In my lectures about air show discipline, I talk about lessons I learned over the years, some of them the hard way.
I never asked to be an air show pilot. Never really wanted it. I wanted to be a test pilot and go to fighter weapons school before that. But my Wing Commander in Germany made me a deal: my grades out of military college were bad enough that Test Pilot School was going to be a hard sell, so if I played on the CFB Baden-Soellingen base hockey team, he’d help get me there (By the way, I was not that good a hockey player). In the end, I was sent to the Tactical Leadership Programme in Jever, Germany instead of weapons school and given the 1987 air show task on top of it. Test Pilot School would come later.
That first season, 1987, I flew shows in Belgium, Germany, Italy, and France. The weather cooperated, and I stayed current on the jet between shows. Major Gary “Lidd” Liddiard, a seasoned Voodoo pilot and one of the CF-18’s earliest instructors, had built the routine with me. He was Canada’s first CF-18 demo pilot, having learned from McDonnell Douglas test pilot Pete Piltcher and then ‘brought’ the routine to our air force. When we deployed to Europe to begin the CF-18’s life overseas, he flew the first CF-18 demos himself. The next season, Lidd coached my squadron mate, Paul “Brillo’ Noack and then guided me the year after when it was my turn. We modified the routine from what had been flown the year prior to change it a bit, and he then coached me through my first practices from the back seat. But Lidd was gone early into my season, with no one left to coach me or monitor the routine. I was on my own, already comfortable enough to start pushing limits.
We were taught the entry numbers — airspeed, altitude, angle of attack — needed to fly each maneuver, and the minimum altitudes at the top of a vertical maneuver. But we had no gates to meet that would let us continue a vertical maneuver and commit to pointing at the ground. We were far too naïve and ignorant in that period to understand why those values were critical to safe demonstration flying.
So, I tightened the numbers, not violating them, but certainly pushing the minimums. I flew a more aggressive square loop, my slow speed pass flown at slower speeds and higher angles of attack and tried to get faster roll rates out of the Hornet for my 3 consecutive roll pass. The Hornet’s one real weakness is a sluggish roll rate. Amateurs in the crowd never noticed but pilots always did. So, I chased every extra degree per second of roll that I could find.
The flight manual was very clear that we were not permitted to fly consecutive full-stick aileron rolls. But I was doing them anyway, three in a row, and with no coach watching and no data ever reviewed, nobody caught me. Until Aviano.
I was flying a late May weekend show at Aviano Air Base in northeastern Italy, hosted by the USAF. I had practiced at home in Baden-Soellingen, Germany on the Wednesday and Thursday before flying down on Friday with a squadron mate, Brillo (the guy who had flown the show the year prior). The crowd was enormous, Italians and Americans both, and the air show program was full including the Italian Air Force’s Frecce Tricolori demo team, an F-15, F-16, A-10 and me. Saturday’s show went off clean. But Sunday didn’t.
For some reason, during the routine on Sunday, I got jammed setting up the 3-roll sequence and entered it at a much slower speed than I ever had previously. I didn’t notice and tried to fly the 3 consecutive full-stick 360° rolls anyway.
The CF-18 gives two warnings before it departs controlled flight. Above 35 degrees angle of attack, a tone tells you to lower the angle of attack before the jet would get too slow. Above 25 degrees per second of yaw, another tone warns that you are about to slide sideways and spin. You should never hear either in an air show routine, at most a momentary AOA tone if you fly an aggressive corner of the square loop.
On the third roll, the jet pitched up and slid sideways. I recall hearing the yaw tone, though I have no recording to confirm it, only the memory, which has stayed with me all these years. I don’t know what I did right, or if I did anything right at all. I think I just stopped rolling and centered the stick. What I do know is that the airplane was a fraction of a second from tumbling out of the sky at 300 feet above the ground, over a countryside dotted with small towns. It would have killed me and many spectators on the ground.
But it didn’t depart. God looked down and spared me that day. I finished the routine, landed, and debriefed with my squadron mate. There wasn’t much to say, and I could not review the Heads-Up Display recording in Aviano, so we started drinking beer with the other air show pilots, Italians included. The Frecce joined us once they had completed their own show, and we all drank together in the VIP tent until the afternoon closed out. Then we piled into the back of a U.S. military pickup to head to an evening reception, and I watched the Frecce take off in formation for their home at Rivolto Air Base, forty miles east. I joked to another pilot that it must be the B-team flying home because the A-team had been drinking beer with us all afternoon. “There is no B-team” he told me. Same guys. Flew their air show, drank three beers, then flew home. Impressive or dumb. I still don’t know which.
Back in Baden, I reviewed the HUD recording with Lidd and we redesigned the routine so the roll sequence could never again be rushed into.
I had violated the flight manual, and I had clearly never really understood the flight control system underneath it, nothing beyond standard fighter pilot schooling. I would come to know it properly, years later, as a test pilot. That day at Aviano, I was ignorant and lucky.
Some years later, the great McDonnell Douglas (later Boeing) test pilot, Fred Madenwald, would depart a F/A-18 test jet during the development of the Blue Angels Demo team flight control system flying a multiple roll sequence at relatively low altitude. His video, which circulated for years in the test world, was terrifying to watch.
In the years since, far too many pilots haven’t been as lucky as I was that day in Aviano, killed because they violated the rules in their flight manuals, or simply didn’t understand how the aircraft was designed to fly for the maneuvers they were attempting. Closer to home: a U.S. Navy Super Hornet crew tried to copy a maneuver they’d seen a Boeing test pilot fly, without understanding the flight control system underneath it. They got it wrong in practice. Both aircrew died.
My colleagues at Boeing have run extraordinarily professional training programs for their own demo pilots, and for the Navy’s, for years, passing on deep technical knowledge, professionalism, and their own hard-won air show wisdom to keep the next generation safe.
By the time I built the F-35 demo, I had learned to be an expert on the jet. Only then did I design maneuvers to show it off, instead of chasing numbers I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t just know how to fly the jet, I knew why it flew the way it did. And after the 2017 Paris Air Show performance, I worked hard to teach every F-35 demo pilot who came after me to understand the flight control system the same way, why the numbers were designed the way they were, so that no F-35 demo pilot could ever get in trouble and hit the ground. That’s what kept me alive. Not the flying. The knowing.
Fate, luck or choice. Luck saved me that day in Aviano.
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