ALL WHO WANDER

TRAINING PILOTS

all who wander Wild Blue Yonder

Viper pilots hurtle along just one wrong move from disaster LT. COL. BOB EGAN, better known as "Festus" to the brave, raw recruits he turns into honest-to-God fighter pilots at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, is cruising along happily at 500 feet and 500 knots in his 3,600th hour in the air, cockpit time that cost the taxpayers of the nation he has spent his life defending roughly $18 million.

Lean, mild and steel-tempered, Egan exudes command so effortlessly that he can make everyone in the room lean forward just by lowering his voice. An instructor at the air base that trains all the nation's regular Air Force F-16 pilots, he's the latest in a long line of airmen who have taken advantage of the desert's empty skies and perfect weather to train generations of fliers. The influx of pilots during World War II introduced so many young people to Arizona that it laid the foundation for the postwar population boom that followed.

Suddenly, something goes violently wrong with Egan's F-16, the lithe, lethal fighter jet pilots call the Viper. For 30 years, the F-16 has served as the most nimble, flexible jet on the front lines of the nation's defense. Now the 25,000 pounds of thrust blasting out the back of his bomb-fitted jet packed with 11,000 pounds of explosive fuel devotes itself to shaking apart the arrow-sleek jet.

With the jet rattling so violently he can't read the displays and the ground a fraction of one wrong move away, Egan reacts instantly to point the nose up as the ravenous engine dies in a great gout of flame. Still moving at 650 mph, the dying F-16 turns its rapier tip to the heavens and on sheer momentum rises to 6,800 feet as it slows to 230 miles an hour. Distantly, Egan can hear his wingman shouting into the radio that 100-foot-long jets of flame are blasting out the back of Egan's aircraft. So Egan pulls the big, rubber-coated, yellowhandled ejection seat lever.

"I pulled the handle and I remember thinking, Why am I not getting out of this airplane? So I looked back down at the handle and suddenly I'm out. There's this violent rush of windlike a hurricane until you're in the chute, then you're coming down and it's completely quiet. I never did see what happened to the plane," says Egan, one of the most experienced F-16 pilots in the world.

The seven-minute drift to the ground is the worst. "It seemed like an eternity. I'm afraid of heights," he says.

That was one of some 23 crashes at Luke in recent years. Six were due to pilot error-including the death of a veteran colonel who became disoriented and flew into the ground. One was the result of a turkey vulture flying into the air intake. The rest stemmed from mechanical failures in the aging jets. Most crashes took place over 2.7 million-acre Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range some 60 miles south of Luke, which provides the empty air space needed to train fighter pilots. Ironically, that same desert shelters a struggling herd of endangered Sonoran pronghorn antelopes.

"I can no longer say that I've had as many landings as takeoffs," jokes Egan, whose 19 years in the Air Force included a stint dodging missiles over Bosnia. On his first mission there, he dodged one missile then watched a second explode just off his wing. Born on an air base, he always yearned to fly. After a stint as an engineer, he yielded to his fate.

"You can't live without it. Love is not too strong a word. It's my mistress-its looks, its capability. It's like sitting on the front of an arrow."

The training crash over the desert was the closest Egan came to dying for his country.

Fortunately, he used that experience to sharpen his demands as a trainer. Which could explain why the thousands of pilots trained at Luke have not lost a dogfight since the Vietnam War.

I got to know Egan while working on Eye of the Viper, a book about the six-month process of turning 13 raw pilots into fighter jocks. I found myself thinking of him often, as we prepared this special issue on having fun in the sky over Arizona.

After all, one reason our air space remains free is that they're out there every day, breaking the sound barrier-with the yellow handle of the ejection seat close at hand.