 Welcome to Figments, The Power of Imagination. I'm Dan Leif. I go by Fig. I'm a retired Air Force fighter pilot. I served for 33, more than 33, unfilled action packed years. And this could be the last episode of Figments and The Power of Imagination. I don't know yet. I've got some new responsibilities that are keeping me busy and I wanna do a good job when I do do figments. So I'll be on hiatus for probably at least a month. If you think I should continue doing this show, drop me a note at info at phase-one.com and encourage me, because I need encouragement. We all need encouragement, right? So we'll see what happens here. Today I'm going to have a solo show as I've had before and the title is Imagine You're Gonna Die in your F-15 on the ground, ingloriously. So this is a true story. It's not very self-aggrandizing by any step because I was on the ground after landing. I wanna tell it straight. And the reason I wanna tell it is, first of all, it's a pretty good story and I'm very lucky, but I turned 70 last week. Can you believe that's 70? Holy crap, how did that happen? I mean, I've only been interested in going 70 in a 55, sorry officer, not turning 70, but here I am at this point in life where any story about me will start with an elderly Honolulu man. Man, I am, but I'm lucky to be here. I'm very lucky to be here. Almost half of my life. In fact, today it's about 34 years in one week. Our free chicken, our years that I probably shouldn't have had because of an experience I had flying my F-15, actually after flying my F-15, I look Air Force Base, Arizona, on August 15th, 1988, and I'm gonna take you there and tell this incredible true story of survival against all odds. But remember, it's not very glorious. It's not combat, it's just a story. So let me set the stage for you. In 1988, I had come out of a non-flying position at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas on the outside of the bars where I taught at the Army Command and General Staff College. And I had to re-qualify in the F-15, which I did, and then go through a formal instructor course to teach new pilots in the F-15 and second lieutenants and other new pilots coming into their flying or those re-qualifying. And that required this training course that I was in on August 15th, 1988. In Arizona, it was a hot day, but a beautiful day, sunny. And I was scheduled for an IPC. Now, that's not an abbreviation. It was an instructor pilot C, where the student instructor, that would be me, would watch an instructor pilot demonstrate how to teach in the F-15. In this case, in a basic fighter maneuvers mission, where you go up in dogfight, okay? That's a lot of technical garbage, but basically it's one-on-one, try to beat the other guy. And we didn't have a student, so I got to play student and do my best and it was pretty awesome. A lot of fun and very, you know, it's a contest. And I thought I won, but let me show you the grade slip from that, that sort of, and you'll get a sense of what this was. So here you go, this is the actual grade slip. I flew with Captain Ted Ankenbauer, and the crank later flew F-16s on the Colorado Air National Guard. And the key point is highlighted in yellow there. Bizarre taxi back after landing, et cetera, et cetera. Lost brakes, wound up off surface, masterful job, okay? But no, the grade circle are highlighted in red there. A two, two is like average, not great, he did okay. It was a miraculous job of saving my life, which of course was in my own interest, but he gave me a two because that's what they always did. Fighter pilots had very high standards. So if you got a two like it, if you had a three, wonder what the instructor had been drinking because pretty tough grading criteria. So bizarre taxi back, what exactly happened? Let me discuss the plan. The plan was to go out and fly this mission, we did. We had a great time fighting, went over against each other in two F-15As without fuel tanks, which is kind of important. So they handled wonderfully and to experience guys each with a thousand hours at least of F-15 time is awesome. All we had to do was fly back to Luke Air Force Base depicted here in this Google maps. And fly back, I'm runway 21 right, the right end runway where you see the airplanes in what's called an overhead pattern, pitch out, land. The arm are missiles, they weren't actually armed. You had to put a safety cover over the glass nose of the training heat seeking missile ahead. Then taxi back along number three there, parked along where number four is on the slide and number five debrief and have a cold beer. That's kind of fighter pilot heaven. And all the hard stuff had already been done. We'd taken off and fought each other to maybe a stable, maybe I won, we'll see what I wonder what Ankh would say about that. So we're done with the hard part when something interesting happened, very interesting. Now here you see an F-15 cockpit and it looks pretty complicated as I get ready for this episode I was reminded what a beautiful airplane that is, the F-15 and how well organized it is. So we'll leave this up here, but know that for an F-15 pilot sitting down in this maze of gauges and indicators and switches and everything else, the very at home and very manageable task load wise. Now any F-15 pilot watching this will notice that this picture is of an early F-15A like I was flying at Luke Air Force Base because it's got a videotape or I'm sorry, a film container to the right side of the heads up display controls, which means videotape hadn't even been invented at least not in our cockpits. So we were recording our missions on real film that had to be processed and delivered to the squadron unlike the videotape and now digital recording days. It's kind of an old jet, first flew 50 years ago, still in service, undefeated in aerial combat. The F-15 is a magnificent airplane and it's incredibly redundant. After almost 2000 hours, the F-15 had some pretty serious emergencies, but this beautiful airplane was designed not to kill you except for today. Now you may remember that I had Mickey T, currently retired Mike talent, Mickey T talent on a couple of weeks ago to talk about how he nearly died in the F-15 when it got in a flat spin because of something they didn't know about the airplane. This was before that by a couple of years and I discovered something that wasn't known. So if we could go back to full screen here, I'm gonna step you through the sequence one through five and talk about what happened, which was not on the very simple end of mission plan I showed you earlier. Up at the top of the picture, just off the picture, it's something called the master caution light. It's a light that alerts you to problem. Then if you've watched any of the air disaster shows on Nat Geo or another channel, you've seen that and portrayed. The master caution light comes on, tells you what to look at and so on. It's a primary alert to problems in the cockpit. I'm going to step you through what happened to me in the time it took and then explain what was happening. So here I am taxing back. I've had the cover put on my heat seeking missile. I'm thinking this was a great day. I think I kicked banks, but I'm gonna go debrief. Maybe he'll give me a three. He didn't. When after taxing about 200 yards, master caution number one. Number two, I look at the caution panel and that's what's bordered on number two down there. It says check hydraulics. I look at up at number three, all of the hydraulic pressure gauges are good. So I look at number four, the hydraulic bit panel back on the left console by the throttles. It says utile A. In other words, the utility A system has failed. That means on number five, I pull the emergency brake and the steer handle hard to depict. I also had to depress a paddle switch on the stick to make sure that I had emergency brakes and steering. That's how fast it happened without reference to a checklist. In the F15, it was such a logical, beautiful air pump still is that we didn't have something called bold face procedures you had to memorize and be able to recite verbatim. You just knew. So it went like this, master caution, check hydraulics, utility A, Emer brake steer handle pull paddle switch. We used depress. Now I have brakes and steering moment for a bit. The emergency brakes and steering would not last forever. So I pulled into a parking ramp and thought, well, now I'll just get some talks because of all the fantastic features about the F15, one of them was not a parking brake. Why not? Well, I don't know. We're in the design process. It says, eh, no, they don't need a parking brake. That's for a wintz. They should have thought about the fact that the F15 had so much thrust that in idle power, idle power, just sitting there like you're idling at the stopway. If your feet were off the brakes, the airplane would go over 100 miles an hour. That's fully fueled. My airplane was not fully fueled. We'd flown to the limits of our jet fuel on our sorority. So it was very light. I didn't have the extra weight of a fuel tank. And that meant I had a lot more thrust than I needed and that I had to hold the brakes and hold the brakes and wait for somebody to come put those big wooden blocks that are called shocks in front of my wheels so that I could shut the airplane down and now go debrief and have that cold beer that I was waiting for. That's not what happened. But before I tell you what did happen, let me remind you that you can find figments, the power of imagination and the show I used to do, figments on reality, episodes of these barcodes and they'll stay on the YouTube even while I'm on hiatus trying to figure out how much time I have for this endeavor. And I'd invite you to look at them, especially look at Mickey T's and go back and look at the, imagine I was on the road episode with former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Dave Goldfield. Oh, that, why I say that on this episode will become clear later. Okay, so now you know the plan. I'm gonna pitch out land, de-arm, taxi back, park, cold beer, nice. What really happened? Well, what really happened was the sequence I just went through in the cockpit, which should have resulted in being chopped and then just getting a ride back to the squad and turned out this way. With the total utility, the total utility failure is what I wound up with. I thought I had only one of the two utility hydraulic systems, A, they're A and B. I had nothing with the emergency brake steer handle pull that I discussed earlier and the paddle switch depressed on the control stick. I should have had plenty of brakes and steering as needed. Should have, that's what the dash one, the tech order, the owner's manual, if you would have the F-15 told me. But as soon as I called to get somebody from the area where I parked, the partner, the place where visiting aircraft parked at the base and saw the guy walking out, it's a hot day, so he was not rushing with a set of chocks to chuck my wheels. Soon as I saw him, the master caution came on again. I had reset it and I saw, check on y'all, weird. Utility pressure on those little round dials going to zero and I had total utility billiard boom and the brakes, which are the top of the rudder pedals went to the floor and my jet was rolling, rolling rapidly, it seemed, felt very rapidly. And eventually I would hit an F-16 and park it in the desert. The 30 to 45 seconds between Pete to the floor, no brakes and parking in the desert, we're pretty excited. So I now know that I have no brakes because the airplane's rolling. Because I parked for a visiting aircraft park, there was a jet across from me. It was a German Air Force F-4, as a matter of fact. They had a German F-4 training program in the US and if I didn't do something quickly, I was going to hit it, which struck me as bad. Now, folks, as I said, this is not glorious. Having a fender bender in your multi-million dollar single seat jet fighter, there's nothing glorious about that, even less glorious is probably I should have shut down both engines and let the airplane roll into the F-4. There would have been damage to both of them, but I don't know, that didn't come to me until later. So what did I do instead? I'm rolling at the F-4, looking right at its nose and accelerating rapidly in my very lightweight, high thrust F-15. Fortunately, I've flown the OB-10 Bronco, counterinsurgency four-door control aircraft before and that aircraft, you steered with differential power. You had nose gear steering, but usually real men, real pilots would steer it with differential power on one side or the other and have it turn it. So that's what I did. All the time I'm trying to figure out how to get brakes and steering back because the owner's manual tells me, I shouldn't be without either. So I pushed up the power on the left engine. The airplane lurched to the right, left power airplane goes right and missed the F-4. I don't know by how much enough that there wasn't any crunching or grinding or braking going on. And now I've got to come up with the plan. I think in about two to three nanoseconds, I went through every possible switch position, including controls that had nothing to do with brakes and steering, trying to get brakes back. Steering would have been really nice. Brakes were very important, but nothing. And again, this is counterintuitive to the max because the owner's manual says, should be working fine. You pulled the emergency brake steering handle, you pressed the paddle switch and I still have both in the right position, but I had nothing. So now I had to come up with an alternative plan and the plan involved parking the airplane somewhere and I wasn't sure how to do that. If you look at this diagram starting at number three and heading towards the bottom of the screen there, I have a decision. I could turn right or to the left of the screen and try to get to the runway and put down the tail hook that the F-15 had and catch a cable, but in the leading nanoseconds that I had available, that seemed way too complicated. And so I decided my plan would be to continue down the screen from three towards number four and shut down the engines as I could and roll to a stop somewhere on the ramp that's now at sort of the very right middle that you see a little tongue of cement there. There's a parking area, I knew it was uphill. So I was just going to shut down the engines, roll to a stop and let what happened happen. Seemed like an idea. So now I'm on that long, wide taxiway from three to four. I have a plan. My voice is modulated a little bit. I was talking on the radios to the folks and I've shut down my left engine because I'm not going to turn right anymore. Okay, I'm going to turn to my left to the right of the screen. And so I don't need more power because I'm already going faster. I would guess 40 miles an hour than I need to be, which was a lot faster without brakes than I needed to be going. And so I'm cool. I have a plan and always feels good to have a plan when things are going badly. So I have a plan, get down towards number four there and the plan falls apart because that was a common place for vehicles to transit from one side of the base to the other, taking a shortcut across the flight monitor. And there was a blue Dodge four by four pickup truck with two airmen in it, security forces truck that was coming from my left to the right, from the right of the screen to the left. And if I kept going, if I continued on plan and turned right, I was going to turn left. I was going to hit it. And I was going to die. And the guy's in the truck was going to die. And there was nothing I could do but except not turn and except the fact that I died and they wouldn't. Now I'd like to say that there was a noble intent on my part to spare their lives. But the truth of the matter is I just, I hit a truck with people and there were some airplanes, F-16s to my right, but I didn't in the nanoseconds that you have to make decisions like this. I didn't see any people around them and I was an F-15 guy hadn't flown the F-16 yet so out of a lack of respect I said, I'll hit the F-16 instead of this truck with two guys in it and I'm dead, but they're not. And that sounds melodramatic. I knew I was dead folks. I mean, as part of this, I pictured the obituary telling the world that I had died in a ground accident and that depressed me. There was a flood and as all of this is happening there's this flood of revulsion. I said, I can't say what I thought but I didn't like that. I didn't like going the idea of going out that way but I had no choice. So now, and I see this truck coming from my left to my right and suddenly they or not suddenly but eventually they stopped, it began to look that I might miss them, hard to describe but you know how if you're in a traffic intersection or whatever you can tell if you're going to be able to pass in front, I had that feeling. I had continued straight ahead but I was very, very close to the F-16 that I would eventually hit and I thought you're going to die anyway. I closed my eyes so as to not see the explosion that would kill me and once now clear of the truck with two young airmen and I put the right throttle on the only engine still running all the way up to the afterburner, far as it would go. And with my eyes closed, I felt the airplane turn left and it lurched to the left, it didn't turn to the left and waited for my fiery death. I'm not kidding. Now I'd probably waited half a second if that and there was no explosion, no sound. I was alive and I opened my eyes and yanked the power back to idle on the throttle on the left console and couldn't believe I was still alive, looked in front of me and I saw a bunch of light bulbs and stanchions that were spaced along the edge of the paved area with a little spot of desert. Right where number five is on that chart is exactly where I wound up. And I don't, I think this is a later photo that had some, doesn't have buildings down but it was pretty much desert there when this happened. So I only have the right throttle or right engine running. I look at the two poles for this depart that are to my left so I can kind of steer towards them. I instinctively give a little squirt of power on the right engine and then shut it off so it won't be damaged when I get in the desert, won't suck up rocks and tumbleweed, sagebrush, whatever and roll 42 feet of wingspan between two poles, 50 feet apart without hitting. Wow. The airplane gets into the desert, powerless now, kind of lurches to a stop and I think I'm alive, man. How did this happen? Now, there was such a cycle of emotions through this whole process where sometimes I'm thinking I got this and other times I'm sounding like Peewee Herman on the radio, but now I'm Chuck Yeager. No, no, I'm just, you know, I got this. So people come driving and running up to the airplane, I open the canopy, put down the internal ladder and I'm feeling pretty puffed up and pretty marvelous about myself. And then I got down to the desert but the airplanes parked in and my legs, my knees were knocking like tuning forks. So I did the brave thing and sat down in the desert so I wouldn't fall down. I should have died. I'd love to say that because I appreciated so much being alive, I didn't screw anything out for the rest of my life, but those of you who know me, that's not true. I did, however, have a pretty good appreciation for how lucky we are to be alive, even at this advanced chronological state that I'm in having past 70, maybe especially. But I didn't know how it happened because when I went back and looked at my airplane once I could walk again, I found there was only one bit of damage and I can't describe this. If you had two scale models of an F-15 and an F-16, you'd see that this is impossible. Over to the left of the screen on this beautiful F-15 is a dashed yellow line. The underside of that horizontal tail was a gouge about a half inch by a half inch, half inch wide, half inch deep that ran two thirds of the length of the tail. It was from the right wing tip light of the F-16 that I had. So they met like this, right? If you took two models or two bronze or compared it in any way, that's impossible. There should have been a lot more interaction between those two airplanes. Fortunately, I didn't have fuel tanks on the wing, as you see on the one in the picture, and the F-16 did not have a training missile on its wing tip rail, because even that would have created much more damage. But there should have been some interaction between my wing and at least the tail, maybe the canopy of the F-16. It should have been horrible, but it didn't happen. And I never knew why. And because the damage was so low, it was tens of thousands of dollars to do the Bondo patch, I think. I don't remember how much, but as well below the threshold for an investigation, we never did an investigation. My wing commander wouldn't let me go see the two young men in the pickup truck, because he figured I'd kill them, and I would have, probably. But I never knew how I lived. And I wondered about that as I reflected on my good fortune being alive. And this is where we get today, Fingers Bullfinn, former chief of staff, at the Air Force, and just how lucky I was. Years later, 10 years later, I arrived at Aviano Air Base, Italy, and I was the wing commander there. Dave Goldfein was the commander of the world famous highly respected triple nickel. America's greatest fighter squadron. And then I say that with due reverence, because after this incident at Luke Air Force Base, I commanded the triple nickel. And so we had that connection. Shortly after I got to Aviano is the one-star wing commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ben Goldfein, and I were standing in the squadron lounge, also known as Bar, having a cold beer one Friday night with the rest of the pilots. And he said to me, he said, were you at Luke when that guy had total failure and no brakes and steering? And it's time for Steve Canyon, Chuck Javer came out as a, was I? Why, that was me. It was amazing. I've never seen anything like it. And my first thought was what I sounded like talking on the radio through this, because I was making calls to ground control. And I said, I sounded like Pee-Wee Herman, didn't I? Oh no, you sounded good sir. Now remember, I'm its boss at the time. So that was the right thing to say, but I'm pretty sure I didn't sound so cool, calm and collected. And I said, fingers from Goldfein's name, Nickname, I don't know how I would, I mean, it doesn't make sense to me. I've never been able to figure that out. So I do. He said, I was in the airplane behind the one you hit. In fact, I thought I was in trouble. It sounded like you had everything under control, and then you didn't. And I considered ejecting, if you hit the plane one row in front of me. So, but then at the last second, when you pushed up the power on the right engine, the right wing of the F-15 and the right main landing went up and the right main landing gear actually lifted off the ground and everything barely passed over the Viper, the F-16 that you hit. That's how close I came to not even barely making it halfway to 70. So being 70, I'm very grateful. Very grateful to have been able to share with you, share my experiences with my friends, some of my life lessons on figments. I hope I can find my way back in a month or two. We'll see what happens just in terms of workload now. So let me close with what's my figment, my next thing. My next thing is always peacemaking. Okay, because I've made war, peace is hard, much harder than war. There's a lot of peace to me in the world. So whether it's on a local basis, an individual basis or bigger than that, that's what I want to do with the rest of the time that I have. So down what would fig do? Live your day like it might be your last because guess what, it might be. Fortunately for me, it wasn't. I am very lucky to be here and very grateful. And I'm especially grateful to the Think Tech Hawaii, a wonderful nonprofit that you should donate to for letting me be one of the citizen journalists doing 30 shows a week here on Think Tech and trying to inform the conversation. So until next time, and I hope there's a next time, Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.