nicholaskristof - 1:05 PM ET September 21, 2004 (#599 of 599)
William, a retired Air Force colonel, writes to offer his sense of what happened when Bush left the Air Guard:
<font color=purple>
I flew the F-102 some years before Bush, we went through essentially the same training and wound up with identical qualifications. I flew the F-102 about 360 hours and Bush flew it about 300 hours, average mission time about 1.6 hours. It was a hot bird, fast, honest but unforgiving. The F-102 was a single-seater, once airborne all the political power, favoritism, blue blood or money in the world could be of no help whatever in gettng back down safely, and the pilot knew it. I lost 3 very highly-gualified friends in the F-102, but no pilot friends in combat (luck - some were shot down and picked up and one was a POW).
<font size=4>
What is missing in most of the stories is why Bush quit flying. He qualified as an Air Defense Alert pilot, a fully-effective and valuable part of our national deterrence against Soviet military adventurism. That required about 400 flying hours. He wound up with 500-700 hours. Then his unit, the 111th FIS, lost its air defense mission and became the training school for all Air Guard F-102 pilots in the country. Alert pilots instantly became useless unless they could qualify as instructors, and that required probably 1,000 flying hours minimum. It would take Bush at least two years of flying to get 1,000 hours, and by then the unit was converting to F-101s. I attended F-101 ground school in Bush's squadron in Sept. 1973, on my way to become Senior Air Force Advisor to the Maine ANG at Bangor (a unit exactly like Bush's unit when he joined).
It was thus obvious to Bush that his flying career was going nowhere unless he pretty much dedicated his career to it. He could have continued flying for another year or two, probably in T-33 trainers as a radar target for F-102 pilot trainees, but to no purpose. Lots of highly-qualified pilots were readily available to his unit so he simply gave up his place for one and went on about his own business. His unit was perfectly happy to get rid of him and from the moment of his decision he was a dead man walking as far as they were concerned.
The papermill had to grind on of course, but only by its own momentum and half-heartedly. "Wanna drill with Alabama? Sure, we don't care, and they won't either, just stay out of the way of anybody who seems to be doing anything useful, and let our Admin sergeant know what you did." Drills? Show up at the orderly room and read the unit newsletter and ask nobody for nothing and disappear when you get bored.
The flight physical? Aircrew have to have a physical every year, but non-aircrew every other year. The price of not getting a flight physical is grounding, but if one has no plane to fly and doesn't expect to get one, so what? Moot. Only the papermill cared.
The transfer to the inactive reserve? That simply relieved the Guard's papermill of responsibility for Bush, a plus. Actually, that put Bush more at risk of being called up than did the Guard, individuals can be called to active duty from it at the whim of the Secretary of the Air Force. Bush was still a national asset while in the inactive reserve, however slight the odds of being called up from it. |
