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Overview
Before becoming an instructor in the Navy’s Topgun program, Dave “Bio” Baranek was just another kid with a dream. Upon graduating from college, he joined the Navy with the goal of becoming a fighter pilot. But, his eyesight waning, he knew that he would never be able to reach that goal. Undaunted, he plowed ahead and found his niche as a radar intercept operator in the backseat of the sleek, new Grumman F-14 Tomcat.
Join Baranek in Before Topgun Days as he takes you along for this greatest, most exciting time of his young life: training to become a naval flight officer. Taking place before the events recounted in his previous memoir, Topgun Days, Baranek brings to life the anxieties and excitement of entering the fast-paced world of fighter jocks. From a green recruit to an experienced flyer, discover what it took to become a Topgun instructor.
Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781634506564 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Sales rank: | 7,407 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
An Ensign Begins
Like many teenagers, I had a dream. I wanted to fly jet fighters. To me, that dream was as tangible as the shiny jets I saw at airshows. In my youthful imagination, flying jet fighters would be the ultimate in adventure; zooming through the sky without limits, in control of a powerful machine, meeting any challenge that might arise. I could never imagine the many steps along the path to reaching that dream, I only knew that others had done it, and I would do whatever it took to do it too. I was going to fly fighters.
After a decade of dreaming — no, seeing myself flying those jets — I took the first real step toward reaching my goal. Three weeks after graduation from college, I was in Pensacola, Florida, to start flight training.
You can hardly talk about flying in the Navy without mentioning Pensacola. In 1914 the Navy set up its first flying school in this busy little city. To this day, one thing every Navy flier has in common is the aviation indoctrination course at Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola.
Some officers come to Pensacola from the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, some from the Reserve Officer Training Corps program — well-known as ROTC, with units at dozens of colleges across the country — and some begin their Navy training in Aviation Officer Candidate School, where they receive intense military indoctrination after earning their college degrees. Each program has its pluses and minuses.
ROTC worked for me, and I attended Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The Navy ROTC program included taking classes called Naval Science and going on four-week "summer cruises" that exposed us to what life would be like after we graduated. We got a glimpse of the various career choices: submarines, surface ships, aviation, or joining the Marine Corps (which had its own career fields). This helped some students to figure out what they wanted. For me, it confirmed that I was on the right path. I'd known since grade school that I wanted to fly fighters. I had devoured everything I could find about military aircraft, and I even drew airplane pictures while sitting in class, all through high school and college.
Like most who dream of flying, I yearned to be a pilot. But then, during my freshman year of college, my eyesight began to deteriorate. I knew that to be a fighter pilot you had to have 20/20 vision. Eyesight doesn't go bad overnight, so for several months I talked to many people about it, including a few fortunate souls whose vision had actually improved over time. But by the time I got glasses, my vision was 20/40. There was no kidding myself. I was not going to be a fighter pilot.
I had considered Air Force ROTC but fortunately chose Navy instead, because the Navy was introducing a spectacular new fighter, the F-14 Tomcat. This was good news! The F-14 had a two-person crew, and the second crewman didn't need 20/20 vision. I could wear glasses and fly fighters! I wouldn't be a pilot, but I would be in a fighter. My dream was alive.
During our senior year of college, my ROTC classmates and I filled out "dream sheets" requesting the kind of duty we wanted to go into after graduation. What an appropriate name for these requests, in my case. Our instructor told us we had to write something in every block. So I did: aviation as my first choice, surface ships as second choice, and something else as third. This was the first of many "doors," instances where my future was uncertain. I knew where I wanted to go, but would have to be selected or meet qualification requirements.
We were repeatedly reminded that the most important factor in our assignments was "needs of the Navy," a phrase we would hear repeatedly throughout our careers. During the months of waiting for the decision, I occasionally imagined myself on a sleek destroyer, slicing through gray seas in the open ocean. I decided that if that's where the Navy sent me I would make the best of it. But it didn't come to that. I was ecstatic to learn, about three months before graduation, that I had been selected for aviation training. There would be many more doors ahead. As each of these decision points approached I did what I could to give myself the best chance, but sometimes I just had to trust my fate and the wisdom of those making the decision.
At graduation for the Class of 1979, I was commissioned an ensign. By July I was sitting in a crowded Navy classroom in Pensacola with thirty-eight other freshly minted officers, mostly young men, but at least one young woman as I recall. With painted cinder block walls and fluorescent lights, the room was crammed full of displays and charts that served their purposes but looked like antiques that belonged in a museum. My new friends and I were not there to judge, for this was the start of our new lives. We had competed for these seats and won them over many others. We would be here for six weeks of classroom, physical fitness, survival, and other training. I couldn't wait to get started.
Our teachers were Navy lieutenants and Marine Corps captains, many of them a mere five years older than we were. They wore the same uniform we did, and only a handful of years before had sat in the same classroom. Now they carried not only technical knowledge and instructor skills, but a credibility and confidence gained from a few years in "the Fleet." They had presence. They had attitude. They were what we wanted to be.
Most of us were Navy ensigns, joined by a few Marine Corps second lieutenants and Coast Guard ensigns. A typical day in class felt a lot like college: we started at 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. and finished in the afternoon. But unlike some college classes, everything we were studying would directly apply to our profession for the next few years, such as basic aerodynamics and aircraft engine fundamentals. Classroom sessions were peppered with lessons from accident investigations, and all of the instructors added their own tales of mishaps or great saves. These were called "war stories," whether they happened in combat or not. At this point in my training, stories about flying still seemed distant, still my dream.
It was too early to be very competitive; most of us just wanted to get a sense of the new environment and our friends. We got to know each other around the slide-show training programs in the library (state of the art in 1979), practicing on the low-intensity obstacle course near the officers' quarters, hanging out at various night spots in Pensacola, and washing the cars we had recently bought when we started getting paychecks.
These first cars were commonly known as "ensign-mobiles." Most were fairly modest, which was a small disappointment to me. I expected a parking lot full of sports cars and convertibles. Instead, I found a Mercury Capri, a five-year-old Plymouth Valiant sedan, and other sensible cars. One guy had a Nissan 280-Z, another had a Firebird with a serious high-performance engine. I had a seven-year-old Mustang convertible, model year 1972. I don't recall any Corvettes or Porsches.
To keep life simple, I chose to live on the base in the bachelor officers quarters, which we all called the BOQ. From the street it looked like a mid- range hotel, with several buildings of two or three stories. Each student had the equivalent of a studio apartment, with a shared living room and kitchen. After four years of living in dorms at college it was comfortable enough for me.
In decades past, living on the base had been common for military officers and enlisted personnel. For those assigned to ships, many lived on the ship. Policies that required personnel to be in uniform when entering or leaving the base, and while on the base, made it simpler and more convenient to just live there. But as society evolved and US military forces became all-volunteer (the draft ended in 1973), such policies were relaxed and personnel started to move off-base. Only about one quarter or less of my Pensacola classmates lived in apartments, but percentages increased as time went on.
It became obvious that my fellow flight students in aviation indoctrination — known as AI — ran the full spectrum of interest and knowledge. Some didn't know a Tomcat from a Hawkeye. Others were firmly committed to what they wanted to fly, whether it was a P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft, A-6 Intruder medium bomber, helicopter, or another in the variety of Navy aircraft. Our majors in college were varied, too. Many of us were engineers, but some majored in business, agronomy, geology, animal science, or psychology (me). Some had been high school football stars; others were certifiable geeks. Several had already held "real jobs" before becoming officers, such as grocery store manager or construction worker. A few were married and had started families. Most of us were twenty-one to twenty-four years old, though a few were almost thirty.
We had at least one female officer in our class. She wasn't "the first" — the first women pilots in the Navy earned their wings in 1974, and this was five years later — but women aviators were still rare in the military.
One of the subtle pleasures of this time was our exposure to Naval Aviation lingo, the verbal shorthand that allows "Those Who Know" to communicate efficiently, and also separates them a little more from everyone else. Most terms were related to an aircraft or a mission, but some referred to people. Future pilots were known as Student Naval Aviators — SNAs. Many people think of "aviator" as a generic term for anyone who has something to do with operating an airplane, but when the letters are capitalized — Naval Aviator — it means a pilot, the person who operates the throttles, stick, and rudder.
The designation of non-pilots is more complex. In the Navy, officers who fly but are not pilots are called Naval Flight Officers, or NFOs. As students we were SNFOs. The NFOs who went to fighters were called RIOs, for radar intercept officer. It's pronounced "rio," as in Rio Grande. Those who went to A-6s were bombardier-navigators, BNs. NFOs who flew in other aircraft were known by various other terms according to their crew responsibilities. Assignment to specific aircraft types was still in our futures, so for a time we were all SNFOs. There was no catchy way to say this, so we were usually just called students, or "studs," which was how we saw ourselves.
For convenience, I will use aviator with a lower-case "a" for both pilots and NFOs.
I was an SNFO. Sure, I had dreamed of being a pilot, but by the time I got to Pensacola I was happy with my new goal: RIO, the back-seater in the new F-14 Tomcat fighter. Some friends who faced the same choice decided they didn't want to fly if they couldn't be pilots, so they decided, early on, not to join the military, or they opted for the shipboard Navy. Not me. I'd rather fly than float.
On that very first day, we were issued our personal flying gear. Because it would be months before we actually flew, this was possibly intended to keep us excited through the challenges ahead, until we got real job satisfaction. At the scheduled time, we all drove over to "Flight Gear Issue," a small cinder block warehouse on the far side of the base, where we received:
— boots, safety
— gloves, flying
— helmet, flying
— knife, survival
These and many other accessories were identified by the military "noun, adjective" convention. Each item was recorded in our logbooks.
Of all the items, one of the most important to us was the flight suit. It was made of flame-resistant Nomex fabric and looked like the coverall of any comfortable garage mechanic who likes loose-fitting olive green. Flight suits were commonly called "bags." We wore bags all day long when we could, but sometimes at the squadron we had to contend with orders to be in a standard uniform when not flying. Bags were great for the Officers' Club, where they helped the aviators stand out from ship-drivers, submariners, and all others. More mature officers knew that everyone contributed to mission accomplishment, but in the early days this distinction was priceless.
I think most guys wore something like gym shorts and T-shirts under their bags. Later we would be comfortable enough in bags to skip the gym shorts. I suspect there were some adventurous guys who just ... liked the feel of Nomex, shall we say.
One other item issued that day actually surpassed the flight suit in desirability. It was recorded as jacket, flying — the brown leather aviator's jacket recognizable worldwide. This jacket by itself was reason enough for many of us to sign up. It just looked cool and had become a cultural icon. Some of the farsighted among us left theirs unblemished, but I joined the group that had a few patches sewn on my new jacket. Like bad tattoos, I regretted them several weeks later, but it was too late. There were stitch marks in the leather.
We all survived day one. We were quite excited to get back to our rooms or apartments that afternoon with all of this gear. It brought us a tangible step closer to our futures, even though there were still many trials before our first flights. Back in my room I dressed up in everything and looked in the mirror. The gear fit me, but I knew I had a long way to go before I fit the gear.
My class spent day two at the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute (NAMI) receiving thorough physical exams to verify our eligibility for flight status. Those who were found deficient were washed out of the program; as we put it, they got the "NAMI whammy." We'd all had physicals just before graduation from college or the Academy, so most of us had no surprises.
The eye doctors at NAMI Pensacola, however, were a special group. They determined the career path of many a young hopeful by ruling whether he really had 20/20 vision and could continue into SNA training, or didn't and thus would become an SNFO. For some, this decision came down to a final session in the exam chair. There were stories of memorized eye charts, sleeping for twelve hours before the exam, and various other techniques by which a fence sitter could squeeze into pilot training. For me the eye test was a non-event: I wasn't even close to 20/20 and I was truly happy to imagine myself as a Tomcat RIO.
Our third day started at the swimming pool. The Navy was big on swimming, which seems obvious, but it was a problem for several students in every class, including mine. We didn't simply swim. We swam various strokes. We treaded water until the instructor became bored. We jumped off platforms, then swam underwater while wearing boots and the baggy flight suit. Various aquatic qualifications would be part of every Navy flier's entire career.
I was amazed to see some of my contemporaries trembling with fear before they jumped from the platform fifteen feet above the water. We weren't asked to perform demanding dives, only survival-related techniques. Once we entered the water, we had to swim twenty to thirty feet underwater, break the surface and splash water away from our faces, then swim another short distance underwater. This was to simulate getting away from an aircraft crash by swimming underwater in case there was burning fuel on the surface, and then clearing a spot to grab a breath. Most of the class had no problem, but we could see the fear in a few — who then displayed the guts to jump in and conquer it. In my class, everybody qualified.
After swimming, we made timed runs on an obstacle course. Our obstacle course included walls we had to leap onto and climb over, large timbers to hurdle, overhead bars that required swinging from one rung to the next, and a few others. We had to hustle to get through, but it wasn't exhausting: three minutes, fifty-one seconds was the maximum time allowed. I made it in 3:23.
The next week we again mixed classroom sessions with physical fitness tests. In the afternoon we were timed on a "confidence course" (similar to an obstacle course but less challenging), a 1.6-mile run, and a one-mile swim. I thought the standards were reasonable; I had never been a serious athlete, but I managed respectable showings in all events, including some basic boxing classes.
If you've ever tried parasailing, you were probably towed aloft by a boat driving along the beach of a glitzy resort. We, however, were towed behind a gray Navy pickup truck in an open field, with not a bikini in sight. But one ride gave us a benign exposure to a parachute landing, should we ever have to return to earth sans flying machine.
Over the next few weeks of AI we completed some more qualifications in aviation physiology. One of the more peculiar tests was an electroencephalogram (EEG) administered with your eyes closed and a bright strobe light flashing in your face. Our instructor explained that a small percentage of us would have an adverse experience and be disqualified from flying helicopters. To this day I don't know whether he was serious. When the strobe flashed we saw vivid spiral patterns — with our eyes closed. It was amusing and intriguing; the patterns were as vivid as if you were looking at them wide-eyed with wonder. The nurse ended my test before I had seen enough. None of us had an adverse reaction.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Before Topgun Days"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Dave Baranek.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION,
ONE An Ensign Begins,
TWO Dunkers and Draggers,
THREE Into the Pipeline,
FOUR A Down Is Not an Out,
FIVE First Flight,
SIX A Det to the Keys,
SEVEN We Joined the Navy to Fly!,
NINE Ants, Tomcats, and American Pigs,
TEN "Here We Go!",
ELEVEN Dogfights in Afterburner,
TWELVE Zero to 150 in Two Seconds,
THIRTEEN "You're a Qual.",
SPECIAL SECTION: Flying in the Fleet,
Carrier Landing Emergency Leads to Airborne Divert,
Single-Engine Carrier Landing,
Supersonic AIM-7 Missile Exercise,
Project "Rising Fighter",
EPILOGUE,
GLOSSARY,
APPENDIX: US NAVY RANKS AND RATES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INDEX,