So There I Was . . .

Jedi’s back—and the brake-check lesson starts before the beers do. An F-4 slides into rainy Pensacola, our hero reports “good braking,” and a brick-built Marine promptly edits his vocabulary: “It’s poor.” Decades later, that same Marine reappears—through Jedi’s son. Aviation is a small world with a loud voice. From there, we ricochet through cockpit lore: a British captain freeing stuck throttles by axe-murdering a radar scope (maintenance note: “radar inop”), […]

Allyn Hinton, Marine and Army aviator, joins So There I Was for a wild, first-person tour from low-level Huey recons over Da Nang to Blackhawks in Desert Storm. In this Allyn Hinton interview, he relives a smoke-grenade surprise that flushed eight guys from a bunker, a foot chase through a dry rice paddy, and a med-evac detour that out-prioritized a Korean officers’ trip to LZ-3! Then we leap to carrier […]

Helicopter search and rescue takes center stage as DPS pilot Darrell Detty walks us through hair-raising missions, near-misses and small-town chases that feel like action movies with rotor wash. From a 50-foot hovering autorotation, governor failures and a frantic stolen-car pursuit that ends in a live carjacking rescue, to talcum-dust LZs and a barbed-wire fence that almost kissed the skid, this episode blends gritty rotor-head detail with absurd human moments. […]

When a 21-year-old warrant officer thinks he’s bulletproof, fate (and a very determined round of enemy fire) impolitely disagrees. In this episode we ride shotgun with Cobra 3-1 — from Duluth misadventures and Playboy Clubs to flight school horrors, hovering triumphs, and the day a bullet turned a routine racetrack into a near-fatal last stand. He survives being shredded through his legs, gets stitched up by a miraculous surgeon, and […]

Two Marines-turned-airline-pilots go full hangar-talk: first solo flight stories (equal parts terror and triumph), Harrier hover witchcraft, and why unstable approaches demand the magic words “unable” and “go-around.” We compare squadron life to airline ops, decode FOQA, MD-11 bounce-landings, porpoising, and laugh through “death-by-go-around” sim rides. We hit auto-lands, HUD/AOA, guarding the controls, and why seniority rules your calendar—and your soul. We even tiptoe across the third rail: raising pilot […]

Welcome to Hangout #2 of So There I Was—a gloriously unfiltered romp of Harrier stories and V-22 tales. Expect FAA side-eye and concussion-grade comedy. RePete and a very lightly concussed Fig corral Sticks, Bago, Lawman, Deuce, Mike Evans, and Col. Jim Schaefer for pure airshow mayhem. We relive Gallo’s rain-soaked Harrier demo that made the FAA clutch pearls. We bust a few Blue Angels myths. We even ask if a […]

NOTICE***There is going to be a Zoom ‘Hangout’ With the “Numbskulls” on 24 September. If you are a Patreon member or Direct Donor you should get an invitation. If not – check back here on the 24th. I will keep the link from being public until the 24th to prevent trolls from trying to ruin it.***NOTICE So there I was… strapping into a seven-ton “dirt bike with wings.” The Marine […]

Student pilot judgment takes center stage in this absurdly true tale of near-misses, smart calls, and the mysterious power of the “E-word.” We welcome Chock as he fights through weather, maintenance gremlins, and schedule chaos on the winding road to his private pilot check ride. From an RV-12 with opinions to a Cirrus with a parachute and sparrows doing formation work on the runway, he keeps choosing discretion over disaster—and […]

Booz, a freshly-minted CFI, New Hampshirite, and RePete’s daughter—whose glider-to-airline path includes a first solo at 15, a daddy-daughter cross-country in a Grumman Tiger, and a commercial check ride where a simulated engine roughness forced a wrong-side pattern call (good judgment > dogma). We talk density altitude (rude), VMC demos (also leg fatigue), and why hypoxia makes your alphabet wander off the page — thanks, hyperbaric chamber! An alternator gremlin […]