Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [41]
I was at Holloman for “FLIT,” which stood for “fighter lead-in training.” We worked on basic air combat maneuvers, tactics, and flying formation in the T-38. I knew I wasn’t a true fighter pilot yet, but training at Holloman, I knew I was going to be. I had a lot to learn, but I had the confidence that I could do it.
You couldn’t avoid the feeling that you were in elite company. There had been thirty-five men in my pilot training class in Mississippi. Many of them wanted to fly fighters. Just two of us were chosen to do it. So I took seriously that my superiors had faith in me, and I worked hard at Holloman to live up to their expectations.
Next stop was a ten-month stint at Luke Air Force Base near Glendale, Arizona, where I checked out on the F-4 Phantom II. The supersonic jet, which can fire radar-guided missiles beyond visual range, flies at a maximum speed of over 1,400 miles an hour, or Mach 2.0. Unlike many fighters, the F-4 was a two-seat airplane. The pilot sat in the front seat and a specially trained navigator called a Weapons Systems Officer (WSO) sat in the back seat.
We went through the F-4 system by system—electrical, hydraulics, fuel, engines, flight controls, weapons, everything. We looked at each system individually and how they worked together as a whole.
My fellow pilots and WSOs and I learned not just how to fly the F-4—that was the easy part—but how to use it as a weapon. We dropped practice bombs. We engaged in air-to-air combat training. We practiced flying in tactical formation. We also learned to work closely with our WSOs as an effective team.
Day after day, we learned the intricacies of the machine, and learned about our abilities or inabilities to master it. And equally important, we learned a great deal about one another.
This kind of flying was very demanding and exciting at the same time. So much of what we had to do in the cockpit was manual. We didn’t have the automation that exists today to help us figure out things. Unlike those who pilot current fighters, with complex computerized systems, we had to do most everything visually. Today, computerization enables flight crews to release bombs that hit targets with pinpoint accuracy. In the older fighters that I flew, you had to look out the window and make estimations in your head. Before you flew, you’d go over the tabulations of numbers, determining when you’d have to release a bomb given a certain dive angle, speed, and altitude over the target. If you were slightly shallow or steep in the dive angle, the bomb would go short or long. In a similar fashion, the speed at release and the altitude at release also affected whether the bomb would go short or long. You also had to allow for crosswinds when you flew over the target. Modern airplanes provide pilots with far more guidance about how to do all these things precisely.
In 1976 and early 1977, I spent fourteen more months flying the F-4 while stationed at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, seventy miles northeast of London. It was my first assignment as an operational fighter pilot.
JIM LESLIE, now a captain with Southwest Airlines, was a contemporary of mine in the Air Force. We arrived at Lakenheath within a few days of each other back in 1976, and we looked a lot alike. We were both skinny, six-foot-two blond-haired guys with mustaches. When we showed up together, people would get us mixed up. Some didn’t even realize we were two separate guys until they saw us in the same room.
A lot of the older pilots knew one of us was named Sully, but they weren’t sure at first which one of us it was. “Hey Sully!” they’d say, and after a while, Jim got so used to being addressed that way that he’d turn around, too. When I landed Flight 1549 in the Hudson, I’m guessing there were some old fliers from the Lakenheath days who pictured Jim as the “Sully” at the controls.
By his own admission, Jim was a bit of a hot dog in the skies. I had the predictable call sign of “Sully.” His call sign was “Hollywood,” and he wore fancy sunglasses and unauthorized boots that were part cloth, part leather.