When most Afterburner Club members think about the possibility of buying it in a training accident, I’m sure a lot of you think of the scene in Top Gun where Maverick and Goose were caught in a flat spin and heading out to sea ending with Goose dying.

I thought about that and a couple of other incidents I’ve had in training recently while reading on the crash of an F-16I in Israel and how the crew is still missing.

Some people think that if the risk of training accidents is that high then that means that we are training our guys too hard. But I’ve got news for them, hard training is the reason we don’t have MORE incidents like that.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the ONLY reason I survived where I got vertigo landing on the Stennis was because of training. Were it not for years of training the Marine Corps instilled in me up until the time of that landing, I would have obeyed my human instincts (which were giving me vertigo) and took a perfectly level airplane and yawed it straight into the Pacific Ocean.

In the F/A-18 Hornet, there is one procedure that we absolutely positively have to know by heart and that is the out–of-control procedure. We were trained on that over and over again until we could recite it from memory really quick. And it pays off too. I should know…that procedure has saved my life too. (Maybe Maverick should have memorized his out-of-control procedure.)

In training for Air Combat Maneuvers (ACM), you better believe that training is pretty intense. So much so that incidents can and sometimes do happen. That is why there is training to get you out of messes like vertigo and flat spins. Yes, if training is properly intense it can kill, but it’s much, much more likely to save your life!

As a future fighter pilot, how do you think you can prepare yourself mentally and physically for the challenges of ACM training?