‘I Fly With the Eagles.’

How a mock-combat drill in an F-15 looked, from the back seat.

Talk about one picture being worth 6,000 words: Detail from an illustration by JC Suares, for my Atlantic article 45 years ago. (Image from home archives.)

As mentioned in my post last night, for paid subscribers here is the full text of my Atlantic article about being taken for a ride in an F-15, 45 years ago. I still have the before-and-after photos from that day. Before, I’m jauntily going up the ladder to the cockpit in my fresh flight-suit. After, I’m being ladled out of the aircraft, my flight suit charmingly dappled in vomit and drenched in sweat. Fun times! But, seriously, it’s an experience I vividly remember and am very fortunate to have had.

The original headline and subhead of the piece are below, followed by the article itself. I have updated it on only one point of detail: Clarifying that “the men” who fly these powerful aircraft are now “the men and women.” That change went into effect soon after the Clinton administration took office, twelve years after this article came out.

Enjoy.

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Original title page for the article. (Home archives.)

“You want to fly with the Eagles, you got to pay the price,” Dick Anderegg told me on the phone. Anderegg is an Air Force major in his middle thirties, a fighter pilot so proficient that until recently he was an instructor at the Air Force’s Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas. Now he works at the Pentagon, as an aide (or “action officer,” in the current phrase) to a general, and it was in that capacity that he became my chaperone for a time early this fall.

The Air Force is well-known for embracing its antagonists with hospitality and with technical displays. I had become eligible for such embrace by writing (in the May issue of The Atlantic) about the harmful consequences of the American military’s progression toward more complex, sensitive, and expensive weaponry—of which one of the most complex, sensitive, and expensive specimens is the fighter plane known as the “Eagle,” or F-15. After the article was published, the Air Force arranged several meetings with pilots and other authorities who testified about the Eagle’s capabilities. At the end of one such session, I commented that if the plane was so phenomenal, it would certainly be interesting to take a ride.

“Done,” said John T. Chain, the major general who was at the time the Air Force’s director of operations. He passed me into the hands of Major Anderegg, with whom I spent many hours in the following weeks.