Walter Mitty Wins a Dogfight

By Edwin M. Reingold

I eased the control stick back for a gut-wrenching turn and climb, then rolled my fighter above the enemy plane. The California desert spun dizzily when I came zooming down behind him as he tried to shake me.

"Get your pipper on him! Shoot him! Shoot him!" yelled my copilot, Denny ("Dooley") Jackson, as the enemy tried to break left. But I had him in the 100-mil circle of my gunsight. I squeezed the trigger, and felt the stutter of the machine guns and watched the plane belch smoke. The world was in color again; the G-forces had receded; my stomach was back where it belonged. Victory was mine. The radio link to the other plane came alive. "Yee-haw!" taunted the loser of this aerial gunfight, a trucking-company official from Tucson. "Now it's my turn."

We were flying -- with the indispensable help of flight instructors -- in identical Italian-built, Marchetti SF.260W air-force trainers, experiencing the sometimes sickening thrill of aerial combat, but without the lethal weapons. I am neither a licensed pilot nor a natural-born killer. But this was a Walter Mitty dream of combat come true -- and, as someone once said about bullfighting, it may be inexcusable, but it's irresistible.

That's what Mike Blackstone and his crew at Air Combat U.S.A. in Fullerton, Calif., have going for them. "We're having altogether too much fun around here," he says. Since he bought his first two-seat trainers and went into the business last spring, more than 1,000 would-be fighter aces have flown sorties. For about $500 a flight, Air Combat U.S.A. will give the Top Gun fanatic an exhilarating course in aerial tactics guaranteed to put your stomach in your throat with maneuvers that test the mettle of experienced nonmilitary pilots -- not to mention the amateurs, like myself. But surprisingly, says Blackstone, "the amateurs often do better than the experienced pilots, because in air combat you break all the rules of straight- and-level flight."

"Don't look at anything but the bogey," Dooley's voice crackled in my helmet. "Keep your wings level with his; now come on back on the stick. Keep your eyes on him." I'm looking straight up through the canopy, my head back as far as it will go. It gets heavier as we go over in a roll to intersect the geometry of the other plane's evasive maneuver. The gravity force is building up again, and the plane begins to buffet. I've used up too much energy, and we slide down, missing another chance to line up a shot. The earth comes spiraling up at us as we regain airspeed. Too late. The enemy is on me now, and I'm in his gunsight. ("Lose sight and you lose the fight. You can't shoot what you can't see," Blackstone had warned in his preflight briefing.) "Break left, break left," yells Dooley. There is a signal tone that tells me I've been hit. Now I am trailing smoke. I'm a goner.

The Air Combat operations shack at Fullerton Municipal Airport is a beehive, as pairs of fledgling aces go through their briefings, don flight suits and parachutes and climb into the low-wing propeller planes for the thrill of a lifetime. When the planes return from the hour-long flight, airsickness bags are discreetly discarded and a debriefing takes place using videotape from the cockpit and gun camera of each airplane. (Trainees keep the videotapes as a souvenir.)

"I don't know anybody who wouldn't like to do this," enthused one novice flyer, a New York City stockbroker. Not everyone agrees. One recent client showed up with a bellyful of Dramamine and sheepishly admitted that his wife bought him his flight as a surprise after he foolishly muttered, while watching Top Gun, that he'd like to fly an F-14 one day. He got sick during Blackstone's hangar briefing on aerial maneuvers and slunk away with only a promotional tape as a consolation prize.

Blackstone, 42, has been flying since he was twelve. He now pilots a jetliner across the country for American Airlines. Though he never flew in real combat, in his spare time he learned the ups and downs of dogfighting in his own Pitts biplane while dodging other aerobatic enthusiasts. "We used to say, 'Hey, I got you,' and the other guy would say, 'Naw, you missed me.' " So Blackstone, an engineer, devised an electronic system to signal a kill and verify it. A tone sounds in the loser's cockpit, and a smoke generator emits a trail of hot oil vapor. With his system installed in three Marchettis and a roster of instructor pilots such as Dooley Jackson, Air Combat U.S.A. was born. Blackstone has four planes and a line on a dozen more. With a mighty air armada abuilding, he is considering expanding to Florida and Georgia.

"Do not fly level," Dooley's voice warned. "Keep up your energy; get some speed and altitude; don't look at the instruments; keep your eye on him." I'm at home watching the tape, the ultimate video game. I've got that red star in my gunsight, and I'm leading him just like in the manual. "You got him," yells Dooley. I smile to myself and nod coolly. Not too bad for a guy old enough to be Tom Cruise's father.