Blue Angels Solo Pilot, Wayne Molnar (1986 - 1988)

you're working so hard to you know for 35 minutes whatever it is that you're airborne there's somewhere you need to be every second so you're trying to get there on time on speed and be where you need to be so that the next maneuver comes in on time i majored in phys ed at florida state i taught school in my hometown at a middle school i was coaching basketball and golf even though i don't play golf and one of my i've got three younger sisters and one of them uh wanted to be an aerospace engineer and always had interest in nasa and so my father said well maybe you ought to go take flying lessons so there's a grass trip a couple of miles from home so she went out there and took lessons in a cessna and i just couldn't stand it that my snot knows little sister was doing something way cooler than what i was doing so i went out took a couple of lessons myself well this was the summer after i was teaching uh that first year and i found out that i was not made to be a school teacher and so i wandered into a recruiter's office one day my dad had been bugging me go see a recruiter i didn't want anything to do with the military this wasn't all that long after vietnam war so it was not a popular thing to be in the military so i wandered into an office and my dad had been in the marine corps reserve so i went to see the marine first he was on the phone so i'll come back later so i went next door to the navy guy and he starts flipping through a notebook a picture on one side descript job description on the other and um flips through ships and submarines and turns the page and there's an airplane i thought well that's kind of cool what do you have to do for that he says come back saturday i'll give you the test i went nah i'm not going to waste my saturday doing that well he kept pushing and pushing finally say all right i'll come saturday do the test six months later i'm in officer candidate school of pensacola with a brand new haircut didn't have my shoulder length here like i did in college and started flying airplanes and it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me i was chosen to be a sur grad uh which means selectively retained graduate what it really means is the navy was too cheap to send you to the fleet and then bring you back to the instructor and they thought you know we could save some money if we took some of these guys that just graduated and we'll make them instructors that way we don't have to move them to the west coast or the east coast and then bring them back three or four years later to be an instructor so that's what happened to me i didn't want to do it at the time i was not happy about that it's like wait a minute i just quit being a teacher because i don't like being a teacher and now you're going to make me be a teacher again but looking back it was the best thing that ever happened to me to get some more time and experience and back then the deal was you got your first choice after being a sir grad of what airplane you wanted to fly and i really wanted to fly the tomcat so it got me there which i wouldn't have been able to do that had i not been a sir grad so in the long run couldn't have been better when i was at miramar i went to vf2 the bullets deployed aboard a uss kitty hawk it wasn't that long after the hostage crisis in iran so there was always a carrier off the coast of iran so that was kind of the routine you'd go through hawaii japan you know hong kong singapore thailand and you know work your way over philippines and then you'd relieve whatever carrier was in uh in the indian ocean off the coast of iran at that time they'd normally been out there for roughly 90 days there was a a little article one paragraph as i recall in the ship's newspaper there was an article in there said the uh the blue angels are accepting applications for you know public affairs officer a flight surgeon a c-130 pilot and three demo pilots or something like that typical ad they send out every uh december or january i never dreamed of it and even then it was like i was kind of embarrassed to even think maybe i could do that but you're out there at sea you had time to think so fortunately the exo of my sister squadron was vance parker star parker um so i saw him in the hallway one day and i pulled him aside and said hey what do you think you know should i try something like that or am i you know just be honest with me tell me i'm crazy if i shouldn't do it but he was very encouraging he couldn't have been any more positive like wow that's something well our kag commander of the air group was ernie christensen another former blue so one day i see him in a hole and i was like can i talk to you off to the side so same kind of thing i asked him this course like you know what do you think i i don't know about this you know i'm like you know am i crazy he was the same way he was like no give it a shot you got nothing to lose go for it you know so i thought what the heck so i submitted the paperwork and this was rather painful they get me on the air on the phone uh in the ready room but they're having a brief going on so i'm on the phone kind of hiding behind the desk of the squadron duty officer trying not to interrupt their briefing it's kurt watson is doing most of the talking and he says you know we had the miramar air show a couple of weeks ago and you didn't even come by to see us you know that was really disappointing because you know we you we kind of thought you had a chance but when you didn't come and i'm like no i didn't come i just didn't want to bother you guys i've been hanging out with you for a month so i figured you were tired of me so i just leave you alone he goes well you know sorry and then all the other guys are on the other lines and so they all chime in walk on board you know you're coming to pensacola so uh that changed my life i was the narrator that was the last year of the a4 1986. you don't go to winter training right away when everybody else does they'd normally go the first week of january and train until about middle of march and you start flying air shows the way it works for the narrator the narrator and number eight the events coordinator they go together in the two-seat airplane and they go to all the show sites around the country they meet with the faa the air show committee just set up all the little things that have to be arranged ahead of time trying to make sure that they're on track to to be able to provide all the things that we need so that they can have an air show so you don't show up in el centro until about first or second week of february and so then as the narrator i would go out to the desert each day when they're out there practicing their maneuvers i'm out there the guys have set up a speaker system with a microphone and you narrate to the rabbits and road runners and snakes out there and do that twice a day and try to learn your narration but i was glad to be the narrator my first year a lot of guys i don't want to do that you're just a gopher i want to be flying in the air show well i'm a slow learner so i thought this would help me a lot give me a year to figure out the rest of this blue angel stuff and then get me into the flying part and that'll give me a leg up you know next year this is lieutenant narrator for the blue angels since 1940's the main thing that had everybody excited was this was the last a4 show and the first you know hornet team to follow and so at the end of the show every you know show's over the jets pull in they park and then okay from the the right cliff skelton who's going to be the narrator next year relieved me of my job he was an f18 rag instructor in jacksonville he'd been picked and so he taxis out the first blue and gold hornet and parks it right by the boss's blue and gold a4 and so that was kind of the moment you know that everybody's been waiting for pat walsh the uh our slot pilot he was the only guy on the team other than cliff skelton that had any f-18 time so he'd written a training syllabus for us we went to jacksonville to nas cecil field which was where the f-18 rag was we went through a shortened course i want to say it was like a dozen flights i don't remember but it was a quick you know like three-week course we spent some time in the simulator going through procedures and emergency training and things like that and then we flew some um some flights around cecil i remember going down we flew to key west over a weekend and we flew like three flights a day you know friday saturday and sunday and then came back more training the next week so it's kind of quick and dirty and they said all right we're qualified good luck don't mess it up and off we go to el centro [Music] but el centro is really busy um and as a new guy actually that year i was the only new guy of the six demo pilots they froze the rest of the team the diamond was the same four guys in the same four spots uh kurt watson had been on the last a4 team but that was his fourth year and so he left dave anderson went from opposing solo to number five as the lead soul and he trained me if anybody was holding up the training process it was me so i just i just buried my head and tried to do as best i could hollywood couldn't have been a better lead solo he was so patient with me so el centro was was great it worked out really well but yeah a lot of pressure to make sure we were progressing and going to be on time to start the season first air show was at yuma arizona marine corps air station over there yeah it was it was suddenly different because now we've been practicing at el centro so you knew where all the checkpoints were you knew how to set up the maneuvers you were you weren't good but you were getting better at it well now we've we just flew over to yuma and now there's all different checkpoints different runways different landmarks different buildings different roads different trees different houses different patterns and so your first time out of the shoot you're trying to deal with that and you've never done that before you've never gone to a new place to to learn all the checkpoints so that was the hardest part i remember finishing the first day you circle around normally two airplanes at a time so five and six would circle around and you're comparing your photograph to what's on the ground trying to decide what you're going to use for your three-mile checkpoint your two-mile checkpoint so forth and i remember thinking at the end of the day it's like there is no way i can fly an air show tomorrow we walked out to the jets and flew an air show the next days and it worked most solo pilots will tell you their favorite maneuver was the tuck over roll and if you ask them what was your hardest maneuver they would say the tuckover roll that was probably also why it was their favorite because if you got it right you felt real good about it and what that is is solos would come in from the right and number six is leading this one most of them have done so you roll it in up both of you guys are upside down so five is flying formation on six and as you get close to center point about 1200 feet right as i remember the lead solo says ready hit it and both airplanes roll simultaneously so you actually lose sight of each other in the roll and then you go out the other side and so to the crowd it looks like you've well obviously coming upside down but it looks like the airplanes have switched positions during this roll and then you go out the other side and it's just hard to get that right every time san francisco was probably most people's favorite it was very hard it was also flown by design late in the season because you weren't good enough to fly that show in march or april um people are surprised to hear that you hear you say that the show might be different early in the season than later yeah the team gets better as the season goes on you move maneuvers a little closer a little lower to the ground a little closer over the ground so a team you see fly in april and steam you slide fly in october you show you quite a bit of a different air show you'll see a refined better air show better formation but most people will tell you the harder ones are the ones they also liked the most just because it was so cool it's like you mean i get to fly over downtown san francisco i can do pylon turns around buildings and there are 100 people on every roof waving at you and i'm waving to them as i fly by so you get to do that and you get to fly right along fisherman's dwarf and golden gate bridge over here the oakland bay bridge over there and make all the noise i want for 30 minutes it's like it's pretty pretty fun [Applause] the crew caves we had those are the ones you get the closest to because you spend time they own the jet they just let me borrow it for 30 minutes a day [Music] and it's almost like a competition between crew chiefs to see who had the best looking jet i mean they'd go out there and wax the thing in the middle of the night my crew chief would take white out the stuff he used to correct typing with and he'd go out to my tires and he would make the goodyear into white letter tires on my my plane nobody else had white letter tires but mine he would spend extra time polishing the what we call the turkey feathers it's the nozzles on the back of the the engines because they were a material that didn't shine very much they polished mine so i mean those guys were just great sometimes they might have to work all the way through the night i remember in the hornet something that happened with a fuel cell there was a leak or something so they take the top of the airplane off right behind the canopy they got everything out and there's this big fuel cell well fat albert flew somewhere got the bladder for that flew it back middle of the night they reinstalled that thing we flew a test hop on it the next morning and it's back in the air so nowhere nobody ever knew there was a problem but those are the kind of things they will do without being asked they're just going to make sure that jet's ready to fly tomorrow really great guys so we met with the t-birds that first year out in nellis in las vegas at their base flew our shows together and then uh went out to have some mexican food and a couple of cocktails and we just had a blast yucking it up with those guys i mean it was like we were brothers um we didn't know these guys but you know we're from cuff in the same cloth and so we had a great time then the next year um they came to pensacola these guys have been on the road for three or four weeks you know east coast trip so they go from one to the other without going back to nellis well so they fly in that afternoon and while they're doing their circling maneuvers to pick up their checkpoints because we're going to fly a practice air show together the following day they finish doing that they land and so we're going through a debrief and kind of setting up what we've got arranged for the next couple days while they're in town and these guys are all scratch golfers and they are so excited because when they're circling the field they can see the golf course there at nas pensacola and it's like man this is going to be great they've been wanting some days off because they've been working for a month straight and so they all get out they've all got their custom golf bags you know thunderbirds written all over the thing and these guys are scratch golfers i think we only had one guy that ever even picked up a putter before and that was a putt putt well so we thought this through ahead of time because the thunderbirds are known for high class with everything they have and do so we're going to warm up in the parking lot the next morning and we're going to go play golf we had some golf balls made up with blue angel logo on it so we're passing the golf balls out and the tees and everything they've got their stuff loaded up we got like 10 cars and so we tell them oh by the way we're not going to play at the course on base we're playing at a country club in town and we're going to stop and pick up a couple of our honorary blue angels they're going to play with us so just follow us and so we're leading the way out there but we get them i don't know it's about a mile or so off the base and we pull into a bowling alley and they're like what are we doing here we're just picking up some people y'all come on in while we're waiting well we're bowling we're not playing golf that day so we've got this is like 10 in the morning and we've got the bowling alley to ourselves and they were not happy they wanted to play golf and the fact that we were jerking them around didn't make it any better and the fact that we were bowling made it even worse well it turned out to be as fun as it could have been because now rather than playing a foursome you got two of their guys and two of our guys you only get to know those two guys well now we're bowling on four lanes we're switching teams we're mixing it all up the pictures of beer coming the dips and chip and so you got to know everybody hang out with everybody and you know they were mad for about the first game but once we got through the first game we couldn't had a better time so it's kind of fun to kind of stick it to them a little bit ladies and gentlemen [Music] i have two lives there was a fork in the road i have a life that i had before a blue angel and i have a life that happened once i became a blue angel and uh it took me places and did things from even now uh somebody will mention something and i'll meet somebody that i would have never met had that not happened in my life and i had a great life before that i mean it's not like i was you know miserable or something but you know if my life was this good before it was that good after and i've met so many great people and gone places and done things and uh and still hang out with with guys on the team there's a bunch of us that go skiing out in colorado in february you know eight or nine of us that like skiing we also did a charity event um well we're doing one now with the blue angel foundation obviously involved with a lot of guys there doing doing good work to help raise money for wounded vets but a lot of us have done a charity event before that working with bernie willett honorary to raise money for one one was a golf event we raised money for uh breast cancer and the other was a ski event to raise money for cystic fibrosis and we did that for 27 years whatever it was raised millions of dollars for both those charities and so uh a lot of that was hanging out with those same guys you

Channel: Blue Angel Phantoms

Views: 23,605

Keywords: Blue Angels A4 Skyhawk, Wayne Molnar, Blue Angels pilot, Blue Angels Transition, Blue Angels f18 hornet, blue angels new planes, blue angels super hornet, blue angels 1987, Blue Angels 1986, blue angels 1988, blue angels fleet week, blue angels movie, Skyhawk to hornet, blue angels 2021 schedule, blue angels vs thunderbirds, Gil Rud, David Anderson, Blue Angels Fat Albert, Blue Angels history, blue angels documentary, f14 tomcat, Ernie Christensen, Vance Parker

Id: GUOxV52aePo

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021