The Flyboy Podcast: Guest Jim "Pappy" Russell

Aircraft flown: A-10 and T-38

Jim "Pappy" Russell shares his extensive flying experience, including flying the A-10 and T-38, handling emergencies, and memorable moments from his military aviation career. This episode offers valuable insights into pilot training, aircraft evolution, and real-world flying challenges.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to the Flyboy Podcast, where we bring you just one thing cool flying stories. I'm your host, David Moore, and today I'll be talking with Jim Russell. Call sign Pappy. Pappy has more than 4,000 flying hours in the A-10 and the T-38, flying for 28 years in the U.S. Air Force. His last assignment was at Tucson, Arizona. After he retired in 2009, he stayed on in the local area, teaching other pilots uh to fly the A-10 as part of the training program there. But more importantly, Pappy and I went through pilot training together, and we first met as second lieutenants in the US Air Force forty-four years ago at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona. Pappy, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Great to be here. It's great to hook up with you again after all these years. And uh really good to see you doing uh such good work on this podcast. Appreciate it, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

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

SPEAKER_00 1:14

When I got to college, I I got to looking at the Air Force ROTC. They ended up offering me a full ride scholarship and and a pilot scholarship. Now at that point I was like, well, you know, I that sounds kind of cool. I didn't really know much about it airplanes at all, hadn't really thought about it. But then as a part of the Air Force ROTC program, we had a retired major F-4 driver that uh took a group of us on a field trip up to Wright Patterson Air Force Base to go visit the uh Air Force Museum. While we're standing out on the ramp, a bunch of young idiots uh, you know, in our blues, a four-ship of F-105 thuds comes up screaming up initially. From the ground looking up, it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. When they started pitching out to land at that moment, I went, that's what I'm gonna do. Not just be a pilot, but I'm gonna fly fighters. Of course they would have never had a chance to get in the 105, but I've loved that airplane ever since.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

So you flew the A-10 primarily. Tell us about what it's like to fly the A-10. Put us in the cockpit.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

A ten was a when I equate it to the aircraft you flew through going through pilot training, it probably most resembles a tweet. 38 you had to fly most swept winged uh airplanes where you had to pull it around the final turn and get it, you know, in order to get it to where you needed it to go. The A-10 was much a much simpler airplane to fly like that. It was a very spacious cockpit. To do a final turn, you just basically had to put the nose down, put the bank in, and it fly itself around quite easily. Uh very forgiving airplane. And uh obviously everyone jokes about its lack of thrust. So you could get into trouble if you got behind the power curve there, but as long as you stayed in front of it, it was a very easy airplane to fly. It's quite quite a bit different today, and if you've ever seen the A ten C cockpit and what it's evolved into today, it's uh quite a bit different. And they're qu they got their hands full.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

So tell us a little bit about that. My time in the A-10 was up through nineteen ninety-two, so a lot of progress. And and we had I had flown it when it was literally an iron gun cross in the heads up display on moving. We then got the lasty system, low altitude safety and targeting enhanced enhancement, where the gun cross would now correct for the wind. But tell us about the evolutions that came after that with the A-10 Charlie. How did that improve the plane's capability?

SPEAKER_00 3:46

It improved it significantly with a lot of both uh uh in aircraft sustainment changes like the uh the hog up system, which did some uh improvements to uh changing out the wings because uh it was never really designed to dive at the ground like we after Desert Storm kind of became a primary thing, and there was a lot more G being put on those wings than was ever intended. Uh that was a a structural change, but the interior cockpit became very, very technically modernized. When we flew the originally the A model had one little uh I believe it was about a four by four screen for the maverick. Yep. Uh and that was on the right hand side of the cockpit. Well they replaced that and they inserted instead two monitors, one on either side that could be interchanged back and forth, switch them to whatever you want. A lot of the old school guys kept the maverick on the right because it was just the habit. But you now had a moving map capability, which I would have loved in Europe. Uh but uh we didn't have that capability. It's also it tremendously increased the capability for the airplane to do some of its primary missions. As an example, combat search and rescue. Back in the day, when I was a Sandy One, you had quite a bit of work to do to find the guy on the ground. Well now, through digital means, automatically that location pops up on your screen. And so you've got a pretty good idea where that survival radio is located. And as long as the pilot's with it, you got a pretty good shot, pretty good quick. But it also introduced the capability to add some additional munition capabilities. Adding the targeting pod gave increased capabilities for finding targets, especially in an urban environment. It really helped them out there. Laser guided bombs, but uh we could drop laser guided bombs in the A ten, but somebody else had to be lasing for us. But now you could laze for yourself with the targeting pod and for the remainder of your flight, which made it quite nice. The technical improvements were just absolutely incredible. And things that we encountered flying the A ten back in the day, if you went lost wingman, you were lost wingman. Well well, if the the tactical displays now in the cockpit, you know where everybody is at digitally. So you may not see them, but you have an actual replication on your tactical display of where they're located. Anybody that you have tagged, whether it's your flight or other flights, AWACS, it it doesn't matter. You had that whole situational awareness increase is just some phenomenal.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

And for our listeners, let me explain what lost wingman is. And this is this is one of those things uh if you go through it before this modification that Pappy's describing, it was a uh significantly uh concerning moment. So and this happened frequently when you and I flew together in England. If the weather got bad, we would uh fly close formation with each other, and a flight lead would have a wingman flying next to them and the wings of the A ten are are quite long, and so you'd be focused on the wingtip of the other plane, and it could sometimes disappear because the fog was so thick. And the rule was if a wingman lost sight of their flight lead and couldn't maintain position and uh awareness of where their lead was, they had to turn away and transition to instruments and and that could be quite disoriented, especially if you had a four-ship goat-lost wingman. That's right. So having that kind of awareness of where everybody is, that would have been great to have, especially flying over there in Europe. Which brings up the question of flying in Europe in bad weather. What's the worst weather you've flown through to land an airplane?

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Well, as you alluded to, the weather was quite often pretty bad in England, and it it's probably the darkest weather I've flown in in Europe in general. I've run into some other bad weather situations in the Chamals in uh in the Middle East, for example, uh in Kuwait, uh and you can get down to flight minimums. But uh the weather over there can be pretty dicey and the one I recall uh the most was not one because the weather was so bad at the airfield, it was the weather surrounding the airfield. I was a brand new wingman. We were flying from Bentwaters in the United Kingdom over to Simbach, Germany, getting to ready to prepare our squadron for a tactical inspection by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO. They would give you these inspections. And we had to fly it out of Simbach because that was the only one that was a US owned base, as opposed to Leipine, which is our primary detachment, which was a German base. So we were going over there, and I was a brand new mission ready wingman, just out of the T-38. My flight lead was a brand new first lieutenant and brand new flight lead, and the two of us were in a two-ship, headed into Simbach, and they vectored us north of the field. As I recall, Sinbach was oriented essentially east-west, and north of the airfield was just absolutely incredibly bad wingman. You mentioned that hanging onto that wingtip light. Yeah, I can guarantee you there was no wingtip separation between my aircraft and my leads aircraft. Because I felt like I was maybe two feet from that light. I was not gonna lose that light. So I'm I'm in there hanging on his best gun and it's just iced everywhere, and we're bouncing around, and it's just horrible. But he has me on the inside of a turn as uh we're finally making a turn towards the the final approach heading to go into Simbach. And his plan was I'm gonna put you on the inside of the turn, and at some point here I'm gonna clear you off. We're in a right hand turn, so he's gonna clear me right, and he's gonna do a left 360 and follow me back in behind me. That sounded like a great plan at the time, and I made it through that watching the wingtip light enough time to get to the point where he said, You are now cleared off. I turned right and immediately tried to transition to my own instruments and figure out where things were at, what was going on, and it was totally iced over. My entire canopy was nothing but ice. I could not see a thing. What I had neglected to do in the A10 they had a defog de ice switch that you had to turn on, and you you didn't do that on a normal basis, but when you went into weather, you always did that. But it didn't immediately dissipate the ice. So I immediately reach over, switch on the defog de ice, but I can't see anything in front of me. I could see that I'm on final for my instruments, but I can't see the runway or to land. As I mentioned, the weather wasn't that bad. We had circling minimums, uh, which meant that I could circle. But this approach plate specifically said circling south of the airfield is unauthorized. Well, there was no way I was going back north of the airfield. And so I just said, they're just gonna have to live with it. I'll try to overfly as a few houses as I can, but I'm not going north. So I call my circle to the left to get the warning from the tower. I said, Yeah, I got you. But I'm trying to get at least a little bit of that ice off of the front canopy so I could land. This is where some of my 38 time came in, actually, because I couldn't get it quite clear enough by the time I got back around. But having landed in 38 so often, looking around the student's head, trying to see the runway, uh, I'm doing that, you know, out the s the sides of the of the A-tent front canopy, and I was able to get it on the ground behind my my flight lead now because he'd already gone in and landed. And then uh we taxi in and we go to our assigned hit hardened aircraft shelters, the Hasses, and what they would do is they would pull you in and turn you around with the back end of the airplane pointed towards the shelter, and they would bring a winch out connected to the airplane and then winch you back into the house. That was the plan. So crew chief's hooked up. I'm talking to him, he's on the ground, the weather's still crappy, it's raining and snowing and icy, and uh I'm just sitting in the cockpit waiting for me to pull me back into there. Uh, as we're getting pulled back, the crew chief says to me, he says, Hey, uh, didn't you have a travel pod on this aircraft? We were told, your configuration? Uh so it's like Yeah. And back in those days, we didn't have enough travel pods to go around, so they would fit one travel pod on one airplane for everybody's gear. So my flight lead stuff was in there, my stuff was in there, along with some maintenance gear, which is gone. So I call my flight lead because I'm like, I'm just dumbwinging it. So, hey, my d the pod's gone. Somewhere over in northern uh Simbach, somebody's got a crumpled up travel pod, is what I'm figuring. Well, he gets into a bit of a bit of a a panic mode, and so he comes immediately from his preventment over to mine, and sure as heck, it's gone. But neither of us are smart enough to notice that the station it was loaded to, it there was no remnants left there. There was not getting nothing where it showed it had ripped off. It was as clean as could be. And it's about that time that a bread van pulls around with the advanced team that were over there, and they're all jumping out laughing at us all. Apparently, on that pullback, maintenance is under the jet, cranking on the travel pod. And they they ended up leveraging it down and carrying off a bunch of them, and they stuffed it on the side of the of the halves, and that's when they went, hey, your pod's gone. Well, it was just all uh it was all a practical joke. Honestly, I don't think it was on me, perhaps, as much as the as the young flight leap. But uh so it was an interesting sortie. So the the weather was pretty bad, but uh it was the fun of the story that kind of made it memorable for me.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

So in your time flying both the T-38 and the A-10, I suspect you've had a few emergencies along the way. Tell us about some of those.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Yes, more than a few. Main of they occurred in the T-38. The A-10 was, as I said, a pretty sturdy airplane and very good to me. I didn't have a lot of real problems in the A-10, but in the 38, over my years of flying it, I I lost six engines. Six engines. Six engines in total. One of them as a student pilot in close trail, got up too high into the turbines, had that same thing happen to me when I had a student and I was the IP. So those were a couple of those. And the other two were at Edwards Air Force Base, out of the envelope kind of things as well. We tended to stress the envelope at Edwards quite a bit more than we did in pilot training or in a pilot training environment. But the the two uh other ones that I had uh were a little bit more striking. One of them was I was uh scheduled IP on a student solo out and back from Williams Air Force Base to Edwards Air Force Base. And it's a day night sortie. So I would go out first, and I had a student in my airplane doing his dual out and back day night, and we would get to the to Edwards, I would go up in the tower and you know, be available if any of the students that were coming in solo had a problem, and they all got there just fine, and we went off and you know, ate and did we had to do till it's time for us to take off and do our night sorty for a return to Williams. Well, that was in the thunderstorm season at uh in Arizona, as you know that can get pretty serious, and I'm the lead guy going back now. So everything I make, every move I make, the students behind me can all hear me on a traffic control as I request different higher and higher altitudes, and so they're following me up. The stupid part of it was now I'm a first lieutenant, but off my left wing I can see Nellis Air Force Base clearing a million, could have hooked the left, went over there, and in hindsight, that would have been the wise choice, but nope, I was going back into Willie. So I have a thunderstorm cell between me and Williams Air Force Base. So I'm on my way up. Service ceiling of the A-10 was reported to be 50,000 feet. This is T-38, right? The T-38. Yeah. To be 50,000 feet. Well, that may have been the case when it was first built back many years before that. So I'm on my way up thinking I can clear the top of this thing if I can just get high enough. And so I had just requested a climb to 49,000 feet, thinking that's below the ceiling. I think if I can get up there I'll be okay. The uh good idea. Didn't work out as planned. Uh as I was coming through around 475,500 feet, I said, hey, I can see over the top of this thing now. I initiated a 30 degree right hand bank turn, and as soon as I did, that outboard left engine popped. Well now at 47,500 feet in a T thirty eight, you are not gonna stay at that altitude. The left engine is flamed out? Flamed out for compressor stall, very susceptible at that at that altitude. I was way outside of the aircraft envelope or the engine envelope. But all I know now is that I am screaming towards the ground, and one of the the bull facing the 38 for a loss of an engine was to put it into burner. My left engine's out, my right engine's in burner, and I'm about 45, 50 degrees nose low, and my attention is solely focused on the lightning flashes that are occurring in front of you. As you know, we have no radar in a T-38 or weather radar or anything like that. So when a flash would occur, I'd go right, or a flash would occur, I'd go left. You know, and I just work my way back down through there and eventually do pop out on the other side. But the interesting part is I'm screaming downhill, it's at night, uh, I'm in the middle of this thunderstorm and I see the mock needle jump. If people swear to this day you can't go supersonic in a T-38 single engine. Well, I I would I would say to you, it could be a 10% truth or not, for uh in my eyes, as a fr young person, I was going over mock and I was going downhill at a pretty good clip with one engine and burner, and then there's another warning in the in the T-38 instruction manual, the Dash 1, that says don't use the speed brakes single engine. Well, when you're going downhill at that rate and at that perceived speed, you kind of have to get you to get slowed down. So I didn't want to yank it out of burner because I was afraid I'd pop the right engine off. So I just pulled it gently into mill power right out of after burner and then threw the brakes out and uh was able to get the aircraft under control and get it down. You know, and probably the stranger part of this whole story though is that uh every one of those students behind me, six of them solo, made it through that cell. Now, they swore that they followed my contrails down. I don't know if that's possible or not. All I know is all seven of us made it back into Willie, me as an emergency, and landed it uneventfully. It flew pretty good on one engine, but uh but there was one one final if it was probably more dramatic to me, although it won't sound most who've not gone through physiological training or understand hypoxia or the the things that can happen to you.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Hypoxia is when you're not getting enough oxygen, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:14

That's correct. And uh we trained on it. I can't remember the frequency, but we had to go in for routine training and so that we would recognize our hypoxia symptoms, supposedly. I found that out to be f a false narrative. We had been on a Friday night to Jock Knight. I don't remember what the J J O C stands for. It didn't didn't really matter to the to the case, but that was a popular place to go for young training pilots because that was the home base to young training navigators, pilot trainees. Well, it was a big rowdy night at Jock Knight, and my student happened to get an altercation with a group of navigators and they threw a thing of beer on him. So we get back, and I his this particular leg, uh, he doesn't need to do anything except approaches. And when he gets to place operations, I can tell he's not feeling too good. I said, just go pack the jet, I'll be there. I'm gonna fly the jet to Miramar or next stop.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

And where is where is Jock Nutt? I I've forgotten.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Mathor Air Force Base in uh outside of uh Sacramento, California.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Uh at Mathor, that's right. Okay. So he so is this a night flight or the next night?

SPEAKER_00 20:24

No, it's it's a mid it's in the morning. The next morning we get up, and so we're flying, it's clear blue sky, everything's wonderful, everything's going along just fine, and I'm flying the airplane, we're at 45,000 feet, just cruising along, uh headed towards Miramar from Navajo, California, Navajo, South California, and I started getting really thirsty. And so I reached down and I tried to get, you know, they gave us they issued us those, they look like flasks, but they they're plastic uh plastic flasks for your water. Well, I reached down to my flight suit to try and pull it out of my flight suit and it wouldn't come out, and I finally I finally ripped it out of there and it's about the size of a softball. And I'm like, holy cow, because there's no cockpit pressurization gauge in the back seat of a T-38. Oh it's in the front. So I yell forward to the student to ask him what's the cabin pressure, and all I see is this helmet bobbing. And I went, okay, this is not good. He's not with us. I immediately declare an emergency and I start screaming downhill. He's passed out. I'd probably have on my way there if I hadn't noticed that I needed that water. So I start diving down to get us below 18,000 feet as fast as we can. And he comes to uh from there, it tends to be kind of uneventful. Uh but uh the the winds in the high desert of California are generally can be pretty hefty. And uh the ones the winds were out of uh tolerance at Edwards Air Force Base, which was my planned divert. Because the fifteen knots was the maximum crosswind on a T thirty-eight. So I figured, hey, I'll pick George, which is a little further, I think southwest, I guess you'd say, of Edwards. Yep. But it had a V-shaped configuration. I said I can pick the runway that has the least crosswind component to be able to do this landing. And uh I bring it in and and get it landed and uh uh ended up spinning both tires down to the red cord, which meant now I need new tires in addition to whatever's wrong with the environmental control system. But I had declared a physiological emergency. So now when I pull into the chalks, I have of course all the fire trucks around and everybody else is there, but there's one guy that's in a little blue sedan, and he's in his golf clothes, has his golf club hanging out of his back pocket, obviously unhappy to be there, but it's the flight surgeon. I'm in the back seat, the student's in the front seat, now conscious, but still a little bit woozy, and he's got his mask hanging down, and I'm in the back seat, and our intercom is on. And so I'm just listening to the flight surgeon's questions to him and saying, he said, Did you fix you sense any of your physiological uh incidents? No, you didn't, no you didn't. I'm screaming at him, you know, here's what you gotta answer to this flight surgeon. Quazilla would have it, the flight surgeon wanted to get back to the golf course, and he decided not to send us to get blood, which would be the norm. So I immediately do not pass go, went straight to the bowling alley and ordered us a couple of beers. And the student wasn't happy about that, but I knew that the flight surgeon had to have smelled him in that front cockpit because of that beer being thrown him in the night before.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Oh, that's right. He had the beer thrown on him, yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

And I said he had to have smelled like a brewery, because he did that morning at Base Ops, and so I said, We're gonna have a beer. I don't feel like it, sir. I said, listen, if that guy changes his mind, you're gonna have a beer right now. So we can tell him, well, sir, we've been just having sitting here having a beer, you know. It turned out that it was an insidious loss. There's apparently a six-inch hose that goes into the bottom of the cockpit pressurization system that just came loose on our climb out from Mather. None of us recognized it. Uh I I of course had no indication that the pressure wasn't keeping up, and so by the time I found out it was too late. But we didn't get any blood drawn, and we we had to stay at George for a few days, but une uneventful, but it could have turned out to be pretty pretty drastic if I if I had passed out along with him.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

Uh you mentioned the A ten being a very reliable airplane and doesn't sound like you had many emergencies flying the hog, but I understand you were the flight lead one time when one of your flight members lost not one engine, but two.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

Coming out of Zaragoza, Spain, we're we'd been on a weapons deployment for a couple of weeks. So we're headed back out northbound over the French Pyrenees, and it's a total solid under canvas beneath us. So we can't see the mountains to judge how high we are from them, but we're trying to get as high as we can up in the thirties. But when we got up there, for whatever reason, number four got up too high in the wake while doing a cross under setup into the the engine turbulence of the aircraft in front of him and dropped both of his engines, fell offline immediately. Now the Air 10, of course, is kind of a flying rock at that point. It can glide a little bit. The bold face was you had to go throttles off, APU start, the auxiliary power unit, start, flight controls man reversion. So now you have manual control as opposed to hydraulically controlled. And then the final two steps, uh left engine motor, left engine start, you can't do until you get down below appropriate altitude, 20,000 feet or lower. So I am in the process of chasing him like a mad person downhill, and I'm trying to raise his attention, and I'm hearing nothing from him. We found out later the auxiliary power unit performed exactly as advertised. Coming through 20,000 feet, it started winding right up, and next thing I hear is a call from number four saying that, hey, I'm I'm dual engine out. Yeah, I know I'm I'm chasing like a bat out of hell going downhill to command a bailout. If he enters that weather without those engines running, I'm gonna command him to get out because you know we don't know how high we are above the mountains. Luckily, it cranked up. He got it started, he got the left engine started, and then was able to get the right engine started, and we all went back into Zaragoza. We tried to change the the bull face procedures. We submitted a change request to the whoever the people are that do that to tell them to make it throttles off man reversion and then APU start, because you got a fall for, in our case, about 13,000 feet, you know, before the AP is gonna even start. However, they did not change the bull face because they said the risk is too high for a low altitude dual engine loss to make that that switch into bull face so it didn't change.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

So what was happening between the time he turned the APU on and he was finally able to broadcast when he got down to like 15,000 feet?

SPEAKER_00 27:12

He's just following, using manual version to stay level.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

But if his radio wouldn't broadcast?

SPEAKER_00 27:17

The attempts to start the APU is draining the electrical system such that none can be provided for the radio to function. That was part of our rationale behind changing the bullface is that you you're you're now lost calm, two engine out, screaming downhill, flight leads chasing around you trying to get a hold of you. And he he he couldn't talk to anybody until he got that APU cranked up and he turned the APU generator on. Now all of a sudden he had communications and he could talk to everybody. It's pretty pretty exciting for a few moments there.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

But so Pappy, what's your favorite flying memory?

SPEAKER_00 27:51

One that I think of the most is a very simple one. For those uh that probably watch this podcast and that are aviators, if you ever flew out of Willie, when you take off to the north, you do a turnout of traffic right over the superstition mountains as you're heading out to go eastbound out to the working areas there. And that still remains to be one of my favorites because we take used to fly pretty darn early and we'd fly all day. I'm climbing out just as the sun is coming up over the superstitions, and I see all these lights on the interstate below. The sun hasn't quite risen to to hit the city of Phoenix yet, but so it's still kind of just lights and lit and uh and I'm thinking to myself, you know, watching these people down there probably going to work, and here I am. I'm at work. How incredibly lucky am I. I've just never forgotten that sensation, and I experienced it more than one time there at uh at Williams Air Force Base.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

So what's the coolest thing you've ever done in an airplane?

SPEAKER_00 28:48

I don't even know if there would be a statute of limitations or not, because I took a a four ship of A-10s on a very rare day in England where it is absolutely gorgeous. We were gonna go up to Lossie Mouth, which is in the northern part of England to visit a squadron mate who had just been transitioned to go fly with the Royal Air Force and and do an exchange tour there. Well, on the way, I thought, hey, it's so clear and pretty out here. We all have infrared mavericks loaded on our on our airplanes. And I said, you know, why don't we stop by Loch Ness and see if we can't find Nessie with this infrared maverick. If there's something down in that lake, we can run our mavericks over that and see if we can't pick that thing up. Well, I don't know if Nessie is cold blooded or not or whatever, but we are uh we go into a trail formation of the four airplanes, and we're down like a hundred feet above the water, screaming down Lunk Ness, do an IR search. And about halfway down that on the the side of the lock, there's a castle and an observation area, and we are well below that. And they're all looking down on us as these four A10s come screaming by. We'd get to the end of the lock, and we'd do a big whifer deal, and then head back and do it the other direction. Well, as we were coming back on my third pass, four is up into the whiffer deal, and he hears somebody screaming. Our call sign was blue at the time, which was a common call sign in the squadron you and I were assigned to. And they were calling for blue flight, and I'm like, holy crap, everybody root abort now, root abort, root abort, root abort. You know, just we we all pop up into the uh away from the lock, start climbing up. Turns out nothing happened. So that was the good part, because it was actually just the way the way the British system worked. We had we were later than our proposed arrival time at Lassimo, and so they were wanting to know if everything was okay, where you at, what's up, you know, where you so it turned out to be a fairly benign call, but the initial call from four got my attention pretty quick.

SPEAKER_01 30:53

So Oh my gosh, are we in trouble? There were there were a few moments like that we all experienced for sure. I remember just uh loving the flying there in England. It was so beautiful in Scotland and in Wales. I remember one time flying with Dan Holt off the coast of Wales. We were under this grey overcast, but it was crystal clear underneath. And we're over this remote part of Wales flying down the coast, and I remember looking at it and think, This is so beautiful, and and we're the only two people that get to see this from this perspective.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Yep. Incredible memories flying over there at low altitude. Weather could be challenging, but you're right, down at low altitude, which is how we always were over there. It's pretty fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Now, is there any time you've ever flown any place you weren't supposed to?

SPEAKER_00 31:40

At the time, I don't know if it was legal or not legal, but uh and that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Sticking to it. But that would be to fly in a T-38 below the rim of the Grand Canyon. Incredible beauty, and and you could go along on a pretty good clip, four hundred, five hundred knots, you know, in thirty-eight, down through the Grand Canyon and below the rim. That of course today is strictly forbidden, but uh I did that uh perhaps on a an occasion or two, but uh wouldn't recommend anybody trying it today. No. Of course not.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Wouldn't be prudent. I remember when we were going through pilot training. My instructor pilot, uh Mark Fish and I planned when we were doing our uh student cross-country went we went to California and I think we went up to Mather as well, and we're gonna come back through Yosemite. And at the time, as it was legal then, we could actually fly down through the canyons at Yosemite. So it was uh very much uh like a Star Wars moment going down the canyon of the Death Star with you know these towering walls on either side. That is definitely not not legal today. But I'll tell you what, it was it was pretty cool when when we did it back in the uh early 1980s. So, Pappy, what's the closest call you've ever had in an airplane?

SPEAKER_00 32:59

But again, been in a T-38 seems to be the predominant place where I was living dangerously, but you've got to remember I was a first lieutenant, second lieutenant for the majority of that time. So uh didn't make the best decisions at times. I left Williams Air Force Base to go to Edward Air Force Base after two years of being a first assignment instructor pilot, and I went out there to be a chase pilot and had some fantastic opportunities out there flying, I was flying a T-38 still, but because I arrived as a qualified T-38 instructor pilot, they immediately checked me out as a T-38 instructor pilot and then an evaluator pilot after that. They used guys like me who were not a part of the test pilot family, if you will. They had their own things that they were doing to give proficiency flying opportunities to those that were either going through test pilot program at Edwards or who were graduates and just needed to continue increasing their proficiency. I had an occasion where I was flying with an XC five pilot, and at Edwards we tended to fly solo a lot. Occasionally we would have an engineer in the back or something, but we would be solo, and I was out there going to do a basic fighter maneuver mission with this guy who is a test pilot school graduate, but he flew C5s. So as a test pilot, he got to fly a lot of different airplanes, including fighters, but he was did so with an instructor all the time. Well now he's on by himself in the T-38, and I'm not myself in the T thirty eight, and we go into this uh BFM maneuver uh where I get him trapped at my twelve o'clock, and uh he's trying to keep me off, and he pulls himself up into the sun and violates one of the cardinal rules that you never do, and that's to remain predictable. If you do something like that, go up into the sun. He did not. He reversed course, and so I as I lose him going up into the sun, I kind of notched off a little bit uh away from his last known flight path when out of nowhere comes this thirty-eight where he had doubled back to attempt to get at my six o'clock, and he was he went over the top of my airplane close back I I estimated fifty feet. 'Cause he didn't see me or have any idea where I was at whatsoever. And he went screaming over the top of me and I immediately called the knockout. Yeah, he's a test pilot, but I'm ultimately the instructor pilot for this formation. And I told him where to go and hold, and uh I got as far away from him as I could until I finally told him, Go in and land, I'll talk to you on the ground. That was the closest Yeah, those moments.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

Wow. So Pappy, I just have one more question for you. If you could re-fly any sortie you've ever flown, either because it was so perfect you wanted to enjoy it again or because there was something you wanted to change, what would it be and why?

SPEAKER_00 35:42

I don't know that I would I would change it, but uh in the A-10, uh when I was a squadron commander, we were notified that we were gonna take twelve airplanes per squadron. We had three squadrons at the time at Davis Mountain, the three hundred fifty four, three fifty seven, three hundred fifty eight, and I was in command of the three fifty eight, and so we were told everybody's gonna head out twelve airplanes apiece on a Friday, land at Tucson International, because they're gonna be doing maintenance on the runway at Davis Mountain for a period of time, a couple of months. So my weapons officer came to me and presented me with an idea, and he had been coordinating with wing weapons about a surplus of maverick missiles that we had that needed to be fired. And so we cooked up this scheme that, you know, what if we take off on that Friday with those live mavericks on board, and instead of going to Tucson International, we go to Nellis and go to the Nellis ranges and shoot these mavericks, and then land at Nellis and spend the night at Nellis, which ain't a bad thing to have happen on a Friday and a Saturday night. But the trick was my ops group commander and I didn't hit along too greatly. However, the Vice Wing Commander, who was a previous ops officer of mine in the A 10 world, flew in my squadron. So I went up and I visited him and I said, Hey, uh, I got this thing up that I might might be able to give us some mavericks if you'd be interested. I you know, I'd like to include you as a part of the twelfth ship if you would be interested, and you get to shoot a live magic. Oh yeah, I'd be all for that. Well, sir, you know, I haven't pitched it yet to the group commander, but you know, I I wanted to do what I just described. And before it ever got to the group commander, he had already approved it. So the wing had already approved this out this cross-country with twelve airplanes, twelve Mavericks uh going to the Nillis ranges and spending a couple TDAY days there. And and on Saturday night, we actually had members of the squadron that drove up from uh Tucson to Nillis, and we had a quasi, you know, going away party up in Vegas with all the mem flying members of the squadron. And uh we had another one, of course, when I came back for all the maintainers and stuff because uh maintainers worked for me at that time. But uh that was a pretty cool experience to be able to take all the the fellows up to and that's all we had at that time, fellows up to uh Nellis and have a few days there, and then we left on Sunday, landed at uh Tucson International, ready to roll on Monday morning, just as frag. So I would like to do that one again. That was a pretty cool experience.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Indeed. Jim, thanks so much for being with us today on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Hey, it's been my pleasure. It's been great hooking up with uh good friend and uh some good memories from the past. Uh I'll be checking in with you weekly, I'm sure, as we move forward from here.

SPEAKER_01 38:18

Thanks, Peppy. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

Before we check out Never, when is your book going to be released and uh the title of it again? I know you named it after the SIT117, I believe. I think there's a lot of us out there to be interested in the release date and how we might get a hold of it.

SPEAKER_01 38:32

Thanks, Peppy. The title is Have Blue Sky, and the publication date is Veterans Day, November 11th, 2026. Once it goes up for pre-sale on Amazon, I'll let everybody know and hope you enjoy the story.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

Sounds great, man.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

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 sortie, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.