I don't deny that I was damned good. If there is such a thing as "the best," I was at least one of the title contenders. But what really strikes me looking back over all those years is how lucky I was. How lucky, for example, to have been born in 1923 and not 1963, so that I came of age just as aviation itself was entering the modern era. Being in my early twenties right after the war was the key to everything that happened in my life, placing me smack in the Golden Age of aviation research and development allowing me to participate in the historic leap from prop engines to jets, and from jets to rockets and outer space. To make his mark on history, Christopher Columbus had to be born at a time when the world was believed to be flat. To make mine people had to still think the sound barrier was a brick wall in the sky. To have reached my twenty-first birthday in the age of the Concorde would have done me no good at all.
Not that flying today isn't fascinating; but technology has removed much of the stress and dangers that made test piloting similar to being a matador. I've also been lucky to retain my health, stamina, and skills so I can stay current with the latest generation of military airplanes. I can because guys at Edwards are kind and bend regulations every once in a while and allow me to crawl aboard the latest equipment. I'm sixty-two and still flying the latest jets. Often I think about ol' Jack Ridley and the charge he'd get flying some of these new birds, remembering how excited he was every time a prototype was rolled out in the 1950s. What would Jack think now of our "fly-by-wire" control systems?
Today's fighter pilot flies by computer. Through his controls he instructs the on-board computer: "Give me so many G turns," or, "Give me this specific rate of roll or yaw," and the computer analyzes his flight data and moves the control surfaces to obey his commands. Now we can build very unstable airplanes at lower speeds to make them more maneuverable at high speeds because the computer will keep the airplane within its stability envelope at any speed. The result? Airplanes performing almost beyond human limits.
For example, the F-16 jet fighter had the first "fixed force" sidearm control. The pilot didn't move the stick, pressure from his hand produced electrical impulses that entered the computer through a so-called strain gauge. It was a problem for new pilots because human beings aren't calibrated in force, and they were never sure exactly how many pounds of pressure they were applying when they gripped their controls. So, that was changed to a movable force stick-moving it about one inch back or forward.
The F-16 had no back-up system for its computer flight controls, and in the development phase, we lost some airplanes and pilots. But the F-18 and F-20 have back-up systems and use digital computers that are more finely calibrated than the older analog computers. These new airplanes have "Head-Up Display," which projects all the flight data a pilot needs on the windshield: angle of attack, airspeed, altitude, even what weapons are on the airplane. In the old days, less than a decade ago, the first onboard computers working inertial navigation and weapons systems needed about four minutes to power up. Now, a pilot crawls in his cockpit, turns the power on, starts his engine, and in twenty-two seconds he's ready to go with a full bank of reference data. And, boy, what a ride!
The new fighters are designed to sustain nine Gs of constant maneuvering at low altitudes. My old World War II Mustang pulled four Gs in banking from a 400 mph dive, and we pilots were four times our normal weight. If we pulled more than four Gs, we began to lose vision and ultimately lost consciousness. My squadron wore the first "anti-G suits," which had a bladder against the stomach, thighs and calves to keep the blood from draining into the lower body. That suit is pretty much what is still being worn today. Wearing it, we can withstand those nine Gs the new aircraft demand.
We spent years and billions of dollars researching and building fighters that were capable of more and more speed, until we finally realized that we didn't need blinding speed. Most dogfighting is done at speeds ranging from .9 to 1.2 Mach. Anytime you operate out beyond 2.2 Mach number, about all you are doing is using fuel. If a guy is running, you can launch a missile that travels about two Machs faster than your launch speed and catch him. In the old Mustangs, the object of a dogfight was to try to get on the other guy's tail. But with the new air-to-air missile systems, we no longer need tail-end position. The new ones don't home in on hot engine exhausts. The guy who wins a dogfight today is the first to rotate, aim, and shoot. So, the newer fighters like the F-18 and F-20 have engine systems that are limited to Mach 2 speeds; they remind me of those durable airplane engines of the 1940s-simple, few parts, easy to maintain, very strong.
I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world-British French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese-and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot had the most experience. The more experienced, the better he is. Or, for that matter, she is. I'm thinking of Jackie Cochran, who was really outstanding, much better than many, many male pilots I have flown with, but only for one reason-she had more flying time. It is that simple. If I had a choice between dogfighting a less experienced pilot in a better airplane than mine or a more experienced guy in an airplane that wasn't as good, I know how I'd choose.
Fortunately, the U.S. Air Force produced both the best equipment and the best training in the world. Fighter pilots fly and fight because that's their job. Guys like Andy never backed off for a moment in going down to the deck to press home and finish off a smoking Me-110. My squadron in the 1950s never blinked about their potential targets so deep into Russia that they'd run out of fuel before getting back. The way the best of us fought in Europe so many years ago is how the best of us fought in Korea and Vietnam. World War II may have been the last popular war, but that made no difference to guys who flew balls-out in Korea or up north in Vietnam. Military guys don't get to veto what wars we fight. Once a policy is decided, we are sent to enforce it. Sure, there are some wars that are easier to get behind than others, but for the most part, the guys fighting are only concerned with two things: winning them and staying alive while doing it.
Dogfighting is unbelievably impersonal. You never think, "Gee, I wonder if the guy I'm about to shoot down has a wife and kids." You're thinking, "Okay, if I break left and he rolls out, he's got me." If you've got to go down on the deck and hit a bridge, you don't worry about whether or not people happen to be crossing it. When a forward air controller points you in the direction where your bombs should be dropped, you don't think, "Hey, wait a minute, what do I have against the Viet Cong? What have they ever done to me?" You might debate the pros and cons of the war with your buddies over beers, but your job is to go on in and drop those bombs accurately, no matter how lethal the ground fire. Military pilots go balls-out and risk their precious lives whenever they are asked. Loyalty and dedication are the only ways I can explain it.
I've met very few military pilots who were warlovers, but also very few who weren't excited by the challenges of combat situations. That part is true enough. For a fighter pilot, combat is the ultimate flying experience, but no one who has lost close friends or witnessed the awfulness of bombing and strafing, or has had a live nuclear bomb loaded onto his airplane in a maximum alert situation, would ever want to repeat those experiences. But if, tomorrow, the pilots from the Air Force Academy's last year's graduating class were ordered to war, they would go out, strap in, and take off to do their jobs exactly the same way that I took off to go fight the Nazis more than forty years ago. That willingness to risk everything in behalf of a mission hasn't changed, in my opinion, from the day I won my wings. To me, that's what made the Air Force so special and why I loved it so much.