're dead. At that point, my flight leads like, hey man, vector north. I was like, oh that's when I picked that's when I knew, but I you know I knew I'd messed up, but also it was their fault for being there. I was gonna kill them. So the uh in the naming, uh I snagged the you know the navy, and everybody was uh had enough uh adult beverages where that seemed like a great name. So that's how I became snagged.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

So you snagged the navy, okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Snagged the navy and also donated a lot of liquor to that particular uh squadron with apologies.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Uh justifiably so, I should say. Well, snag, thanks so much for being on the podcast. It's been great to have you today and great to catch up. 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, and you can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com. Until our next sorting, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.