You’re totally wrong. First of all, navigation and pilotage was MUCH harder back then. Because the airplanes were simpler, you had to do a lot of calculations for yourself. No calculators and computers meant slide rules and memorization of tables.
IFR is absolutely a requirement for every military pilot. What, do you think the air force is grounded every time there’s some cloud cover? And having flown IFR approaches in airplanes at 100 knots, I can well imagine how difficult it can be when you’re going 300.
And while the National Guard may have been a ‘rich kids’ getaway, I guarantee you that they weren’t hiding out in fighter jets unless they had real skills to get them into the cockpit. You don’t just get given a seat in a fighter because your Dad is someone, because Dad is likely to get really mad when you become a greasy stain on a runway somewhere.
And a lot of guys like to intimate that the F-102 was somehow a ‘lesser’ fighter for weak pilots or something. Well, it was in the process of being replaced by newer jets, but that’s irrelevant to how difficult it was to fly. Those early Century Series fighters were known as some of the hardest jets to fly, ever. They had horrific accident rates. Bush lost two squadron mates to operational accidents while he was in the guard, and the chances of him being killed flying the F-102 were much greater than if he had been drafted to Vietnam.
ElvisL1ves: Those links you provided are interesting, but highly partisan. There are some real howlers there. Like the big about how he was grounded and suspended from flight duty for ‘failure to take a physical’. Makes it sound like a punishment. In fact, a grounding and suspension from flight duty are normal and automatic if you don’t complete your physical. Hell, I’m “suspended and grounded from flying” right now, because my physical has lapsed. Whoop-de-do.
And you said Bush had approximatley 300 hours in the F-102. Your second cite says he had 300 training hours in the F-102. That sounds about right - there’s a lot of training for fighter jocks - everything from aerial gunnery to formation flying to low-level flying and god knows what else. So let’s see… By July of 1970 he ‘earned his wings’ according to your second cite, and was an operational fighter pilot, with 300 hours in the F-102, plus at least 200 hours before that (you have to be qualified IFR in the T-38 before transitioning, and that’s a minimum of 150 hours for the IFR, plus qualification time in the jet). So by 1970 he has probably about 500 hours.
Then he flew for almost two more years in guard, according to your second cite, last flying the F-102 in April of 1972. In 70 and 71 he was credited with 68 days of flight duty (which means days in which you actually flew the airplane). Call it maybe a total of 80 days of flight duty before he let his medical lapse. If you figure an average of five or six hours of flight time per day, Bush probably had close to about 1,000 hours of flight time before he left the military, including his basic flight training and operational flying.
As for that story of him ‘almost crashing’ the Cessna, that sounds to me like Bush jerking Don Evan’s chain. There’s no way a pilot qualified like Bush was would forget how to fly a Cessna 172 in six or seven years. Hell, I flew one after a wait of that long once, and after about 10 seconds it was like I’d never left the cockpit. The damned things almost fly themselves.
It sounds to me like Bush did a little goofing off in the plane (which he should NOT have done anyway), and the story got embellished over time. Airplane stories tend to grow a life of their own.
