Category: Podcast

Welcome to a sobering and powerful episode of So There I Was. This week, we explore incredible Hanoi Hilton survival stories with retired Navy Captain Mike “Masher” McGrath. Beyond the technical skill of flying an A-4 Skyhawk, Masher details the sheer mental grit required to survive six years of brutal captivity in North Vietnam. 2,102 Days of Endurance and Torture On June 30, 1967, Masher’s world changed in a heartbeat during a bomb […]

So there I was… five miles from the runway at Stansted, flaps moving from 35 to 50 on an MD-11, when the airplane abruptly rolled to nearly 60 degrees of bank on short final. That’s not a metaphor. That actually happened. In this episode of So There I Was, Fig and RePete sit down with Chubbs, a Guard fighter pilot turned FedEx check airman, for a master-class in aviation storytelling, […]

In this episode of So There I Was, Fig and RePete are joined by Kemo and they sit down with two air traffic controllers to talk about what pilots never see — and rarely understand — on the other side of the mic. From go-arounds that mean “you’re not trying hard enough,” to near-miss moments that make an entire tower pucker, this conversation pulls back the curtain on how airspace […]

New Year’s Eve, no guest, and somehow the cockpit still turns into a full-blown sitcom. Fig & RePete kick off with a takeoff that goes sideways at V1 when “rotate” gets called… and apparently translated into “stare blankly into the void.” From there, it’s the perfect hangout episode: Top Gun continuity crimes (medals disappear, sunglasses teleport), a hard pivot into the Air India 787 post-rotation dual-engine power-loss mystery (and why […]

This week’s So There I Was episode is a Hangout — that happens when you put pilots, controllers, and a few proud troublemakers in the same virtual room and hit “record.” We swap the kind of stories that never fit in a checklist: a Harrier night recovery that ended six inches from a very bad day, a Learjet that missed an airliner by 100 feet in IMC, and a “UFO” […]

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 […]