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Pilot´s living his dream over Daytona today
LYDIA HINSHAWNEWS-JOURNAL STAFF WRITER
ORMOND BEACH — Bret Anderson was just hoping to see a decent movie, and perhaps win some points with the pretty girl who was his date.
Seventeen years later, he´s lost track of the girl but lives the movie every day.
It was a spring evening in 1986, and Anderson was a senior at Seabreeze High School when he first saw “Top Gun.”
He walked out of the old theater at Bellair Plaza thinking, “Fighter pilots have the coolest job in the world.”
He´s absolutely sure of that now.
“The best roller coaster ever,” he says of his current ride, an F-15C Eagle that can go 12 miles high and mach 2.5 fast. That´s 2.5 times the speed of sound, or 1,875 mph.
Capt. Anderson, who grew up in Ormond Beach, is halfway through a plum assignment as an Air Force demo pilot. He´s one of just two pilots tapped to do what he does, namely show off the F-15´s capabilities at air shows in the United States and Europe.
This weekend, the 34-year-old former Volusia County Beach Patrol lifeguard gets to put his plane through its looping, spinning, roaring, G-pulling paces in front of a hometown crowd at Embry-Riddle´s Wings & Waves 2003.
It´s one of about 30 air shows he´ll perform for in 2003, with another 30 to come next year before he begins training the lucky young pilot who will be his replacement. By the end of this assignment, an estimated 20 million spectators will have seen his demo flight.
His parents, Harriet and Dave Anderson of Ormond Beach, couldn´t be prouder.
People who knew him as a teenager aren´t surprised at what he´s up to now.
“Bret was extremely bright and motivated,” says Don Staller, who taught Anderson advanced placement history at Seabreeze High School. “He was goal-oriented but also adventurous. I wasn´t at all surprised to hear he was flying an F-15. That just clicked in my mind; that´s perfect for Bret.”
The Air Force decided Anderson was perfect for his assignment after a series of interviews and background checks, plus a flying audition.
“They put out a call and a bunch of us volunteered,” Anderson said during an August visit to his parents. “They did interviews and talked to our commanders and bosses and I was lucky enough to get picked.”
The demo pilot´s job, in addition to flying, requires serving as a living, breathing recruiting poster for the Air Force, and Anderson is perfect for that too: tall, handsome, well-spoken.
He also has the right amount of experience, about 1,500 hours in F-15s, including 65 combat missions patrolling the Iraqi no-fly zone during a total of four deployments to the Middle East, the most recent in 2002.
The plane he flies in air shows is not just for show; it can fight on short notice.
“It´s not modified, has no special paint, nothing removed from the plane, and it´s fully combat-capable,” he says. “If a war broke out, all they´d have to do is load some missiles and bullets in there and we´d be ready to go. These are the exact same planes and people as in the front-line Air Force.”
Anderson´s 15-minute program this weekend will be performed at altitudes as low as 300 feet, the better to be seen by spectators, and low enough that precision is critical.
In two months of training for this job, he started out doing his routine at 5,000 feet, and worked his way down.
During the demo flight he´s in radio contact with a second pilot who sits on the ground with a script of altitudes and speeds, and they double-check periodically via radio.
If Anderson is too low or two slow to complete a maneuver, he will abort it.
After the 15 minutes of high-speed acrobatics, Anderson plans to do a formation flight with a historic aircraft, usually from World War II or the Korean War.
“I have to slow down and he has to go about as fast as he can, but we make it work,” Anderson says. “Older folks in the crowd really like it, especially if they were in the military when they were younger.”
Anderson wound up in the military via an unusual route.
He completed a mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech, and went to work for General Electric, in the same program his father, Anderson, had started out in 30 years earlier.
He got a private pilot´s license during his two years with GE, and decided he loved flying too much to continue in his father´s career path.
Bret Anderson is too modest to tell the rest of the story, but his dad isn´t.
“Bret walked into an Air Force recruiting office and said, ‘I want to fly, what do I need to do?’” Dave Anderson says.
The recruiter arranged for Anderson to take some written tests designed to bring would-be jet-pilots swiftly back to earth. Anderson produced nearly perfect scores. The Air Force decided this extremely rare civilian off the street might be worth the huge investment in training after all.
Anderson has now served his required commitment, and could leave the Air Force at any time.
But like Tom Cruise in Top Gun, he has discovered a need for speed.
“Right now, I love what I´m doing and I´m going to continue to do it as long as the Air Force will let me,” he says. “I´m not planning to leave any time soon.”
In addition to his air-show duties, Anderson flies regularly with his squadron at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, keeping his combat skills up to date. When the war in Iraq started, his unit was deployed to Saudi Arabia, but Anderson stayed behind, because the Air Force decided to continue supporting air shows for recruiting and retention purposes.
“It was a strange feeling,” Anderson said. “It was kind of a letdown when I saw them all leave town and I was getting left behind, but the job I was doing was important too so that´s what I kept telling myself.”
As it turned out, he didn´t miss much, because the Iraqi air force remained on the ground.
“My buddies flew a lot but they didn´t shoot anybody down because there wasn´t anybody to shoot down,” he said. “They were ready though.”
Did You Know?
There have been thousands of pilots in the armed forces. These are some of the more famous names:Jimmy Doolittle (1896-1993) became a national hero during World War II. He led sixteen B-25 twin-engine bombers in the surprise attack on Tokyo in 1942, winning the Medal of Honor. Doolittle broke many aircraft speed records and was the recipient of the first doctorate in aeronautical engineering.
Curtis LeMay (1906-1990) was always known as the best in his unit. He helped develop tactics to win wars from the air. He was the lead navigator on two historic B-17 flights to South America. He led the way as the Army Air Force battled Germany and Japan and he organized the Berlin Airlift.
Eddie Rickenbacker (1890-1973) raced in the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911, and eventually owned the Indianapolis Speedway. An ace fighter during World War I, he shot down 22 enemy planes and four balloons. While an inspector during World War II, Rickenbacker and his crew were lost at sea and survived in rubber rafts for 24 days. He went on to manage several airlines, including Eastern Air Lines.
Chuck Yeager (born 1923) was a World War II flying ace, recording 13 aerial victories. In 1947, he was the first person to fly an aircraft faster than the speed of sound in a Bell X-1 rocket airplane named Glamorous Glennis in tribute to his wife.
Compiled by News Researcher Megan Gallup from Air Force Magazine, World Book Encyclopedia
Serial Story: UP IN THE AIR -- The 18-part serial story ran in the Daytona Beach News-Journal each Monday from January 13 through May 19 (except for April 14). Text and illustrations for the serial copyright © 2003 by Brian Floca. Sponsored in part by Inventing Flight, Dayton, Ohio. Reprinted by permission of Breakfast Serials, Inc. www.breakfastserials.com.
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