Topgun Days: Dogfighting, Cheating Death, and Hollywood Glory as one of America's Best Fighter Jocks

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This is a story about an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances. In 1980 the U.S. Navy designated 451 Naval Flight Officers. Four years later only one of them became a Topgun instructor. That was me.

In the pages ahead you will experience events that are relatively rare, even in the universe of jet fighters, such as surviving the life-or-death experience of ejecting from an F-14 Tomcat during a crash, attending the Topgun class as a student, and returning to Topgun two years later as an instructor.

Before becoming an instructor at Topgun I flew in hundreds of dogfights, which usually lasted about two minutes each, and logged more than a thousand hours of flying time in the F-14 Tomcat, the Navy’s premiere fighter and at the time one of the world’s most capable aircraft. As a radar intercept officer, my seat was six feet behind the pilot’s, so I got the same ride as he did and I was critical to our mission. I launched real missiles at targets, escorted Russian bombers probing our ship’s defenses (they were our nemesis then), regularly flew only a few feet from other aircraft to accomplish aerial refueling, and made hundreds of head-snapping catapult launches and arrested landings on aircraft carriers — day and night. I flew at speeds of more than 1,000 mph… and occasionally less than 200 mph, which can be equally thrilling in the midst of a dogfight. Like my fighter squadron brethren, I did these things on a regular basis, and they make for great stories.

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