losing your wings.....

years and years to earn...seconds to lose...

---------------------------------------
SAN LUIS OBISPO - At a quarter past noon on Jan. 21, a U.S. Navy F-18
Super Hornet jet fighter flown by a combat-tested pilot named Richard
Webb appeared over the Edna Valley and streaked toward San Luis Obispo
County Regional Airport.

On its first pass, the Super Hornet screamed along at more than 650
miles an hour, just 96 feet above the main runway. Soon it circled
back, touched down on the tarmac for an instant, then went into a steep
climb, afterburner roaring, and disappeared in the skies.

ADVERTISEMENT

Blake Medeiros, a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who fuels planes
at the airport, was in his employer's office when he heard the jet. He
ran outside and clambered atop a 15,000-gallon fuel tank to watch. He
had seen such displays of aerial might at air shows. But for such a
sight to appear out of nowhere during his workday was awe-inspiring.

Ernie Sebby was in his house less than a mile from the airport. He ran
to the front porch and caught a glimpse of the aircraft. It appeared to
be painted in gray primer. He could make out no identifying numbers.

A former volunteer at airport community functions and an erstwhile
recreational pilot, the 77-year-old retired corrections officer guessed
that the plane was a surplus military jet fighter flown "by some guy
that's got more money than brains."

Sebby immediately recalled an incident in Sacramento in September 1972,
when an inexperienced civilian pilot crashed a decommissioned Korean
War-era F-86 Sabre jet into an ice cream parlor, killing 12 children
and 10 adults.

Martin Pehl was in the washroom of the airport's administrative offices
near the terminal. For a moment, Pehl, the airport's assistant manager,
thought that he was feeling an earthquake.

Then he and nearly everyone else bailed out of the building to see what
was happening. He saw the jet fighter's afterburner afire as the
aircraft climbed into the sky.

The Federal Aviation Administration designation for the airspace above
the airport is Class D, meaning that it has a speed limit of 230 mph
below 2,500 feet. "Oh boy, we're in trouble," Pehl thought. "We've got
a real PR issue.... "


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Like the turbulent wake of a jet, the incident's impact spread outward,
with severe consequences for Webb's aviation career.

George "Bud" Day, a Vietnam-era combat fighter pilot and Medal of Honor
winner, recalled a time when military aviators were entitled to
occasional displays of thrilling bravado.

"Back in the old days, I used to fly by my house on the way back from
an exercise and give a little toot on the afterburner just so my wife
would know I was on the way home," he said.

Webb's case, however, demonstrates how far fighter pilot culture has
evolved.

An important factor is the greater cost and sophistication of today's
jet fighters. Although the Super Hornet's cost is often cited in the
media as about $60 million apiece, Department of Defense figures
collected by the authoritative defense policy group globalsecurity.org
place it at about $95 million, when development costs are included and
the price is calculated in current dollars.

"The weapons systems today are so complex from an engineering and
science point of view that the old idea of who a fighter pilot is has
changed," said John Sherwood, a historian for the Navy.

"Right now the ones who make it are perfect physical specimens, and
they tend to be engineers, people with a strong math and science
background. In the Vietnam War you would still get a lot of people
who'd played football and were jocks and brave guys who were willing to
risk their lives to fly very unsafe aircraft off of very unsafe ships.
But that's changing."

Along with the changes in the aircraft, several highly publicized
accidents and the 1991 Tailhook scandal, in which numerous Navy fliers
were disciplined for wild drunkenness and overt sexual harassment, have
helped shift the culture, as has the emergence of female fighter
pilots, Sherwood said.

Darrel Whitcomb, an aviation historian and retired Air Force colonel
who flew jet fighters for two decades, including three tours of combat
duty in Vietnam, said current standards reflect "a new level of
maturity. The level of professionalism has gotten progressively
higher."

In today's environment, Sherwood said, there is little tolerance "for
misbehavior in any way, whether it's flying an aircraft outside the
flight plan or having a few beers in the officers' club."

The Navy tradition, he said, is to give a ship's captain or aircraft
pilot a great deal of responsibility and autonomy, but to countenance
not even the smallest mistake. The Navy "has a reputation for eating
its children.... If you mess up, there are no second chances."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport once practically had been
Richard Webb's second home. In 1992, as a sophomore at Cal Poly, he got
a job with an aviation service company at the airport. He drove fuel
trucks, pumped gas, swept hangars, washed planes and became enthralled
with flying. Every dollar he earned, after he paid rent and tuition,
went to flight lessons.

"While driving the fuel truck around the airport, the highlight of my
day would be when a military fighter jet seemingly appeared out of
nowhere and made a high-speed low pass over the runway," he wrote in a
widely distributed e-mail months after the incident.

"Talk about motivation for a growing pilot, I'd have a grin on my face
for hours after that. Because they seemed to just appear out of nowhere
with such force and thunder, these flybys had lasting impressions on
me."

After graduation from college, Webb became a U.S. Navy aviation
officer. He flew F-14 Tomcat jet fighters in combat over Afghanistan
and Iraq, taking off from the deck of the U.S. aircraft carrier
Enterprise.

In January, he was based temporarily at Lemoore Naval Air Station in
the San Joaquin Valley, where he was learning to fly the Super Hornet,
the Navy's successor to the Tomcat. Sometimes he drove to the San Luis
Obispo airport to visit and fly with old friends.

One of those friends was Mike Dacey, his former employer at the airport
and the owner of a decommissioned Czech jet fighter-trainer. Dacey was
astonished by the skill that Webb's multimillion-dollar military
training had given him. Of his career as a Navy aviator, Webb told him:
"Mike, I love this so much I can't believe they're paying me to do it.
I'd do it for free."

In Medeiros, whom he had met on one of his visits, Webb saw himself at
an earlier age. He later wrote about how the younger man was "putting
himself through school, driving fuel trucks, learning to fly, wants to
fly military jets ... talk about a spitting image of myself 13 years
ago," Webb wrote in the e-mail. "He'd seem to hang on every word I said
and I enjoyed telling him stories and giving him pointers for how to
get accepted to flight school."

On Jan. 21, Webb checked out an F-18 Super Hornet at the Lemoore base
for a training flight, to add to the 14.8 hours he had logged in the
aircraft's cockpit. His superiors assumed that he would fly to a
designated military training area above Sequoia and Death Valley
national parks, 100 miles to the east.

Webb had other ideas.

"When I made a quick decision to fly down to my old airport and do a
flyby, you can imagine what I was thinking.... " Webb wrote. "I could
now be the guy who seemed to explode out of nowhere doing a high-speed
afterburner pass, leaving a lasting impression on a young kid. Talk
about the circle being completed...."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Minutes after Webb's flight, telephone console lights in the airport
administrative offices blazed. "Everybody heard it - the whole city
heard it," said airport manager Klaasje Nairne. "The phone rang off the
hook ... it rocked our world."

About half an hour after the plane departed, Sebby e-mailed Nairne,
asking her to find out the plane's identity. He expressed concern that
"the tremendous noise generated will set airport and community
relations back years."

After airport officials got in touch, the Navy convened an evaluation
board to consider Webb's conduct. Webb admitted performing the flyby
and knowing that it was against the rules. The board also reviewed two
other incidents in Webb's past which, in the Navy's view, involved
questionable judgment by the aviator.

Upon learning of the threat to Webb's career, San Luis Obispo airport
officials expressed concern about the reaction they had sparked. On
Feb. 15, Nairne wrote Webb's superiors that "it was never our intent to
be a party to the end of this gentleman's naval aviation career." If
that were the result, she wrote, "it would be most regrettable."

Although a superior officer acknowledged that Webb was "an energetic
junior officer and talented aviator," the commander of the Naval Air
Force Atlantic Fleet, Webb's home command, concluded that his flyby
"merits termination of flying status."

Webb's wings were pulled. He was exiled to a desk job in Qatar in the
Middle East, and left to ponder the four remaining years of his service
commitment as a groundling.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Sebby's e-mail wasn't the only complaint the airport received, but Webb
fixed on Sebby as the instigator of his problems.

On June 3, he sent an e-mail to Sebby, carbon-copying more than 30
friends and others in the aviation community. Webb told Sebby that his
grounding was "a direct result of your indignant e-mail," which he
characterized as "scathing."

In regard to his unauthorized flyby, Webb wrote, "No respected fighter
pilot worth his salt can look me in the eye and tell me they've never
done the exact same thing."

Webb concluded that he was "not apologetic for what I did, and if given
the chance, I'd do the same thing again.... It's just incredibly hard
to admit fault, and accept such disproportionate punishment, to an
action that probably helped recruit many young kids in town that
day.... I feel ashamed to have my close friends die to protect your
freedom to complain about how we do our job."

Webb's punishment has grieved his friends at San Luis Obispo airport.

Medeiros, who is 22 and plans to enter Marine Corps flight training
next year, considered Webb a role model.

"To meet somebody who went to the same school as me and became a
fighter pilot, it was very inspiring," he said. "I think he's a great
guy."

Dacey, for whom Webb worked as a student, said it was difficult "to see
him get hammered. Richard grew up here and he came back to show off a
little bit. The kid's dream was to be a naval pilot, and the vast
majority of people at the airport were proud of him."

After losing his wings, Webb appeared to be "in a state of shock,"
Dacey said. "If you wanted to see a kid who looked like he aged 20
years overnight - literally. He looked like he got run over by a
train."

Dacey speculated that Webb didn't realize how much the San Luis Obispo
area had changed in the near-decade since he had left for the Navy -
the expanded population of the city, the amount of residential
construction within earshot of the airport. "He'd been gone," said
Dacey, whose principal business is as a building contractor. "He'd been
in Iraq. He'd been in Afghanistan."

Sebby is not as sympathetic. Webb's missive brought down on him an
avalanche of angry e-mails, and some anonymous, harassing phone calls.
Sebby contacted Navy officials to complain of what he came to see as
Webb's orchestration of a vilification campaign against him.

"I wasn't trying to prosecute anyone or get him fired or grounded,"
Sebby said in an interview. "I had no idea it was even a military
aircraft. This thing he orchestrated against me ... I want the Navy to
know I'm not going to let this drop because I'm offended, deeply
offended, by this."

In a recent letter to U.S. Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) and both of
California's U.S. senators, Sebby demanded an apology from Webb and
that it be disseminated to all recipients of Webb's original e-mail. He
also called on the Navy to further punish Webb for "his harassment
behavior against me."

Reached by e-mail in Qatar, Webb declined to be interviewed for this
article.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Several military aviation experts who reviewed the evaluation board's
report dispute Webb's assertion that flybys such as his are common
today.

"I was very much floored when I read this report," said one former F-18
instructor who agreed to be interviewed but was under orders from a
commander to not be quoted by name. "This was so far out of the realm
of acceptability it's ludicrous.... What he did was practically unheard
of, extremely unusual ... 500 knots at 96 feet is way beyond his
ability.... That's extreme poor judgment having only 14.8 hours" of
flight time in an F-18. "This kid was an accident waiting to happen. It
was a blessing they got to him before he killed somebody and that was
something that was going to happen."

Webb's case illustrates the balance a modern fighter pilot must strike
between aggressiveness and daring on the one hand, and tight adherence
to discipline and procedure on the other.

"You want your young men and women to fly aggressively, fly tough, fly
mean, so when you need them to do tough things, they can go into battle
and win," Whitcomb said. "But that aggression has got to be properly
tempered, so when it's not called for, it doesn't get them in trouble.

"Nowadays, you can't accept needless loss. This F-18, this is the
top-of-the-line, multi-multimillion-dollar aircraft extremely capable
of doing some really amazing things, and we want the young people we
bring in to be able to do those extra things, but always under control
and carefully directed because it's very easy to lose control of a jet
like that."

The case also points up another dilemma: How tolerant should a civil
society be toward a warrior whose behaviors have been influenced by the
experience of fighting on its behalf?

"The kids we want to fight our battles for us are probably not the best
in peacetime," said Dacey, "not the best flying over your local
airport."

The problem, Sherwood said, is hardly new.

"If you take the king's shilling and go to war, you put yourself in
harm's way and you've fulfilled the ultimate contract with the
military. He did that and he may have felt a certain level of
entitlement. Maybe we're being too strict in our treatment of officers.
You can't ask a bunch of altar boys to fight a war."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~^ beancounter ~^ wrote:
years and years to earn...seconds to lose...

---------------------------------------
SAN LUIS OBISPO - At a quarter past noon on Jan. 21, a U.S. Navy F-18
Super Hornet jet fighter flown by a combat-tested pilot named Richard
Webb appeared over the Edna Valley and streaked toward San Luis Obispo
County Regional Airport.

snip

On Jan. 21, Webb checked out an F-18 Super Hornet at the Lemoore base
for a training flight, to add to the 14.8 hours he had logged in the
aircraft's cockpit. His superiors assumed that he would fly to a
designated military training area above Sequoia and Death Valley
national parks, 100 miles to the east.

snip

Here's the part that I am wondering about; "his superiors assumed" ???
Perhaps it's just the terms the LA Times writer wanted to use (or how
I'm reading it), but as written it sure reads like it's a case of it
wasn't actually known where the pilot was going, or what he was going
to do with the "checked out" bird. It's like; "Here are the keys, have
it back by 5." g

From those with such experiences while in the RAG; wouldn't there have
been at least a flight plan for example? Might that be what was meant
by "assumed"? Any thoughts on that para from the article?

MW

yea, good observation...one would think a pilot must at least file
a flight plan...to check out a expensive "piece of machinery" for
sone seat time (only, like 14 hrs..??)...

it was in today's la times....

On 19 Oct 2005 14:29:12 -0700, "Mike Weeks" wrote:

Here's the part that I am wondering about; "his superiors assumed" ???
Perhaps it's just the terms the LA Times writer wanted to use (or how
I'm reading it), but as written it sure reads like it's a case of it
wasn't actually known where the pilot was going, or what he was going
to do with the "checked out" bird. It's like; "Here are the keys, have
it back by 5." g

I have to presume it's the Times trying to be "hip" and "cool." Even
in the Reserves one does not get an aircraft and just "check it out."
There is a flight schedule that in in support of a training
curriculum.

From those with such experiences while in the RAG; wouldn't there have
been at least a flight plan for example? Might that be what was meant
by "assumed"? Any thoughts on that para from the article?

Unless things have changed a lot he was probably assigned a curriculum
flight with a certain number of manuevers that he would have had to
complete to get his "X" in the block.

Not being a "single seat guy" I wondered about him being without an IP
chase. Are data links good enough now that IPs don't have to go out
with the FNKs while they accomplish the curriculum?

Bill Kambic

might be Bill...the times does have a bit
of a reptuation........


"I have to presume it's the Times
trying to be "hip" and "cool."

~^ beancounter ~^ wrote:
years and years to earn...seconds to lose...

---------------------------------------
SAN LUIS OBISPO - At a quarter past noon on Jan. 21, a U.S. Navy F-18
Super Hornet jet fighter flown by a combat-tested pilot named Richard
Webb appeared over the Edna Valley and streaked toward San Luis Obispo
County Regional Airport.
snip

There's nothing new about discipline. He deserved, and received, the
same treatment as two F-4J pilots who buzzed their former tormentors at
Warner Springs in 1969.

That pass was low enough for jet-wash to collapse a guard tower and
cause an instructor's near-fatal thoracic splinter penetration.

Clunk, clunk on the long green felt.

Rick

That F18 pilot knew exactly what he was doing. My guess is that he was
fed up with the Navy and decided to hang it up. Note - he was on an
authorized sortie or else there'd been a lot more severe action taken.
Walt BJ

WaltBJ wrote:
That F18 pilot knew exactly what he was doing. My guess is that he was
fed up with the Navy and decided to hang it up.

But he didn't turn in his wings and resign his commission. He's now
located at a place which if only Adak was still open ...

From the story, it's a much different picture as to his reaction to the
world of hurt he caused himself.

Note - he was on an
authorized sortie or else there'd been a lot more severe action taken.
Walt BJ

Well true, it's not being stated he snuck off in a F/A-18. He didn't
have an unauthorized sortie. It's apparently where he decided to do a
"touch-n-go" after a serious case of flat-hatting[?] g

"~^ beancounter ~^" wrote in message
ups.com...
years and years to earn...seconds to lose...

---------------------------------------
SAN LUIS OBISPO - At a quarter past noon on Jan. 21, a U.S. Navy F-18
Super Hornet jet fighter flown by a combat-tested pilot named Richard
Webb appeared over the Edna Valley and streaked toward San Luis Obispo
County Regional Airport.

On its first pass, the Super Hornet screamed along at more than 650
miles an hour, just 96 feet above the main runway. Soon it circled
back, touched down on the tarmac for an instant, then went into a steep
climb, afterburner roaring, and disappeared in the skies.

SNIP

You're sure now. Not 95 feet, not 97, but precisely 96 feet?

R / John

John Carrier wrote:
"~^ beancounter ~^" wrote in message
ups.com...
years and years to earn...seconds to lose...

---------------------------------------
SAN LUIS OBISPO - At a quarter past noon on Jan. 21, a U.S. Navy F-18
Super Hornet jet fighter flown by a combat-tested pilot named Richard
Webb appeared over the Edna Valley and streaked toward San Luis
Obispo County Regional Airport.

On its first pass, the Super Hornet screamed along at more than 650
miles an hour, just 96 feet above the main runway. Soon it circled
back, touched down on the tarmac for an instant, then went into a
steep climb, afterburner roaring, and disappeared in the skies.

SNIP

You're sure now. Not 95 feet, not 97, but precisely 96 feet?

R / John


....plus state tax where applicable



--

Cheers

Dave Kearton