air combat usa

Let me say this about that.

My wife has been trying to kill me for years.  Her method is insidious in that her attempts are cleverly disguised as gifts.  For my birthday, she doesn’t give me traditional gifts.  She gives me, what she calls, “experiences.”  I call them “near death experiences”.  These “experiences” include such relaxing events as glider aerobatics 5 miles out to sea, hot air ballooning over the Rocky Mountains, and ’007′ anti-insurgency training camp in the Arizona desert.  I managed to live through them all, but the one that nearly got me was the “Top Gun Air Combat Experience”.

The process is straightforward.  You go up in a fighter with a highly experienced ex-military pilot.  A buddy goes up in another fighter with his pilot, and you dogfight with laser cannons at 550 miles an hour.  I agreed to do this because the guy I was to be dogfighting with was a…    Human Resource exec and I always wanted to shoot a personnel guy.

After a couple of hours of instruction on our aircraft (an SR 260 Marchetti turbo prop built in Italy and used to train combat pilots) and the fundementials of dogfighting tactics (basically consisting of a novel approach to aerial combat called “If-You-Ain’t-Cheating-You-Ain’t-Trying”), we take off for aerial combat over a South Florida swamp.  The fighter is configured so the instructor and I sit side-by-side so it is convenient for him to observe my flying skills and scream at me for flying the plane like tree sloths screw.

Immediately after take-off, an alarm starts going off in my plane:

Instructor:  “Damn, damn, damn!!!”

Shambo:   What, what, what!!!”

Alarm:  “Ah-ooga, ah-ooga, ah-ooga!!!”

Instructor:  “Take the stick and let me see if I can find the problem.”

So, here I am.  Been in the plane for 15 seconds and now flying the damn thing 100 feet off the ground at 200 mph, while the real pilot is fumbling around under the cockpit console.  After 30 seconds, the alarm stops and I start breathing again:

Shambo:  “Great, you fixed it.  What was it?”

Instructor:  “The landing gear alarm went off.  Hate it when that happens.”

Shambo:  “Is it fixed?”

Instructor:  “Damned if I know.  I just removed the fuse from the alarm box.”

Shambo:  “You WHAT!?!?  What about the landing gear?”

Instructor:  “Screw it.  Let’s go have some fun.  We’ll worry about the landing gear later.”

Shambo:  (whispered to self) “Dead man flying.”

Instructor:  “There are only two safety items I want you concentrate on today.  One – We are wearing parachutes because the plane we are flying was made by Italians.  Two – If you look over to my seat and I am not there, I advise you to exit the aircraft immediately.”

Shambo:  (to self) “Dead man flying.”

So, me and my HR buddy zoom around for 45 minutes at combined speeds over 500 mph, shooting at each other with our lasers, pulling 4 and 5 G’s in dives, aerial loops and near misses, amid earsplitting noise, heat, smoke, gas fumes and a nagging fear that if I lived through all this, I still had no landing gear.  It was one of the most intense things I have ever done and I loved it.  But after 6 dogfights, we were tied at 3 victories apiece and had to head back home.

The landing gear thing turned out just to be a faulty alarm and  we had a good laugh about it while we were getting blasted at a bar near the airport.  At the bar, my wife asked who won the dogfights.  I said:

“I did ……… 3 to 3.”

If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.

And, that’s all I have to say about that.

Shambo