18
Sep
2016
We’ve all told stories that start with, “There I was …” This story, however, doesn’t begin like that. Whether you were right or left seat with 3,000 hours of experience or fresh out of Mother Rucker, most of us have been in this situation. At the very least, all of us have witnessed it. This time, the story starts with, “There you were ...”
The B-17 bomber was closing fast as I made a swift right turn to evade the heavy iron climbing toward my airplane. It happened when I was on a very routine mission flying a Cessna 182 as a law enforcement pilot.
I remember my first night vision goggle flight in a UH-60 at flight school. It was a beautiful Alabama night with great illume and we were at one of the stagefields practicing roll-ons.
It was a bitterly cold evening in Ansbach, Germany. We were conducting local area orientations for one of our newly progressed RL-2 aviators and the training was going well.
There I was, working as a Black Hawk crew chief with a medevac team. It was beautiful morning in eastern Iraq.
Most everyone has heard horror stories involving target fixation, but they don’t believe it will ever happen to them.