![]() The trash talk was personal and unforgiving. We hammed TOP GUN poses beside the airplanes. We slipped into our parachute harnesses, then swaggered out on deck. “The trophy for the alternates is down in the ladies room!” Yeah, cracked me up. I went into the ladies room by mistake and the wisecracks were predictable. “If You Ain’t Cheating, You Ain’t Trying.” So the playbook allowed shady tactics? These would be covered in the airplane after take off, we were told. Then there was the cryptic “IYAC YAT” on the whiteboard. If your breakfast came up again, the hero camera would record the ballistics of every disgusting barf. The biggest thing on the board was “LOOK GOOD AT ALL COSTS.” The Marchetti SF260s we would fly had three video cameras – cockpit camera from behind looking forward gun sight camera and the ‘hero’ camera, which looked back at the pilots and was always on. So we put our flight suits on and sat for the briefing.Īn ex-F-14 Navy jock, call sign ‘Spartan,’ ran the one-hour brief. Tim, Paolo’s Dad, threatened to walk out if we stripped down to towels. We considered recreating the locker beefcake scene from the movie. Within minutes we were ordered to the locker room to put our flight gear on. We were instantly in an aircraft carrier fighter squadron ready room. We met at Fullerton and stepped through the looking glass. I texted him that Charlie and I were already at the beach playing half-naked volleyball with Maverick and Goose. He also claimed that he spent the night with “Charlie.” Yeah, right. Paolo ready to go Mach 2 with his hair on fire.īut two years ago, he travelled trans-Pacific the day before our knife fight and pleaded jet-lag. In fighter pilot lingo he is “flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong.” Now, two years later, my former adversary Paolo sits all grown up in the cockpit of an A-330 airliner. There were two little boys in those Marchetti SF-260 fighter airplanes that day. We were about to launch into air combat against a real pilot, in a real fighter airplane, with badass ex-Navy and ex-Marine fighter pilots. We showed up at their hangar for a pre-booked flight. Apwas one of the best entries in my pilot logbook: Air Combat Manoeuvring - “dogfighting.” Air Combat USA was an outfit in Fullerton Airport, California.
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