So There I Was . . .

This is what happens when you put a Navy Tomcat legend behind a camera and let him tell the story his way. Heater takes us from KC-135 tanker ops with that infamous hard hose, to the kind of “how’d-you-do-that?” plug where he’s steady on the basket and still managing to grab photos mid-refuel. Then we pivot into Top Gun lore from someone who was actually there: the “Star Wars on […]

This week’s sponsor: Antigravity A1 Drone. Learn more at sothereiwas.us/antigravity Episode 190 is what happens when you hand the mic to Captain CJ “Heater” Healy and then just try to keep up. Heater takes us from a childhood obsession with WWII airplanes to roller-coaster “G-training,” to flying—then teaching—at the highest levels of naval aviation. Along the way, we hit the $10 “Mexican Justice of the Peace” wedding that turned into […]

In this week’s episode of So There I Was, Ike joins us with stories so wild they make the Quigley, Beirut, and Cherry Point weather sound like minor inconveniences. We open with Ike casually mentioning that he once found himself upside-down over the North Atlantic at night — because of course he did. From growing up under the Nashville approach path to being choked in boot camp for laughing, to […]

B-2 stealth bomber test pilot Sparky joins So There I Was to explain why the world’s sneakiest bomber still can’t go direct to Liberal, Kansas without a paperwork migraine. From “switches up, auto missile, eat a sandwich” bomb runs to 24-hour missions fueled by go-pills, honey buckets, and a hacked-together cot, he walks us through life in a jet built for nuclear armageddon but terrible at simple IFR. Then we […]

Strap in, because Sparky’s ride from the C-17 to the B-2 is basically the aviation version of “What could possibly go wrong?” — except when everything did go wrong, and somehow nobody died. We open with Sparky nearly spearing aPassenger Airliner 737 at FL280 when the T-38’s pitot-static system decided to take the day off. That set the tone. Next, he walks us through dropping flares directly onto a detainee […]

So There I Was dives into the UPS MD-11 crash, compressor stalls, and why some jets are “varsity airplanes.” Fig kicks things off with a flaming T-45 compressor stall story, then we walk through what we know so far about the UPS MD-11 crash, V1 decision speed, startle factor, and why “no fast hands” can literally save your life. From tail tanks and induced drag to cargo-pilot zombie sleep schedules, […]

Six Marines. One table. Zero chill. This round-robin mayhem starts with a Harrier pilot fishtailing toward a hover pad in Iwakuni, Japan when a yaw reaction-control literally comes loose and starts “helping” at random. From there, we spiral into why conventional landings in a Harrier are a last resort, how “taking the jog” at Cherry Point doesn’t mean going for a run! Then we chat about what happens when your […]

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 […]