How a dream became reality

Since I was a boy, I'd watched my father, an ex-Air Force F-4 driver, take off tire-scorched runways in his camouflaged F-4 Phantom II. I missed him desperately during his two-year tour in southeast Asia in '68 and '69. He bombed North Vietnam and I bombed third-grade math. Living in Germany, many an afternoon, I sat in his high-tech cockpit, right hand on the control stick, left on the throttle, I imagined flying through a miasma of flak, smoke, and white-hot sky. I sat there, wearing my thick, Perrier-bottle-bottom, black-frame glasses, dreaming the impossible. Or so I thought.

As I grew older, my interest in flying never waned. I kept the possibility on the back burner, flame on low . . . but on, nonetheless. In the summer of 1988, the flame would not only blaze away, but turn into a scorching afterburner! I saw the movie TOP GUN 26 times in a movie theatre in Long Beach, California: more than fifty hours' and one hundred dollars' worth of pure, high-octane intoxication. How could I not be enraptured by the danger and romance of fighter aviation?

I was obsessed with flying like never before. I knew the TOP GUN movie by heart, every line, by the 10th time: I was right there with "Maverick" and "Goose". . . .

"Talk to me, 'Goose,'" says a cocky, overconfident Lieutenant Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. Their F-14 Tomcat, 20 tons of fire-spitting, rocket- slinging hell with wings, picks up the telltale sign of multiple bogies. "Goose" peers into his one hundred, fifteen-square inches of green "crystal ball," the Tom's radar screen, and barks, "Roger, I got 'em. Contact, twenty left, thirty miles. . . ."

TOP GUN must have rekindled in me a deep-seated, repressed dream to become a fighter pilot, to scream across a diaphanous blue sky at Mach 2, not a care in the world below. To me, it was now or never. Testosterone shoved all logic out the proverbial window. I had to get into the back seat of fighter for one flight -- just one, I wasn't greedy. I knew one flight would last a lifetime. I was willing to do whatever it took.

But here I was, finishing a Master's in Marine Biology, far from flying in Lear jet, much less a high-performance fighter jet. But within a week after seeing TOP GUN for the 26th time, I was on the telephone. After a month of calls to the Air Force, Navy and other agencies, I found I could request an orientation flight as a member of the media. But members of the media write and take pictures, don't they? The only thing I had published at the time was an article on "Electroreception in Sharks" in Underwater Naturalist.

What the heck, I thought, a publication is a publication! I called the public affairs office at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, and requested a flight at the US Air Force Fighter Weapons School, the Air Force's equivalent to the Navy's TOPGUN school. The folks at public affairs were very professional and kind . . . but they denied my request for a flight in one of their fighters, due to training constraints. I was momentarily crushed.

"Don't give up yet," I told myself, so I followed through and visited the school at Nellis, met with many fighter pilots, instructors and support personnel, and wound up writing a great article for Stars and Stripes. I even shot some nice photos, too. My first professional shoot. In fact, this landed me a great letter of recommendation from the Commandant, Colonel Russ Everts (who had flown F-4s with my Dad in Vietnam), and I submitted it to an F-4 squadron in Southern California. One thing led to another, and I was soon approved to take a hop in the F-4E Phantom II.

Unfortunately, the week I was supposed to fly, Dean Paul Martin -- a pilot with the California Air Guard -- crashed and died on a training flight. Because of the attention caused by the accident, I thought my flying days were over before I even got off the ground.

Not yet, said the Commander of the unit. He let the accident settle down, then called me in for training. I got a day-long course in the altitude chamber, then another day of ejection-seat training. I was really on my way! The morning of the flight, I was as calm as I had ever been, but there was a tinge of anticipation lingering. One moment we were sitting in the briefing room, preparing on paper and chalk board for the flight, the next we were screaming down the runway at 150 knots, then lifting free of the tire-scorched black ribbon beneath us. Then came the call from my pilot. We'd have to abort the flight because the afterburner failed to ignite. "Well, at least I got to spend fifteen exciting minutes in the F-4," I told myself. More than I thought possible at one time.

After we dumped our fuel and landed, Colonel Dan Gibson (the Squadron Commander) approached us and said to the pilot, "John, I give ya one job ta do!" It was a bittersweet laugh for a moment, until Colonel Gibson told me to come back again in a week or two for another flight. And please bring a camera next time, too. I didn't own one. Minor detail, easy remedy. A second flight was beyond gifts! I couldn't imagine a dreamier end to what started out as the greatest thrill of my life. In a week, I was back at the squadron, strapping on 20 tons of F-4E, and rolling and climbing and screaming across the diaphanous blue skies over the southern California Pacific. My dream had come true -- twice! I shot some lovely images from the back seat, which later were published in National Guard Magazine.

It was the break I needed. Little did I know, the National Guard Bureau, purveyor of the Air Guard, would be so interested in those photos. They agreed to sponsor my visits to other units, allowing me free access to the back seats of all their fighters! Those first two flights led to five more with that unit, then dozens of others in Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, New York, Texas, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona. . . . Since the F-4 flights, I have flown in the A-4, A-7, F-14, F-15, F-16, F/A-18, various cargo aircraft and helicopters, and even spent two glorious weeks at the famed US Navy Fighter Weapons School -- TOPGUN. My dream had come full circle then, given that I had spent a hundred dollars just watching the blockbuster movie a few years before. I also wrote and photographed the best-selling coffee-table book, TOPGUN Miramar, after my tour at TOPGUN.

The story is still unfolding. . .