It still amazes me, after all these years, how a bunch of supposedly smart, disciplined humans could rack up so many tales of jaw-dropping stupidity in the air — and live to tell them at the bar afterward.

The irony is that not everyone got away clean. Some ended careers. Some crashed. Some ejected. Some didn’t come home. I just kept going from one dumb episode to the next, and somehow the story never stopped. A test pilot colleague once told me I typified the “Better Lucky Than Good” crowd. Fair enough. I’ll take the trophy.

I never set out to break the rules — I was too disciplined for that. Good judgment, on the other hand, took a few extra years to show up. Especially when I was a young pilot flying the T-33.

I’d finished top of my pilot training course and — as many people know, because I’ve mentioned it once or twice — was selected as the first “pipeliner” onto the $18-million plastic jet about to reinvent the Canadian fighter force. But that first CF-18 course was still a couple of years out, so in the meantime I got parked at Base Flight in Cold Lake, Alberta, flying T-birds to kill time before my CF-5 and CF-18 courses came up.

The T-33 was an old airplane — a great NORAD target, a reliable parts-runner between bases, and, for me, a free source of flying hours. It was practically idiot-proof. Right up until you put a determined idiot in it.

And what could possibly go wrong with that plan? A 23-year-old, flying a jet older than he was, all over North America, for nine months. My father had over 3,000 hours in the T-33. Everyone who flew it loved it. And more flying hours meant more experience, which meant — I now realize — more chances for me to do something monumentally stupid. Once I started flying the CF-5 and CF-18, I hung onto my T-33 ticket and kept flying it for years — through NORAD alert duties in Cold Lake, then Bagotville, and later out of Baden-Soellingen, Germany, whenever the new CF-18 fleet was too broken to fly for lack of spare parts.

It’s hard to pick just a few highlights. So here are some.

The Alaska fuel gamble. We were tasked to fly NORAD target missions out of Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska. First we had to ferry the T-33s from Cold Lake up through Whitehorse for gas. Coming out of Whitehorse, the other pilots in our formation — veteran fighter guys who had actually planned the flight — decided to skip the boring airliner-style climb-and-cruise and instead go low level up the Yukon River before climbing out toward Alaska. They’d plotted the route, worked the speeds, calculated the fuel burn for the low-level leg and the climb-out beyond it.

I had done none of that. I heard “low level,” liked the sound of it, and audibled into the plan with zero route study and zero planning of my own.

I’ll admit it was spectacular — screaming along the river at low level, winding past old mining relics, seeing a slice of Canadian geography almost nobody gets to see from that angle. Somewhere in the middle of enjoying myself, it dawned on me that I was burning gas like it was on sale. I climbed — too late, and not efficiently — and did the math. It wasn’t going to work out. I’d blown most of my fuel budget flying fast and twisty down a river valley with no airport anywhere along the way to bail into. So I climbed a little higher, slowed down a little more, gritted my teeth, and hoped physics would be kind.

By the time Eielson’s runway came into view, I was on the radio begging ATC for the most direct possible route to the ground — direct enough that I cut off my own flight commander on final approach and forced him to go around. I landed on fumes. Nothing left for a second pattern. Nothing left for a go-around of my own. Lesson very much learned.

Or so I thought. Many years later, ferrying two F-16 Block 60s from the UAE to India, we took off toward Bangalore and looked down to discover we didn’t have the fuel to get there either. That Alaska memory came roaring back at exactly the right moment — which tells you either that I’m a slow learner or that the universe has a sense of humor. Possibly both.

The tornado gap. On a CF-18 squadron, the T-bird was my go-to whenever our jets were grounded — which was often, because there were never enough spare parts in the early days to fix the broken ones. Right before our first deployment to Germany, a fellow pipeliner and I decided a weekend trip to my old high school haunts in Colorado Springs sounded like a great idea. It was, right up until Sunday, when a wall of tornado-grade storms rolled across our route home. Smart pilots wait out weather like that, or route well around it. We were lieutenants. We were not smart. We filed for Minneapolis–St. Paul, which was ahead of the incoming storms, and figured we’d sort out the approach en route. A plan, and I use that word loosely.

Somewhere over the Midwest, I asked my backseater to dig out the approach plates for Minneapolis. His answer: “I thought you had them.” I was the aircraft commander. I did not have them. So we bluffed our way through with ATC and got a radar-vectored visual approach instead. The winds were already ugly — I remember watching a DC-9 ahead of us on final, crabbed sideways against the crosswind hard enough to make it look like it was flying the approach diagonally, in conditions that were beyond the limits of both our jet and our parachutes. We landed anyway, without incident, which I still consider a minor miracle. We got fuel, borrowed the approach plates we should have brought from the start out of the Air National Guard’s Base Ops office, and launched again ahead of the tornadoes — straight at the storm wall, hunting for a gap in cloud tops that towered monstrously around us. We found one and flew through it in total silence, both of us fully aware that any engine trouble in that gap meant a descent into weather that would kill us. Neither of us said a word for a hundred miles. Lesson learned: stop assuming someone else did the job that was actually yours.

Did the lesson stick? Sort of. A couple of years later I was in a three-ship gaggle of CF-18s flying from Germany to the Canary Islands for a weekend of fun, armed with nothing but one out-of-date, photocopied civilian approach plate between the three of us — no legal publications anywhere in the formation. So apparently some lessons need three doses.

More famously — in my Lockheed Martin days, early in the development of the F-16 Block 60, we hit a problem with the aircraft’s air data probes. Part of the job of figuring out why they were misbehaving was flying directly into rainstorms to see how the probes handled wet weather. So there I was, actively hunting down the exact weather every sane civilian airliner was diverting around. I took a colleague along on one flight and found a wall of rain moving west to east toward Fort Worth, where we were based. We flew into it, found rain, and then things got very, very dark around us. I turned us around and ran for home. That same wall of cloud exploded into a line of deadly tornadoes not long after, tearing up the ground below. So — no, I did not, in fact, learn all the lessons. My test pilot colleague has still not forgiven me for that flight.

The wrong-airport approach. In Germany, new Hornet pilots flew a handful of orientation trips in the T-33 to learn the approaches into our Canadian bases at Baden-Soellingen and Lahr, and to get familiar with the low-level areas. As a dual-qualified T-33 guy, I flew a lot of these — free hours, and time with squadron mates.

Both bases used the same High TACAN approach profile: descend from 18,000 feet in a spiral, turn 270 degrees, roll out on final. On one of these trips we planned some basic instrument work at altitude — holding patterns, then an approach into Lahr, then a climb back up for an approach into Baden. I was heads-down flying the approach with a buddy in the back seat, and I didn’t notice he’d quietly flipped the TACAN selector from the station I’d set to one of his own choosing. When I looked up, I simply followed what the needles were telling me to fly.

Canadian air traffic control cleared us to begin the approach, then started radioing that they couldn’t see us — repeatedly — and, in the finest tradition of “well, you cleared yourselves, carry on,” kept letting us continue anyway. We flew the whole approach down to 200 feet, runway in sight, ATC still insisting they had no idea where we were, before we finally gave up and overshot.

Only then did I mention how good the golf course looked off to the right. My buddy — an avid golfer — pointed out that Lahr didn’t have a golf course. Only Baden did. We had flown a complete instrument approach to an airport 40 miles from the one we meant to land at, and neither of us had noticed. By the grace of God there wasn’t another jet anywhere near that airspace that day. We slunk home, called ATC to apologize, and filed it away as one more entry in the ledger of Things That Only Happen to Dumb Pilots.

Every aviator has a lifetime of stories like these. At some point you get smarter, or the airplane gets you first, or someone writes you up. But dumb pilot stuff never strays far from the psyche. Mine followed me through the years flying Hornets in Germany, test pilot school with the US Navy at Pax River, F-16s at Edwards, through Munich flying F-4s, Tornados, and Eurofighter, and through more years than I’d like to admit at Lockheed on the F-16 and F-35.

There’s an old line about bold, old pilots and old, bold pilots.

There should be one about old, dumb pilots too. I’d like to think I earned it.