Flying Naked - An American Pilot in the Amazon Jungle

Hearts of Green

The first place the Air Force sent me was Hondo, Texas.

Hondo was a dustbowl on the plains outside of San Antonio where the Air Force housed its flight screening program. Flight screening was just that, a three-week haze of intense flight instruction designed to weed out guys who probably wouldn't make it through the formal course later. If you wanted to survive you had to learn fast, keep your mouth shut, and ignore the stress.

And there was stress. I arrived with fifteen other pilot wannabes and we all assumed the only way to survive was to make sure someone else failed first. Though we didn't stab each other in the back we didn't help each other, either, and whenever someone stumbled the rest of us rushed to distance ourselves for fear of being weak by association.

Then there were our instructor pilots. It was a screening program so the IPs were supposed to be tough but ours were particularly harsh because they didn't want to be there in the first place. They were all first-assignment guys, FAIPS, pilots only a couple of years older than us who believed they should be flying fighters somewhere instead of coddling students. Every time they looked at us they were reminded that – assuming we made it through the program – we would probably get to a real cockpit before they did. That fed their resentment and encouraged them to yell ever louder. We had to leap to our feet when they approached, say "Sir" five times in every sentence, and jump at their every order, but still they hated us.

Lastly there was the plane. It was the Marchetti SF-260, a test aircraft the Air Force was thinking of buying as a new trainer. "Test" meant that no one we knew had flown it yet, which meant there was no inside gouge to help us through the program. It was faster than the Cessna that most pilots trained in and unlike the Cessna it was fully aerobatic. We wore parachutes in case we screwed up so badly that we had to bail out.

In sum, we students were nervous, the instructors were bitter, and the planes were unlike anything we had ever seen. After three weeks only eight of us were left.

Beyond the stress, though, two things about Hondo stuck in my mind long afterward. The first was the taste of lemon drops. South Texas is hot and the Marchetti's cockpit was small so the first guys to go up and twirl around the sky ended up puking their guts out. Yakking was embarrassing but if you kept doing it you could wash out of the program – as two guys found out. So airsickness was a big deal. We all worried about it and wondered how to avoid falling victim. When one of the IPs casually mentioned that lemon drops would keep our stomachs under control we all ran out and bought bags of the stuff. I sucked on more hard candy that month than I ever have before or since. Who knows if it worked? I passed the course, that's all that mattered.

The other thing I remember was the conflict between Captain Simpson and Hollywood. Simpson was my instructor. He was a dead-ringer for Alan Arkin but unless the actor was wound tighter than a catapult spring the resemblance stopped there. Simpson was a captain who hated the Marchetti, hated being at Hondo, and hated being an instructor. Like Erich Fetterman down in Panama, he was a screamer. From the start of every sortie he was angry about something: he beat on the dash, yelled at the tower, or smacked me on the head when I did something wrong. "Trim, trim, trim!" he would scream as we entered the pattern. If I strayed off altitude his hand flew across the cockpit, making me see stars. If I didn't stray but he thought I might, the hand rose and hovered in anticipation of violence.

Hollywood was a guy from California who showed up at the course with all the wrong priorities. "Hey, dudes, any of you ever surf Texas?" he asked on our second day in the barracks. He asked the question while standing in the doorway holding a surf board and then announced his intention to head to Corpus Christi for the weekend in pursuit of waves. The rest of us were buried in books trying to memorize aircraft systems: Hollywood was in search of a curl.