 I'm Dan Lee, if I go by Fig and this is Figments, the power of imagination, you knew that because you tuned in to watch it. But I'm glad you did. And I thank Think Tech Hawaii for allowing me to share this with you and my other show Figments on Reality. Now, before we get started, let me talk a little bit about what I like to talk about here. And Figments is intended to entertain and inspire. There are no politics, there's no news here. But I've got a lot of friends who can tell you how they're goals became reality because Figments has kind of a negative connotation. It's kind of fanciful, something never realized. So they are also the basis for every great thing that happens and that every goal that people live out. My guest today is somebody who's lived a dream. And his dream was to fly and fly and fly and fly. So let me welcome Lieutenant Colonel Retired U.S. Air Force, Greg Slick Aguirre. Aloha, Slick, how are you doing? Doing great, Fig. Really appreciate the opportunity to become a Figment today. Well, you've got a heck of a figment, a great story. And it's always great to connect with you. We first do each other at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, where we're both flying the beautiful F-15 Eagle. And that's how I thought of Slick mostly, but there's much more to his story. Slick, I'm really glad you'll share it with us. We've got a nice picture of you and the cockpit of the F-15 here that I think will show. And that's you and the mighty beast of the Eagle. You flew the F-15 a lot. How many hours did you wind up with? Well, somewhere above 1900, but I don't know the exact number, because I never wanted to know the exact number. I knew I wanted to be the first guy to do 3,000 hours, so 2,900. I wanted to be the first guy to 3,000 hours and I was really hustling. And I didn't make it. I didn't want to know by how much I missed it, so I never really knew the exact numbers. But I wanted to move on to another career. That was 1,000 hours behind you, but I do remember. 1931.9. And then I went and flew the Vipers, you know, but you got a lot more hours than you've flown different airplanes. 27,000 plus hours. We've got to be accurate. It's somewhere north of 25,000. Okay, that's still a lot. I mean, that's a lot of flying. I can't do math, or I'd figure out days, months, however long it is in the cockpit. That may be more time in the air than a lot of birds, actually. A good point. And you were well known in the F-15 community because you were the first second lieutenant to fly, the solo of the F-15. You had four second lieutenants and two captains in your class, and you're well-recognized kind of as the face legal. But through the luck of timing, you did become the first second lieutenant in the United States Air Force to fly the then new F-15 Eagle by yourself. Yeah, and it actually got me on the front page of the Air Force times. It's been downhill. Did it really? But no, it just happened to work out that I ended up flying the first solo hop, and it was very high visibility. The Air Force had just got the brand new Eagles, and they were monitoring our grades in progress very closely. So I went out and flew my ride with the chase, came back to the pattern, and as I looked down at the RSU, the mobile, there was a little small control tower at a training base. They have to watch us students closely. Exactly. What was like a blue, steely parking lot? That's what the colonels drove around in those days. Low-government vehicles, usually crappy cars. The second lieutenant solo with their Eagle, and so I knew I really had to do a good job. So about the second one, I made a low approach, and of course you were only allowed in the single-seater to make low approach, but you could come down just so close as to not touch your wheels. One inch would have been fine. Touching goes, folks, that was just a rule. You couldn't touch the wheels to the ground until you'd landed. And I did such a good job that I kissed the tires on there, and actually did a touch of those, but nobody gave me any grief over it. Very memorable. I still think the F-15 was the easiest airplane I've ever flown to land well. I mean, most of them are designed to be pretty landable, but you could properly flown. You could land the F-15 very nicely. Oh yeah, absolutely. I remember the last landing I made after flying it for 15 years. I was able to even make a really good landing with tears in my eyes, because I was getting used to that jet. I remember that flight. I was honored to be your wingman. You went up against a couple of F-15s and clubbed them off 16s, but flown by instructor pilots, and you clubbed them like they were baby seals. Okay, I know I'm going to get some nasty emails about that. And so did you, Fig. I kept that video, and I watch it now, because it's pretty inspirational. We got some good film that day. We did. It was fun. I could go on and on about that, but there's much more to say, because in your 2,900-plus hours, you flew kind of the standard training environments that we flew in at our operational bases. But you also went up to Keflavik and flew in Iceland, intercepting the venerable, even then, bear bomber, right? Yes, yeah. I was there in 1986. It was actually the transition from the F-4 to the Eagle. When I first got there, it was an F-4 squadron with just a couple of Eagles in it. And our mission was to intercept any Soviet aircraft that intruded on Icelandic airspace. Well, this sounds pretty boring, and supposed to doing a dogfight against another F-15 or an F-16? Was it boring flying, intercepting a big old bomber? No, it was actually really kind of a kick, because here you are. You've gone, you know, and it's just like in the movies, you race up the ladder, jump in the jet, get it started, blast out the alert barn, go right into Burner on the high-speed taxiway and onto the runway. And now you're headed out, sometimes 600 miles from Keflavik, to intercept a Tu-95 bear bomber. Usually they're two of them. Over the North Atlantic, which if you've ever flown a single seat fighter over the North Atlantic, it's pretty foreboding. Yeah, at night, you have lots of weather, and the pressure was on, because once AWACS committed us, if we did not... They're on radar airplane. Yeah, exactly. If AWACS, once they committed us, if we didn't complete the intercept, it was briefed at the JCS level. So you didn't want to go up and miss that intercept. It's such high visibility that I've got a picture here that was taken from an airplane with two-seater with a photograph in the backseat. And first of all, it's a beautiful picture of two beautiful airplanes in a bomber, so I may be biased, but that picture's in the Smithsonian, right? Yes, it is. Normally, we didn't get this high quality of pictures, but this was a special mission, actually. We set up on alert with three alert aircraft, and I had a two-seater and had the photographer, there was a contract photographer, Donald Douglas, who was the manufacturer of the jet at the time, and we got very lucky. Sometimes you could set up an alert and not get scrambled for a couple weeks, but he got his cameras in the jet, and we went into the alert barn. Let's get a cup of coffee. Horn goes off, and we went on a beautiful day and intercepted two Bayer deltas. It's a maritime surveillance version of the aircraft. And as you can see, the pictures just came out spectacular. I'm sure the Bayer was wondering, why are three Eagles joining on my wing? And you could see a lot of camera lenses in the gunners. Pointing the other way. Exactly. You told me when we discussed this ahead of time, because this is a mission I never flew in the F-15, you told me that there was actually sort of a mutual cooperation between the Bayer crews and the Eagle pilots. For example, when you beat photographing the Sonar Boy Bay, would you share that with our viewers? Yes. One of the variants that we intercepted was a Bayer Foxtrot. Now, a Foxtrot has a magnetic aspirin detector, a mad boom, on the back of its tail, and it flies down very low and is a sub-chaser. Well, flying down low, now that sort of ratchets up the fun quotient of the mission. And the Bayer was a very impressive aircraft down low. Amazingly with those turboprop aircraft engines, they could still do 400 knots. That's incredible. Yeah, they were pretty incredible. It really is. Better than World War II fighters. And you could actually fly forward on their wing line. So you got in line with the props with your aircraft and you could feel the vibration in your cockpit. Your cockpit would vibrate from the vibration. Well, imagine what it was like in their cockpit. Oh, once in a while they come up on the radio and it sounded like in the background. But so now if the Bayer Foxtrot is down low, he's down there to do his mission, which is chasing submarine. Now, the Intel specialists really wanted pictures of in the Sonabue of the Bayer. So what we would do is we'd drop down below the Bayer on kind of an angle when the Sonabue bays came open. They're like bomb bays on here. And of course, if they're open and he's down low, it's because he's getting ready to drop. So he didn't want to be right underneath them. And if you've got the correct angle, you could actually get pictures in the Sonabue Bay. The bears actually kind of took care of us because sometimes you'd be underneath the bear and kind of jockeying for position and trying to get that photo. And if he kind of gave you a gentle wing rock, that was, hey, watch out, buddy. I'm getting ready to pick these Sonabues. So gentle wing rock and then the Sonabues would come out. So yeah, they were very friendly encounters. We could use that with the current Russian Air Force because it's not like that. So anyway, that's pretty awesome. And this whole story sort of tells me that you were born to fly, but it wasn't that simple. And when you soloed in the F-15 as the first, second lowest officer rank for you non-military viewers, a butter bar, a new kid, you already had 48 air medals that you'd receive flying Hueys in Vietnam. And that's a lot of air medals. Ten is a lot of air medals. So that's really how you're flying started. You wound up in the Army as a Huey pilot. And you wanted to fly, but that was the path. Why was the Army the path? But it should just go right into the Air Force or fly for the airlines, which you did later. Well, I graduated from high school and I got good grades, but nothing good enough to get me into college. So this was kind of a fortuitous encounter with one of my friends because I was just talking to him about if I don't do something, I'm going to get drafted. This is 1968. So this friend of mine said, well, once you do like Vinny Zappini did, Vinny joined the Army to be a pilot. I went, no, no, no, I know about these things. You've got to have college to be a military pilot. And fortunately, my friend was very insistent and goes, no, Vinny went in the Army to be a pilot. He told me that. Next statement, I was down at the Army recruiter. I walked in the front door, it's kind of a long hall. And on the left was the Air Force recruiter. And I thought, maybe I'll ask the Air Force recruiter first. You know, this is like 10 of 68. It just happened a while back. And I was kind of going, oh, I'd rather be in the Air Force. So I went and talked to the Air Force recruiter. And that was a very quick conversation. I said, well, I'd join the Army if I could be our Air Force, if I could be a pilot. And he goes, I hit the road, kid. But that Army recruiter down the hallway will talk. Yes, I went, oh, now I'm encouraged. I continued down the hallway and saw the recruiting posters on the wall. And they're saying, be an Army Aviator, Army Aviation. So I opened the door into the recruiting office and said, well, Sergeant, I joined the Army if I could get into aviation. And he says, well, what do you want to do, son? Fly him or fix him? I said, well, I want to fly him. Well, I guess he didn't even bother talking to me. He just opened his door, gave me an intelligence test and said, go take this test in their little room. There was a little more in the closet. And then bring it back. And then he'd spent some time talking with me and told me the program and it all kind of evolved from there. So you joined the Army to be a pilot. Were you guaranteed you were going to get to flight school? Or was there some uncertainty? Because you had to go to basic training and infantry training and become a soldier and then become a pilot, right? Yeah. There was sort of a catch in a sense, because you are guaranteed it. But of course, you ask the recruiter, well, what happens to me if, you know, maybe I don't make it through. He goes, oh, we'll just treat you like a draftee and you only have to stay in 18 months. Doesn't sound too bad at all. Well, you do go through infantry basic training, throwing hand grenades carrying a rifle as an E1. And when you graduate, then you go to pilot training. Now, if it doesn't work out so good for you and you go, well, and you had to solo within 17 hours, that was a hard number. 17 hours. So you had to be able, good enough, as a helicopter pilot to fly by yourself with 17 hours of flight, right? Exactly. And if you didn't cut it, well, guess what? You'd already had eight weeks of infantry training. You got back on the bus, went back to Port Polk for eight more weeks of infantry training and went to Vietnam with a rifle. And on one occasion, I saw one of the guys that had been in my class loading in my aircraft. Oh, wow. With his rifle. With the rifle. So that's incredible. You're 18 when you joined the Army. You're a 19-year-old helicopter pilot in Vietnam. In fact, you told me that you were a 19-year-old aircraft commander flying in combat. And I know you're very modest and I respect that's part of you and I respect that very much. But we've got a picture here that you and I've talked about that we'll just call one minute out. And you actually took this picture from your Huey. And please take some time and describe that whole scene for me as you did. Remember folks, Slick is a 19-year-old young man flying the second Huey into a target area. So go ahead, Slick. Yeah, I took this picture in the fall of 1969. And the missions that we flew were in support of the infantry. And you're going to hear me call them grunts because and I say that with the utmost respect. Our mission was to support the grunts any way we could. And it boiled down into insertions or combat assaults. They'd operate it in an area and then we'd extract them. And that was an extraction. And then while they were operating in an area, we'd do resupplies and keep them with sea rations, water maybe, ammunition. So this picture is a picture of a combat assault. I call it one minute out because we're one minute out and I can tell by the white phosphorus detonation that's left. Now where we're actually landing is that gray area out in front. And that's gray from the artillery prep because we have several artillery batteries lobbing 155 and 105 HE rounds, high explosive rounds into that landing zone. And the intent is to make the enemy keep their heads down because the helicopters are really very vulnerable. Right. So whoa. So this artillery is getting lobbed in there. And then at one minute out, the artillery battery would fire that white phosphorus off the LC because it's already obscured enough by the explosive already. And that would tell us that the tubes were clear. No more artillery rounds were going to get hit by your own cannon shells. Because we have one artillery round would kill us all. So now overhead are cover gunships. And you can see if you look closely in the picture just to the left and low of our flight. And actually I'm number three. There's two in front of us. You see that little poof of white in the tree? Tree tops. That's from a cover gunship lobbing 2.75 artillery or a holding fin aerial rocket. So 2.75 rockets along our approach axis. And then lobbed putting mini gunfire, which is machine gunfire and a very high volume ray along our approach axis until we touched down in that LZ. And then now we've got grunts that are getting off that aircraft and all that fire stops. So they're really, they're clearing a corridor trying their best to suppress fire underneath you so you don't get shot down. Exactly. And I tell you, and so each aircraft has four crew members in it, two pilots, two crew chief, two gunners, and five grunts on board. And we're all wondering whether we're going to be alive in five minutes. Just never knew. In fact, the adrenaline just kind of gets going a little bit describing it. And we did, I did this hundreds of times. It was part of our mission and I flew nearly 1300 hours, 1284.6 to be comfortable rounding it up. So I did this a lot. Yeah. Wow. Well, wow, I'll just leave it at that. And we'll talk about your other flying, but that's a better description of flying the Huey in Vietnam, I think, than I've ever heard. So let's take a quick breath here, folks. Put your chicken skin subside, as we say in Hawaiian. Talk about figments on reality is every other week. And I think think tech are sponsored for that. You'll see us a week from today at 10 o'clock, Hawaii standard time in the morning. And I think that's 4pm on the east coast. You do the math. I'm not good at math, but both shows are brought to you by Think Tech Hawaii, a nonprofit corporation that can use your support. Please go to their website and think about donating to them. So 1900 hours in a year. So we said nine. No, no. 1284. I call it 1300. Man, that's a boatload. And you're not tired of the Huey because you still fly it. Yes, I feel blessed. I work for a company. Dillon Arrow, we manufacture the M134 minigun, which is the same armament that was on the Cobras when I was in Vietnam. And we have a UH1H, which is the same model of Huey I flew in Vietnam. So 53 years later, I'm still a current Huey pilot. Yeah. And 53 years later, you still look 19. And I'm kind of angry about that because I know you're actually three years older than me, but whatever. You know, that's genetics or something. It's a great picture. And I got to go fly with you, not in that airplane. But you told me once that your goal is to fly something every day. Yeah. And I haven't been able to quite do that because a lot of the flying we do not do now is mission oriented. But yeah, you know, if I don't fly, it's kind of like exercise to go, well, I didn't fly today. And you're kind of aware of it. And you go, well, just have to make up for that. Do more reps the next day. You did a bunch of reps with Southwest Airlines in the 737, like 20 years of reps. Yes. Yeah. After I didn't quite make it to 3,000 hours in the Eagle, but it was worthwhile not making it to be at Southwest. It was absolutely a wonderful company. The culture was so friendly and helpful that I actually, I really miss working there to this day. And my timing there was spectacular. I was a first officer for only about three years, and then the company absorbed here and grew very quickly. And so most of the time I was there, I was a captain. And I found I found airline flying very rewarding. I enjoyed the company, the first officers, the flight attendants and the crews and the way we pulled together as a team. It was just a wonderful experience. Well, I really, you know, the one thing every time we talk that I take away from it is you just love to fly. And there are different kinds of flying. And you find what you love about it. You did have a pretty interesting on the ground experience with Southwest. You told me about, can we give that a quick one minute once over just so people know what can happen. Yeah, I had some unusual experiences at Southwest, things that other captains were going, you got to be kidding me. And one of those was one night, one evening, actually I was taxing out from Salt Lake City going to Spokane, beautiful evening in the summer. I'm a new captain. And I got a call from the flight attendants, says, well, you know, we have a pastor in the back who says he's violently ill and needs to go back to the terminal. I said, well, I'm not going to argue with violently ill, go ahead and get some symptoms. We'll have medical attention waiting for him. And we're taking him back. Very simple enough. Yeah, exactly. So meanwhile, fortunately, I'm going pretty slow because there's high demand for the gates. So I'm calling off. Meanwhile, another jet has actually taken the gate we pushed back on. So I'm taxing fairly slow while the opposite is going well, which gate can we send him to now? Well, so shortly after I'm kind of working the gate, there's the flight attendant calls again and says, well, he says he's okay now, and that we can continue. I said, no, can't cry the wolf like that. He says he's feeling bad. And we're already turned the aircraft back. We're going back to the gate. She says, okay. And so the next thing that happens and just kind of in an instant is I kind of feel the aircraft kind of clunk from the forward entry door opening, a little bit of pressurization change. And then I hear the flight attendant screaming. Oh my gosh, well, I just all I could think of was I better shut the engines down right now because I can't see where he's going. I mean, he could get sucked up by an air an engine and that would impact the profit share. So yeah, among other things, I stopped cock the engine and engines and now the aircraft just goes blank. Well, meanwhile, he's apprehended by the rampers who saw this happen. And the aircraft is now dark. So I'm thinking in my new captainhood that this is one of those times when the captain should go back and talk to the passengers. And I'm going to cut the story. I know there's much more to it, but I know I'm watching the clock. But I think this is one of the times where later because of what you did as a captain, you got some appreciation from the passengers. And you mentioned that a couple of times. That's got to feel pretty good when you get a round of applause from the people who trust you with your life. Well, yeah, it basically is it worked out. You know, I told them that that we had a demented passenger jump off the aircraft. And but we're going to take you back to the jetway. Well, they applauded. And we did all the right things. And half an hour later, they all got back on the jet. And we proceeded to smoke in. So I'll cut the story short. Yeah, there's more. Well, there I mean, there's so many stories that I've already going to flex to plan B, which you and I discussed. And I'm going to ask you to come back at a later date because we haven't talked about the flying you do in the Huey, the DC seven and other airplanes for Dylan. We haven't talked about your beautiful Chinese built trainer Chinese trainer that I've flown in that is really a nice airplane. And so we're going to have to come back and tell more flying stories. Are you are you up for that? Oh, gee, I have to tell more flying stories. Yeah, there are. There are that half of this. This half an hour has literally flown by. Yeah, literally flown by. So I will I do have to ask you now because this was a figment, this idea that you were going to fly was a figment something you wanted to do. Your first airplane flight was on a on the flight to Army training. If I remember correctly, yeah, and you turned it into a dream that you haven't lost. So what's your current dream flying related or other? Do you have something that at age 71? I can say that because I'm right behind you. That's next or that's, you know, something in the back of your mind. Well, actually, I have recently discovered. I got a Wrangler Jeep because I hit the realization hit me that I've been all over Arizona, all over the United States. And I've seen a whole lot of it from the air. So I thought, yeah, because I'm going to start going down some roads and exploring on some of my days off and seeing the things up close that maybe I've seen from the air and I'm seeing them from the ground. And so, so that's kind of being woven into the retirement plan. Yeah, neither Jeep nor Southwest Airlines have compensated us for these plugs that we've given Orman down the Douglas and now defunt company. But cool. And so thanks, Slick. We'll get you back on sometime soon and continue the conversation on on all this and I'm flying. And I hope to get out there as soon as you just see you and Betsy, but also because you said you take me flying again. So, you know, I'm up for that. We'll put some G's on your body. That is a very rapid fire flew by episode of figments. And I will close with what would fig do what fig would like to do and learn from this is not just follow my dream, but find something good and everything you do because that's that's slick. That's Greg Aguri and he's an inspiration to me. I hope he has been to you. So next week figments on reality commentary and then the following week back to figments, the power of imagination with honey. I bought a race car. So tune in next time. Please give me feedback, show ideas, whatever else you'd like to share at info at phase minus one dot com Aloha.