You may have heard that Leonardo DiCaprio is developing a new series based on Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff”, which is about the very first astronauts. If you haven’t read that book or seen the 1983 film, you might want to do so because it is as much about fighter pilot culture as it is NASA’s history!
To be an astronaut in those days (as well as today if you’re thinking about possibly flying in one of NASA’s upcoming Orion spacecraft someday), you had to be a test pilot, and to be a test pilot, you first had to be…you guessed it, a fighter pilot!!
One of the coolest jobs a fighter pilot can do with his experience in become a test pilot, and the military has schools at Edwards AFB (for the Air Force) and NAS Patuxtant (for Navy and Marines) to teach pilots how to do just that!
To become a member of this elite fraternity requires that you be involved with developmental work and envelope expansion. For those of you who don’t know what envelope expansion means, that’s when you take and airplane past the point where it has been flown before; when you push a plane to the very brink of how high, how fast, and how far in can really go. Needless to say, this requires someone with a cool head who is very confident in where exactly he stands in the world. A reckless rogue like Maverick in Top Gun isn’t going to get very far in the world of flight test. He definitely won’t survive long enough to make it in the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, much less become an astronaut!
When you attend a test pilot school, they’re looking for someone who can do a lot more than just a fly an airplane really well. They’re looking for someone who has the patience and the team spirit to do a lot of paperwork crunching data and working with the flight test crews and engineers to develop new systems and expand the envelope of existing ones as efficiently and as safely as possible. Yes, the military flight test schools do require someone with an engineering degree (which only makes sense, since the pilots obviously have to be able to keep up with the engineers), but they also need someone who is a team player. They need someone who is not going to get all bent out of shape if things don’t go right, because guess what- most of the time in the test flying world- things usually go wrong. In fact, they are actually expected to go wrong! That’s why the test pilot is even there in the first place; to save the new aircraft or system and report his findings to the engineers. And he needs to be able to do so without bias. A test pilot has to be a steady, well-rounded, and unemotional person. They need someone with that Right Stuff!
Test pilot school is one of the options discussed in the Fighter Pilot Power Pack! And we have conducted several interviews with former test pilots and even astronauts to tell our members what they can expect.
Visit www.becomefighterpilot.com to get started on that incredible journey!
Semper Fi!