Chocks Away

The summer I got my wings

Last week, I wrote about how I’m paring down my belongings in anticipation of moving house. I mentioned a few of the items I’m considering selling or giving away, and listed two flight suits I have hanging in my closet. Yes, flight suits. Perhaps I should explain why a civilian freelance writer who specialized largely in subaquatic adventures would have not one, but two issued fighter pilot jumpsuits.

Back in the twenty-teens, I was living large. It was the heyday of watch brand press trips and, for a few years of that decade, before the COVID pandemic shut the world down, I was gone every month to some exotic corner of the planet, diving in Mauritius, hiking in Iceland, and kayaking in New Zealand. Some press trips were simply well attended junkets, such as the introduction of a new Omega at Mission Control in Houston, while others were one-off exclusives, or small groups of lucky journalists doing interesting things (heli-hiking in British Columbia, for example).

In 2015, I was invited to two “experiences” involving riding shotgun in fighter jets. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I was lucky enough to do it twice within a few months during that fateful summer. I’d had some previous experience in small planes, from a floatplane in the Maldives to taking the yoke in a Cessna 172 over the Rockies once, but nothing that involved learning how to use an ejection seat or the possibility of passing out from excessive G-forces.

The trips on which I did these flights couldn’t have been more different. The first took place in a narrow, rocky valley in the Swiss Alps, near the Italian border, flying in a Cold War-era, British-built fighter jet. Despite the dazzling, luxe locale, the flight felt more “seat-of-the-pants” and raw. It was an older, bigger and more powerful aircraft, while the second trip was to Milwaukee, my humble hometown, to fly in a nimble, Czech-built jet trainer. Today, neither Oris nor Breitling owns a jet team, so I feel privileged to have had the opportunities when they did. For the record, I didn’t pass out or puke on either flight.

I wrote up both experiences for Gear Patrol, and Revolution, respectively. Since both original stories are now long out of print (or archived in the basement of the Internet) I present both of them below. As for those flight suits, issued to me ahead of my rides, I haven’t decided if I’ll keep them. They seem like overkill for grocery store sorties in the Defender.