LLESA Author Series | "Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet" by Brian Shul

okay i've got to deal with every one of you we're not going to tell the boss that he had that this gentleman had a bigger crowd as the deputy don't ruin my day all right everybody swear right okay all right got it okay good that's our deal we never don't do that uh thank you and to the veterans in the audience uh happy belated veterans day and uh this event is uh one of those times where you realize there's a lot of great americans out there who have contributed a lot to our nation and continue to do it even today so thank you um i read the bio today i don't know if many of you did that but uh brian wow and i'm just going to give you a few highlights uh brian graduated from east carolina university in 1970 i remember that year unfortunately i graduated the same year with a degree in history in anthropology for the next and then for the next 20 years served in the united states air force as a fighter pilot and during the vietnam war he flew 212 close air support missions and was shot down near the canadian cambodian border he was unable to eject and forced to ride the plane into the jungle a wild ride severely burned an ensuing crash and was given up for dead at that particular point rescued by special forces good for the army brian endured one year in a military hospital where he underwent 15 surgical procedures and told he would never fly again but as human will over doctor's advice after much physical therapy brian miraculously returned to active duty flying flew the a7 was an instructor in the a-10 which is still flying today and went on to teach at the air force's top gun school culminated an air force career by flying the nation's top secret spy plane the sr-71 blackbird fastest aircraft ever built even today brian flew covert missions in the blackbird for four years and was a pilot who provided president reagan with detailed photos of the libyan terrorist camps in 1986. during that time he became the only sr-71 pilot in history to fly three missions in three consecutive days and if you know a little bit about what the sr-71 does to your body since it's flying so fast that's uh quite a feat after retiring from the air force in 1990 pursued writing photography and was the first pilot to write a book about flying the blackbird completely illustrated with his own photography he's also the only man to fly extensively with the navy blue angels and the air force thunderbirds as a photojournalist so i just think going through that it just sells serves a life well served and continue to serve so as a perfect veteran celebration of a speaker that can tell you about what the air force had done and what a lot of people have done to serve our nation so with honor i'd like to introduce air force hero brian thank you thank you so much when i was first asked to come here i envisioned a couple old men in white lab coats and people so nice to see there's humanoids behind the gate what a treat uh i'm used to working in top secret facilities and also didn't scare me getting in the badge and everything today but what a pleasure to come and be invited i know what i know what a lot of you are thinking right now how could a fighter pilot possibly be a keynote speaker they have a limited vocabulary we talk in words like jet zoom fly occasionally a larger word like tower runway i want you to know that i've been doing this for 25 years now and i've worked extensively on my vocabulary you will be hearing some words in today's presentation that are very very big i don't want you to confuse me with anyone that's heroic or famous or did anything great it's good etiquette when you check the airplane out of the squadron to bring it back leaving your jet in the jungle doesn't qualify you as heroic i am a survivor they say a good landing is one you can walk away from a really great landing is when you can use the airplane again i did not do either of those things i want you to know that what you are looking at here today is the luckiest person that you will ever see at this podium ever and at the end of today's presentation i think you will agree with me on that now i will admit to you i did not feel like the luckiest guy on earth with my aircraft was going down couldn't get out it was a horrendous morning everything was going wrong and i was about to impact the jungle and i realized i was about to die in a matter of seconds it was a very sobering thought i uh clenched my eyes tightly and clenched my fist i figured it'll all be over in a heartbeat i'll wake up in heaven painlessly be over next thing i remember was a great deal of fire and smoke and heat and flames all around me and i thought well maybe i didn't go the way i thought i would quickly realizing i was still alive i got out of the airplane and collapsed in the jungle was severely burned i was numb i was not in any great pain i just i just realized i couldn't i couldn't use my hands they were i was just really badly burned and i laid there and if you want heroes in my story it is the special forces people that came and got me and they eventually got me back to it was kind of it's not like in the movies where everybody's anxious to rescue you the first chopper said that's too far we're out of gas the next guy said that's not our sector we can't be near cambodia finally the third guy was army and you know as most of you know you can talk army people to just about anything if you tried and we got him down there and he got down there and i'm listening to all this on the radio i'm just laying there and and they're they're hovering over me at their weapons and they're shooting in the background and they're they're talking this guy and he says i can't put it down there's not enough rotor clearance i'll lose my crew this is uh and i'm thinking wow what more could go wrong today and at that moment this man that was kind of guarding over me pointed his m16 at the chopper and very clearly on the radio said you either put it down and we'll shoot it down and i thought at that moment i am on the right team of players next thing we heard was i think we can put it down which he never did and a superior bit of airmanship he could not land he's hovered four feet above the ground and they stuffed me in there and it got me back to thailand and they said well he's not going to make the trip across the pacific send him to okinawa send him to kadena he'll die put his body in a box ship it home that's the harsh reality of that war well they shipped a team of nine people from fort sam houston texas burn center all the way to okinawa just for me and their mission in life was see if you could save the young lieutenant bad thing happened to me in those two months of intensive care the numbness wore off i'd like to tell you all about how courageous brave and heroic i was going through all that treatment and tough it'd be a big fat lie i'm an inspirational speaker day i go all over the world and it pains me to tell you that i wanted to give up and that it was just so beyond what i could deal with that i i pray it and i please god you have the wrong guy let me just die and it would be easier and it's hard for me to even believe i i did that and i used to lay there thinking of all the bad things i'd ever done in my entire life that took a week all right two weeks and it still didn't add up and i couldn't cope and my body was wasting away i i was in such incredible shape when i went down i wasn't physically fast 180 pounds of just muscle and steel well as you see today and uh my body went down to 119. 119 and i it wasn't receiving food it just it just said we can't eat it's just failing and they said you know your body saved you and now you have to build it back and you have to get food and i i said it's not i can't put food down it's just not working they said if you lose another pound you can't save me and i didn't care at that point i said well okay then i guess i'm just gonna have to die after all this incredible pain for two months it has to be a turning point to every story of course mine was kind of a silly thing except i it wasn't silly to me and i will share with you today and i was laying there one afternoon i could see out the third floor window the soccer field the end of the runway at kadena the the road there and i could hear the kids playing soccer every afternoon laughing and playing kicking the ball it was april and i thought boy i was those kids i'd give anything to be back out there with them and that made me sad and at that moment judy garland came on the radio singing somewhere over the rainbow how many of you know the words that song anybody here no you don't put your hands down you think you know the words that song i thought i did from the wizard of oz yellow brick road no no that is a very deep philosophical adult song you listen to the words to that song it's all about daring to dream it's about dreams really coming true i heard the words of that song for the first time that day they penetrated my brain sharper than any scalpel they were using and i could look out the window and see the other side of the rainbow and those kids and i made a choice i made a decision right then i am going to try to eat the food tomorrow i want to live i'm going to try to survive i'll never fly again i'll never do anything i probably lose a couple fingers and i probably won't walk right again doesn't matter i am going to change my attitude and then tomorrow i'm going to start trying to heal and isn't it amazing how the simplest change of attitude in life can affect the whole rest of your life that one choice the next day they came in they had food they could see a different look at my face they could see fire in my eyes which is probably a bad pun at this point and they were excited and i tried to eat and it wouldn't go down my body rejected it i could not eat they were beside themselves they could see i was trying and i'm saying no god please just forget everything i just said up for two months i want to eat now let it go down nothing finally some army corpsman had a sack lunch his wife had packed him he said this didn't come from the hospital but it's different maybe there's something in here i could eat anything there's nothing except a little plastic container of cherry kool-aid and the cherry kool-aid went down real good they ran to the commissary and got every pack of cherry kool-aid they could find i drank 3.2 gallons of cherry kool-aid the first day ladies and gentlemen i lived on cherry kool-aid for four straight days drinking an average of five gallons a day and i peed real good they say that's even a better sign his body's functioning normally internally he doesn't need anything internally he's just got to build his body back eventually some saltine crackers some bread next thing you know i'm on a plane back to the states i spent a whole year in the hospital and they did all kinds of surgery and they said well i guess we won't cut those fingers off maybe we could save them you'll never fly again though keep that in mind you'd be lucky to just be alive well back then the deep recesses of my brain i needed that i think i could still fly again to go through all the therapy i had to have a goal i realized the power in the mind was far greater than the failing muscles of your body spend a year there one day i'm not going to bore you with that whole tale of adventure make you sick boom i pop out of the hospital and more miraculously i'd passed a flight physical they couldn't flunk me they said internally he's strong as nails he just he looks like hell on the outside but the scar tissue if he keeps working it he's got dexterity we can't flunk him got out of the hospital and went back to the air force the air force wasn't all that excited to have me they're going like well you've crashed one of our jets already no they i didn't say that they didn't know what to do with me and here's something you've already learned in life i'm sure there are many know people in the world who want to explain to you why you can't do something many people are too afraid to do their life fear rules all their decisions i don't want to look bad i'm probably not very good at it i might fail people might laugh at me all the reasons that stop people from living their dream i didn't have that problem you lay on your back for a year you will learn what's important in life and you will have no fear because you're not going to miss another moment of it so when i returned i had two major concepts in my brain that i will share with you today one life is short and it's uncertain it's not one or the other it's both and because it is you can't possibly miss the gift that each day is number two pursue your passion now do it now do the thing in life you love whether it's family work job hobby whatever it is don't wait because of rule number one armed with this very simplistic bit of knowledge i went back in the air force and i felt like i was a two-year-old i was born again i was like starting over i'd had a whole year in the hospital and it was like i was fearless and i wasn't going to miss anything and i was like too it makes the air force very nervous to have two-year-olds flying their their jets they either loved me or hated me i was an enigma it was like this is the greatest guy we had in the squad and he'll try anything he'll volunteer he's fearless and he he's got a great attitude or he is a loose cannon we don't know what he's going to do next i got back to flying and i i became a big story in the air force which i didn't want i a fame and and being in magazine it wasn't that wasn't comfortable people then all that they knew you and they they're all looking at you funny and like well so what does the scar tissue feel you know it's like i just want to do my job and i did my job very well and i was teaching at top gun and one day i said i'd like fly the world's fastest yet sr-71 it's the only thing left i haven't done and then i can retire and they said whoa all the no people came running out of the woodwork you have to take an astronaut physical to fly that airplane because you're flying in 90 000 feet that means if you flunk any part of that very difficult two-day physical you will never fly again and that's why people are afraid to go try out for that program there's that word afraid well i was 12. i was a 12 year old by the time i got to this program have you ever known a 12 year old it was when you said hey maybe you shouldn't do that skateboard on the that said yeah boy that's pretty dangerous i don't think they're already doing it i said but what if i pass the physical and could actually fly that airplane we would have missed it and against being surrounded by adults i they didn't get it i scored the sixth highest score at travis on their astronaut physical they had ever had i was motivated and internally my body really was very strong and they said wow you you look like hell on the outside but you're still strong it's like then they were worried about scar tissue let me just tell you about scar tissue it's it's like leather it's okay it just you stretch it it's actually tougher than skin it's actually fine to fly with you have to keep stretching and everything so the air force was like so afraid then they said well you're wearing a space suit when you fly and good god we gotta be breathing 100 oxygen all the time and and that could you know mess up your scar tissue yeah they just didn't get it and i said uh i went into surgery 15 times and they were giving me 100 oxygen every time so i pretty much think it'll be okay what i learned in life as a 12 year old in an adult world was that we become fearful we become we lose our dream we lose our passion i was exactly the opposite it didn't please everyone around me and those that it did you know love you for life and say thank you for reminding me what a gift each day is that isn't guaranteed for those of you that are not familiar this aircraft the sr-71 stood for strategic reconnaissance went globally this was the airplane in that was invented because gary powers was shot down in 1960 over russia president eisenhower was quite embarrassed when kelly johnson at lockheed said build me an airplane they cannot shoot down 18 months later they rolled out the blackbird the sr-71 the fastest highest flying jet ever built we are cruising at 2 000 miles an hour uh at ninety thousand feet and i could read your name tag if you're standing outside flying over at that speed this airplane carried a crew of two pilot and navigator carried eighty thousand pounds of fuel about sixteen thousand gallons we'd burn through in an hour and a half it was made of titanium you can't forge titanium you can't use regular tools on titanium that's why no one's ever built an airplane out of titanium because it's too difficult and impossible to do and they had a dream and they did it he said we're going to invent technology in 1962 we're going to invent technology without computers to build an airplane they hand built each one they only built 50 of these forever and only about 35 were made the reconnaissance version this airplane was your guardian of freedom of this nation for 26 years it did more to shape your foreign policy from the vietnam war to the gulf war it served six different presidents and did so many things behind the scenes that you never all those pictures of haifang harbor during the huntley brinkley reports back in the 60s were shot pictures taken by this aircraft there were no weapons on this airplane your only weapon was speed in 26 years not one was ever shot down not one piece of one jet was ever hit by any missile well ahead of its time this was the jet they gave way to no other plane just up the road here in marysville at beale air force base was the home of the most remarkable aircraft of the 20th century people didn't know a lot about it because it was so top secret uh that you you couldn't say a lot about it uh only only later when it started setting speed records in the 70s just to thumb the the nose at this at the soviets people became more aware of it and today people are still mesmerized by the fact that we could build an airplane in the 60s that is you're sitting here today in 2016 still holds every speed and altitude record well i was crewed with major walter watson he's the one on the left it was bad enough that i was getting all this uh publicity in the air force as that burned up guy that's now flying the the sr well now walter was the first and only african-american officer ever to be in this program and what a brilliant engineer he was what a terrific guy we are best friends to this day we flew for four years every mission together they team you up because the airplane requires that you work in tandem you learn to work together in two totally different cockpits we are like say best friends to this day and i had the best backseater in the squadron when i got in the airplane i checked out my cockpit looks pretty pretty normal pretty ancient here you know what kind of radar we had we didn't have any radar you know what kind of computers that we didn't have any computers you know kind of flap spoilers speed break we didn't have any of those things the airplane was your basic street rod 60s go fast burn gas airplane and i loved it now i got a little nervous i saw no guns bombs or rocket switches that little naked i thought well maybe i can flip a camera switch on and nope walter had all the camera sensors all the secret stuff in the back seat i said walt if we're ever shot down you're the spy i'm just the driver now getting used to the space helmet did take a little because as a fighter pilot in flight you can take your oxygen mask off wipe sweat out of your eye or if you're a navy pilot pick your nose or whatever it is whatever it is they do um but now you were entombed for five hours six hours whatever the mission was it breathed in 100 oxygen and and you'd get a little earache later in the night when you came home but but you got thirsty dehydrated hungry no big deal i was a new guy and they were kind of playing with me on my first big mission they said hey have the ham and cheese omelet at the in-flight don't do the steak and eggs today do the ham and cheese almond put extra cheese on there because you know you're going to need that protein for that man i thought well that makes sense cheese protein sure pile it on now those of you that know as you go higher in elevation the evolved gases in your body expand well passing 55 000 feet in the climb that day i thought i was gonna give live birth in the cockpit walters going are you okay which i'm making sounds he's never heard and uh finally at 72 000 feet when relief came i very tearfully realized how self-contained that entire environmental system was now they worried about i had two i had a steel pin put in my finger here but they built the hinge joint and had they not built the hinge joint into it but on a whim the doctor just said why don't we just do that he might want it someday he's never gonna fly again had they not done that i would have never passed the physical but because i could grip and grasp which is what the reg said but i had to learn to do some things upside down backwards in the cockpit you know you will learn how to do something if you're motivated i had the power of motivation and will on my side you could learn as a 12 year old you could you could do it if you want to do it bad enough now i'll admit it's a lot more fun being in the front seat you got a stick you have a view walter had no way to fly the plane in the back he's got his head down working on the magic stuff so here we are getting ready to go on a real mission if you look closely at my spacesuit ah it's a little happy face kind of yeah this is fun walters ah not so much now i may surprise you know how few people we had in the squadron at any one time we only had 15 guys in the squadron any one time we're out of the country six months out of the year we only flew out of three locations and covered the globe all the time two jets in okinawa two jets in england 10 11 airplanes at beale that's it that was it only 93 men in history flew this jet and i always said i appreciated it more than the other 92. the photographs that you're seeing in today's presentation represent the world's rarest collection of blackbird photos anywhere because they're all my own pictures now you weren't allowed to carry a camera in certain areas you couldn't do it blah blah blah blah blah but if you really wanted to get a photograph you could get permission from the commander go to the security chief get the wing commander sign off it was a big hassle but it could be done and photography was my passion when i came out of the hospital what i say about living your dream following don't miss the moment so here i was with the most elegant aircraft ever built and carrying my camera out when i could how was i going to miss that in seven years i only got 200 pictures that's not a lot that's not a lot but that was the passion did i know i was going to be a speaker write a book of course not i just thought how could you miss the moment of what this is this is okinawa kadena we're getting ready to go up to north korea sonic boom their little shorts off um if their plane carried a double sonic boom at 2000. let me just give you a speed reference here if you went hunting with your your 30 out six rifle that bullet exits the muzzle at 3 100 feet per second this airplane would cruise with ease in a climb at 3 200 feet per second okay we're doing a mile every two seconds or a mile every second and a half if you want to go a little faster the jet would always go a little faster ronald reagan knew how to use this airplane he was our commander-in-chief one day the uh the uh all the bad guys were having a conference up in north korea they invited all the soviets and the chinese the vietnamese all the bad guys were there and they didn't invite us ronald reagan said have brian and walter take off out of kadena go up to korea and fly a little figure eight but we're so we did this mission we got and we said what are we doing we have photographed the entire country in the first six minutes it was ronald reagan's way of every six minutes sonic booming their coffee cup off the table just to let them know we know you're there and now you know we're here and you can't do a thing about it over 4 500 missiles were fired at this jet in 25 years not one was ever hit a little footnote to history here you may not know behind the jet is the kadena marina where the navy has a little officers club where people are windsurfing and sailing and learning how to wind surfing rumor has it not i don't know how true this is but some sr-71 pilots on takeoff would like suck the wheels up 10 feet off the dick and full burner go ripping across that marina knocking when surf is over and i think that's just a rumor personally now i want you to be impressed with these pictures today but i don't want you to be impressed with the photographer because the photographer knew nothing about photography except that he loved it and he had his kodachrome slide film and had his little manual f3 camera and he was around the most beautiful lady in black that you'd ever want to photograph so it was a passion and it showed me now when i look at this picture that's a beautiful picture that's a gloomy sky in england getting ready to take off the jets running up one engine at a time we're in the mobile car down the runway mesmerized by the sound and fury that's going on in before us me and the commander sitting in the mobile card and he looks over and he says what's that camera doing on the seat you know you're not supposed to have a camera out here and then he looks back at the jet because it just me it captures our attention and i'm like huh what camera and then i had to think fast i go you know colonel if i got a picture of that you could put that in your office while nobody would have that picture and as if not to be complicit he never looked at me he stared straight ahead at the jet and i saw the little vein come out on his forehead and his lips never moved exactly but somehow i heard you have 10 seconds i will never forget this this because every time i see this picture i can still feel the steel uh buckle on the runway there where i'd put my knee in the hardness of the concrete and the cold of that wound that that england air and i got two shots in 10 seconds and i'm still fumbling with my zoom lens and i still couldn't figure out what the word aperture on the camera meant i had no idea i'm trying to roll it and i'm thinking what did i expose it correctly did i get the wingtips in i see that picture today and people go out national geographic man that's beautiful yeah it's beautiful because somebody didn't miss the moment was not afraid to fail somebody just went for it because they were 12 and they didn't care if they failed they weren't going to miss it because when they're laying on their back in the hospital they were missing everything they would have given their left toe to get out there and fail at something i love that picture moments later the jet took off and did a big six hour mission around the russia and the arctic circle if you've never heard one of these take off your life's incomplete i'm sorry this was not a sound you heard as much as felt i got one shot of the takeoff remotely in focus and every ba every bone in my body was vibrating as it went by climbing out over susanville uh we're in a chase aircraft here little t-38 i don't want to make any cessna drivers here feel bad today if any people fly from brake release to 26 000 feet leveling at 450 knots is three minutes and 51 seconds i think that's about three days in a cessna i'm not sure now if you're gonna go this fast all over the world you're gonna need aerial refueling two to five times on any mission pretty pretty nice on a clear calm day like this sunny day no no big deal we're all very highly experienced guys we're really good at what we do we're like all stars you try this at night in the weather in a turn in turbulence with lightning in your face they don't pay you enough but you have to get the fuel i still have nightmares at night not about the war not about being shut down not about anything except night refueling it was not a comfortable thing on my days off i go up with the boom operator and they say what in the world are you doing on your day off going up to fly on the tanker for like five or six hours and you're only going to get like 30 seconds of actually and i go we're the only people in the world get to do this why why would i not i got my camera i got a new roll of kodachrome and i i'm pretty sure i figured out that aperture thing today you know and they just look at me like hey it's your go on the tanker guys loved having you this was the achilles heel of the program people say how could they cancel it because of budget a lot of tanker support for every mission for 25 years dedicated because they had to carry the special fuel that only we used there's a picture you'll never see because aerobatics over refueling operation are pretty much illegal but god what a shot come on no come on i don't want to give you the impression i was completely out of control the air force photographer came out one year and said we've only photographed this yet once or twice in the whole lifetime i need someone to fly me in the t-38 go up there and i knocked over three people and said i i will fly the photo chase when we were done he said that was the most exciting photo chase i have ever done in my 20 years as the official photographer and we got the best but yeah we got that shot folks you know another one of those pictures you'd say well there you must have known what you're doing rembrandt lighting no no sitting at kadena one day the same commander who now had a beautiful picture in his office said brian out your day off why don't you go up on the tank or just even get some more cool pictures i go well thanks sir i think it will went up on the tanker and they're just climbing out of kadena over the south china sea and the cloud deck reflected light and they banked 12 degrees in the early morning sun gave it a black shine you could see the fuel seeping out across the wing this airplane grew four inches in flight due to the 900 degree fahrenheit heat that built up in it so we had to build expansion joints into the aircraft so it leaked and oozed when it was subsonic and this is one of the rare shots where you actually get to see the fuel seeping out across the wing and again everyone says wow professional photography flailing with that zoom lens that in order to take a picture in the boom pod you have to lean over because the boomer has center center cot and you got to lean over can't look through your viewfinder very well this was pre-digital days folks no auto anything and i thought well i didn't get much today what a waste probably one of my favorite pictures and the the real issue here is not ooh look at my photography don't miss the moment coming off the tanker passing fifty thousand foot in the climb the sky turns a very deep dark cobalt blue and you're above all that weather that you feared when you flew mortal planes leveling at 85 000 feet you look out the window and just takes your breath away and you realize you're not in a rocket ship but you feel like you are you're in an air breathing jet above 90 percent of the earth's atmosphere you are ripping along at speeds that are mach 3 three times the speed of sound or more and it always would go more this is what the arctic circle looks like at about 90 000 feet and you might think well who are we spying on at the arctic circle you know santa is a sled driver he's okay we used to call the plane the sled as a nickname um one day the soviets put a bunch of new missiles around the arctic circle in the soviet union they we didn't know what these missiles capabilities were some general said brian walt come in with a secret briefing um we need you to fly up there point your jet at their border make them think you're going to penetrate their air space those missile sites will come up walter you record all that data electronically at the last minute turn come back we'll learn what those missiles can do i just have one question general sir uh what if they don't know we're not going to penetrate their recipes and they fire one of these we don't know what they'll do missiles at us he said well that's even better we'll get launch data this is the confidence they had in this airplane it was so great walter and i actually did this mission i saw two sunrises and two sunsets that day because in the winter you take off that angle and you get to north pole it's night with stars and you come back you see the sun kind of come up again anyway no one shot at us we came back with all this data four years later every navy and air force fighter pilot was armed with electronic countermeasures to these missiles which were by then widespread throughout the middle east so we did a lot of variety of missions we found a hiker mount mckinley nobody could find we found a guy in the pacific ocean in a boat tried to sail around the world he got stuck nobody could find we found we did a lot of cool missions that weren't always just spying on the soviets but that was the primary cuba korea china vietnam soviet union nicaragua you name it if it was in the newspaper this airplane was probably involved and if you saw pictures they weren't all satellite pictures one day i was looking in the rearview mirror and i saw this incredible reflection in my green visor now don't ask me why we had rear view mirrors in the world's fastest jet i can assure you no one was gaining on us but i've already admitted to you as a big baby in the hospital i'll admit something else today i used to look in the mirror and pull my visor up and to see the scar tissue in my face that you are not dreaming this you are actually doing it in the hospital they'd give you these drugs for pain that would take you on these wild like lsd type dreams where you didn't know reality from a dream world you just couldn't you'd wake up and say oh god i'm in a hospital must be a dream i can't possibly be this badly injured then you'd realize that was your reality so i i would actually i didn't tell walter it might worry him a little psychologically the man is still looking at himself in the mirror but i would actually do that to make sure you are just 12 years ago you're laying in hospital you are you're doing it right now well i put the camera up there on timer 10 seconds and uh you may think we had a lot of time to take pictures and fly i have six cockpit shots in in seven years and those mostly on training missions almost all of them are training you you didn't have a lot of time i don't want to give the impression that you know we we could be fooling around or playing in there but i love this picture it actually uh it shows a little bit of the cockpit and people always are asking me what are your favorite missions and i could talk for 30 more minutes on just that one was this mission where we're coming across the coast of vietnam going to look at china and cambodia and we fly right over the same place where b shul was shot down 12 years earlier don't think we didn't lay down some serious sonic boom that day and blow down some trees 18 miles high walter had to tell me pull it back pull it back let's not uh you got to realize your turn radius at that speed is about three states so you don't want to be sliding into red china there at the lessman and i will tell you it's pretty cool it's pretty cool being the fastest guys on the block you know you walk in the officers club on a friday night and all the f-15 f-16 guys are talking all the toy jet fighter guys and uh and they were all my ex-students so i i used to fly those planes and my instructor and i walked into the bar one time and we've got the the m3 plus patching we're the only guys in the in the world that can wear mach 3 plus and it's a cool thing so we just and my instructor was very cool so they're going like you did all this today now they look at so would you guys do today because see if you don't have if you don't have guns bombs or rockets you're like spit you know you're just so he goes well we did nebraska in four and a half minutes today kind of shut everybody up ladies and gentlemen that's the best way to do nebraska by the way in case you've ever driven through there sometimes the jet would reward me with an incredible view i didn't expect we took a jet from sacramento to london which was a three and a half hour flight ripped across canada at night saw the stars and milky way i write three pages of my book alone on what that looked like i could never get that picture what an incredible sight and we saw the sun come up over iceland and i just happened to have my little tiny camera in my spacesuit pocket there on a little lanyard coming back into land by mount lassen again we're in a chase aircraft i was a t-38 instructor so i got to fly uh the t-38 during the week a lot afforded me the opportunity and this was not illegal at all you could take all the photos you wanted and guys were always saying oh you're carrying the camera again don't you have enough pictures and i'd go have you eaten enough ice cream in your life are you never going to have another ice cream i wanted to take pictures every day if i could but you couldn't it was very very difficult to do sometimes the last 10 minutes of flight were the most harrowing you're up in a clear air mass for five six hours guess what the weather's all changed when you come back you're landing in in england sometimes on an icy foggy zero zero visibility runway after six hours of gut wrenching air refueling you're dehydrated hungry and you have enough gas for one approach and you're at 190 knots across the fence don't mess it up and i will tell you learn how to concentrate mightily in those last 10 minutes of flight because you got one shot of getting that airplane down and the rule was we can train other pilots you're expendable don't hurt the jet and uh it was the only regulation i ever read in an actual flight manual that said that go down you you if you die that's okay but don't hurt the jet now if you want more than your 15 minutes of fame in life you be an sr 71 pilot go to a major air show where there's a hundred thousand people fly your jet over their heads light the burners in their face land at their airshow stand in front of the jet you are a sky god and i will tell you i never felt prouder in my entire air force career to stand out from this plane it was the hero and all-star of any air show you brought it to and and i flew it in the 80s when it's well known and it was okay we did a lot of air shows from paris air show i got to open the reno air races one year and i think i pretty much won my heat this is the big england show they had 200 000 people there and i swear 199 000 of them were at that jet and you'd hear funny questions like people they were in awe of the airplane it was like meeting the pope they'd stand and stare speechless then they'd stare at you they couldn't speak we're going hey we're just regular air force pilots we're not astronauts we're not yeah and they just couldn't speak finally when they did they'd say something like when you go into orbit do you shut the engines down and we go no no we don't go into orbit it's not a rocket that's what's so amazing is that it's an air breathing jet that's why it's it's a remarkable thing but after you heard that question enough times you'd have to play with them a little bit and one day i heard that question i said well if you promise not to tell anyone i i will share some very classified information but you have to keep this very walter's role in his eyes oh god here we go they wanted to be a part people love undefeated first in class and they wanted so bad to be a part of it so i said okay here's the deal when we're on the back side of the moon his eyes got real big and i said we shut one engine down to preserve fuel and we used the gravitational force to sling us back into him he was so sp his mouth's open he's like and i said but but don't don't tell anybody because that's critical no no no i won't tell anybody when running back to his family told him everything and but it was a real proud thing to stand in front of this airplane at paris air show the soviets would come over and stare at it and we thought yeah pal that's the closest you will ever get to one uh we used to see the soviet migs coming up chasing us over the baltic there and they'd be frozen their contrails would be frozen in that arctic sky to see these big white plumes and all of a sudden they'd get all puffy and squiggly and they'd be out of gas and ideas and they'd be falling out of the sky and they'd better get back home and they're never going to make it i got four inches of throttle left in my 57 chevy and i'm i'm blowing the doors off a 1988 mig that just gave you such a sense of american technology you folks work on on cutting edge technology and and you you kind of know what i'm talking about there's there's no other country in the world we can do we put our minds to it's like the stuff that this was 60s stuff unbelievable baby jet t-38 was uh your companion trainer you kept current in the formation and instruments over lake tahoe camera boy could not resist the beautiful little white jet that white jet afforded me the opportunity to get many of the photographs you see today and and i i it was totally legal and everybody said okay nobody else wanted to do it and again i didn't know that i'd be the one man keeping the memory of this jedi for the next 30 years i just thought i'll have a nice collection of photographs once i figure out how to use that dang lens but a beautiful jet walter and i would go up and do little training sorties he had a stick now a real view nobody was shooting at us i said i wasn't famous or anything walter and i do have one claim to fame we are famous set and that is that we flew three missions in three days uh during the libya crisis in 86 we're the guys that provided reagan with all the photos they did fire two missiles at us on that one mission and that did caught our attention and we went to full throttle and people always go how fast will that jed go let me tell you faster than the book says it will the real reason we had the baby jet was for uh chase uh assistance here the sr is dumping fuel immediately after takeoff has an emergency has to lighten his gross weight so he can land uh 38 is going to offer safety assist we just happened to be airborne that day and somebody just happened to have their camera with them got a very rare shot of the two of them together right over beale air force base this only picture i'll brag about today and tell you i knew what i was doing this was after my 20th year in the air force i had two weeks to go and i bought a cable release for my little f3 a nikon there put it up and uh got my buddy to fly way too close and i had finally figured out what the word aperture meant i'm in focus he's in focus mammoth lakes is in focus love that shot some company in new york loved it too and said we'd like to build a puzzle this uh i understand you'll be getting out of the air force soon we'd like to pay you some royalties and all of a sudden doors were being opened to the one guy that had been carrying a camera around who did not want to fly for american airlines had no interest in flying for the airlines last i checked they didn't do barrel rolls or fly through the grand canyon in their a-10 there were no loops involved i wanted to do pursue my photo photography and that led instantly in 1990 to those things the same year that they retired the jet 1990 they started flying jets off the base to museums they said the budget we're going to put the money to satellites and drones we can't keep doing all that tanker support the cold war is over we can do without it big mistake they wish they hadn't they'd at least it should have flown another 10 years but there came a sad day when the very last airplane at beale took off when we realized this was the end of an era you were never going to see the likes of this kind of airplane again i would have taken more pictures that day but tears welled up in my eyes as i realized this was the last of of a legend every soviet mig fighter pilot knew that profile right there wanted to be first to shoot one down victor balanco defected to this country with his mig-25 gave it to he says we built a whole line of migs for one purpose shoot that damn airplane down he says we could not understand how your decadent capitalist mickey mouse society could build an airplane in the 60s that we could not shoot down in the 90s and the general got right in his face kind of like a baseball umpire and he said victor that's what you can do in a country where men are free victor blanco got it became an american citizen i lived in america and said what would you like to see now that you live in the united states he said only two things disneyland and an sr-71 up close rumor is he enjoyed the latter more leaving air force history through the gates of legend the airplane sits quietly if not proudly in 30 locations today only one overseas in duxford england the other 29 if you haven't seen one uh they're all around they're not that hard to find california has a lot of them there's definitely it's worth seeing a piece of american aviation technology that has been unsurpassed these people literally invented technology to build an airplane out of titanium that did its job better than any anything else i was i was left with all these wonderful photographs and i wanted to do something with them when i got the air force and i and all the know people said you're not a writer you're not a publisher not a photographer you don't know what you're doing you're just an ex-fighter pilot and i thought well yeah but i have a collection of stuff i'd like to do something to honor the jets so me and everyone turned me down me and a couple guys got together we took out a big loan ate peanut butter sandwiches for two years and we did a book called sled driver little did we know we did that first edition we thought two or three hundred people would would buy it and everything well then the internet got big and then people said well we've never had a pilot that wrote flew this yet write a book and we love it and we want more and then we redid the book made it nicer and now it is the single most popular book worldwide it's in 48 countries you go on the internet tonight look up sled driver it's 400 500 we print a limited number each year you can't hardly get them they're like icons to the aviation world well i brought a very limited number as a special treat for you guys here today which down at 235 which is way below any price you will ever see outside of here we are supporting wounded warrior today uh is a little bit after vet's day but we support them year round i also want you know that we've just commemorated the 50th anniversary of the first flight of the jet recently and we're the only guys that did a gold coin lockheed nobody no one thought to do a gold coin how quickly we forget our history we are the only ones that did a coin we minted 3 000 of them for mach 3. i have 150 left i brought a couple dozen coins like they're actually 50 gold pieces they're worth about 62 bucks for the gold that's in them we sell them for 50. if you're looking for a little early christmas gift santa is a sled driver so they're all pre-approved i also want you to know that if you do buy one of my books today that i'll be happy to sign there are still some photographs that are extremely classified and i hope you don't divulge to anyone outside of this art i'm hoping that you will keep these things to yourself i'll always be the sled driver guy no matter what else i do in life i went on to do a lot of other different things that when i got out of the air force i flew with the thunderbirds for their winter training season to do a book on them they said no one has ever been allowed to fly with them during winter training season and i recommend you don't they're not real good yet they're still learning how to do their thing but led me to my infamous year with the blue angels no one in history got to spend a whole year uh air show season in the back seat with the blues but i did was i the best photographer in america was i the best photo journalist was i the most one no i was the guy that called 437 times on the phone and they said no every time and i drove my truck to el centro california god forsaken lettuce field on the mexico california border but i knew that's where the blue angels do winter training and i showed up and the guy said you're the first guy that ever showed up we get 100 calls a day for people who want to fly sports heroes senators congressmen movie stars they never show up and they never give anything back you want to do a book for us i said yeah whole year 80 000 slides put the best 200 in a book wish i could show you that book it's beautiful we sold out of it we're gonna reprint it there's three jets in this picture how often do you think those three jets are lined up that well how often you think our jet is lined up with those three that well pretty much never now we were almost killed here that's not a wide-angle fisheye lens that is a normal 55 millimeter lens where number two moved out too quick we moved up we we're counting rivets we almost died right there and my pilot got a little nervous whoa partner don't put that in the book i was like we almost killed ourselves now dino i flew with dino quite a bit he's flying for fedex now and he was pretty cool the first time i flew it he goes air force boy that's what they called me for the first six months air force boy your seat is four inches higher in the back so i'll know when you start crying and squealing like a little girl that i'm too close and i'll back it off a little bit for you i go well that's so good to know um but this day we almost we almost hit and we're taxiing in i said hey dino i used to teach this stuff for a living and i was really good but you scared me bad twice today he goes that's okay partner i scared myself three times i did my very last flying uh with the air national guard i did a photo calendar shoot for the portland air national guard over mount hood the uh f-15 eagles we call these eagles in the hood uh and i hung up my spurs and people go how could you how could you stop flying i had five thousand hours of pure joy i my back was hurting i was older i wanted to do other chapters in life and people go how and the reason i could walk away when so many of my friends who went to the airlines still regret is because i did it fully i didn't leave any of it on the field as they say it's like i did it all i almost killed myself about a hundred times in the a-10 a7 f5 doing all the stuff that we do and daily work that you don't even realize goes on every day and i was okay to walk away because i wanted to i wanted to pursue my nature photography i wanted to go walk across the lane i'd been flying across so fast that that i didn't get to really see it as a pilot what i found out was i was totally enamored with nature's flyers nature's pure pilots if you a simple seagull you just ignore when you really look at it has the most perfect elliptical wing that we gives it such speed and maneuverability a bald eagle that you can't take your eyes off when you see one in the wild especially up close and you watch them for hours and hours and hours and a bird so fierce it became the symbol of the greatest nation on earth even the tiniest delicate flyer can manage to navigate its way from canada to mexico every year we still haven't figured out how it quite does that with the navigational system far superior than anything man has ever made and i defy any aerodynamics engineer to diagram all the aerodynamic forces going on when a when an egret plucks that minnow from that pond i've watched them for from sun up to sundown for years all these these incredible birds and it makes you realize the real reason man wanted to fly in the first place we are truly the imitators they are the real flyers well no matter what else i do as i said i'm always going to be that guy and people always say well i guess it doesn't get a better nat fighting communism flying the world's greatest jet you studly man you you are the guy you did it and i go yeah that's very cool and everything i you got to realize i have other priorities in life that's not the end-all that was one chapter of life and i'd say that's number two of doesn't get any better than this if you want my all time doesn't get any better than this moment in life it would be the day they let me walk down those long concrete steps at fort sam houston and leave the hospital and there was a blue car waiting for me down down below and i abs walk down those steps with on my own two legs without somebody helping me and there was no therapist there to help me i could open the car door even though it was painful i didn't want the guy helping me and i got back in the car and i was getting a second chance to go back to life thirty thousand men never saw the age of 21 died in vietnam never got to come home never had a second chance never had a life never had their dreams fulfilled and i was getting to start over i was getting to go back and have a second and redo i thought that doesn't get any better than that and isn't that all we can we can ask in life is the opportunity there was no guarantee when i went back to the air force that i'd fly well i'd get to do half of the things i showed you today no guarantee all i wanted was the chance the opportunity and then funny how we take our opportunities for granted so much every day i remember having a squadron commander briefed us one day and we were all bitching and moaning about how bad our job was and a trash collector in san francisco makes more money than a captain on flying status in a squad and it was true called us all in on a down day said okay here's the deal new york city there are 10 000 doctors in one city 10 000 doctors there's 4 000 air force fighter pilots in the whole world he said now if you don't like your job you don't want it there's about a million guys at the door that will take your place you know it kind of puts them in perspective you want to be a trash collector in san francisco make that extra 200 tell me right now it says you're out you're gone and the way he said it we knew he meant it and it just gave us a moment of perspective that for me this was a really great thing to do but it wasn't the greatest thing i will tell you uh before i close today i will share this little story with you that people always ask me was it ever fun to fly the world's fast yet and i've shared this story many many years ago and it became a became a cult classic on the internet so people send it to me and i go hey i wrote it it's in my book i'm the guy and they go no no i heard this really incredible story i go hey it's my story so i'm going to tell you because you will see it on the internet tonight when you when you go on there it's called the la speed story and i it was just a story about one day it was really cool being being sr 71 walter and i were doing a training mission around the united states where you just were building up hours and time and we take off at a beale hit a tanker in idaho rip on up to montana zip across denver hang a right turn in albuquerque out over los angeles up to seattle back into sacramento two hours 21 minutes and you just do that for then you do it backwards and you hit a tank or two it's just just to gain crew coordination get build your hours we're on our last training mission we're over tucson i can see downtown l.a from tucson we're at 89 000 feet i can see the whole western united states bathed in a warm october fall glow i can see the chain of rocky mountains from canada to new mexico i could i could just see the most beautiful picture laid at my feet in this air as smooth as glass not a gauge moving in the cockpit it was perfect now i'm thinking we bad i feel sorry for walter because he has to monitor five radios in the back seat so i flipped the switch up just to listen and la center is controlling they control all when you fly southwest air there the guy's controlling everybody but we're above controlled airspace so they have us on their scope but they're not talking to us now there's controllers all over the country jacksonville center chicago center seattle center you know it's the same guy they all talk the same and it's really cool the way they talk because they make you feel important as a pilot they don't just say yeah okay here's your thing they make you feel really cool so sure enough this was pre-gps day some cessna guy has to know his ground speed uh la center cessna november tango off you got a ground speed readout for us now center would like to say who cares get off free but no he'll talk to him like he's john glenn cessna november alpha we show you 90 knots nine zero knots on the ground and they do that sing song but that's how they talk and it makes you feel kind of cool right after that a twin bonanza came up to pimp the guy for speed i guess and la center twin beach uh whatever you got a ground speed readout for us and senator likes the car it's friday why me god please just get a freak but he's going to talk to him like he's air force one twin beach we show you 120 one two zero knots on the ground and right after that a navy f-18 at a lamar popped up on frequency and you knew as a navy guy because he talked really slick on the radio center dusty 5-2 speed check and i'm thinking wait a minute dusty 5-2 has a ground speed indicator and that million-dollar f-18 cockpit it's right there in the heads-up display why is he calling center to broadcast his speed i get it we are just the meanest baddest fastest military jet in the valley today we're taking our little hornet jet over mount whitney and ripping across death valley we want everyone from fresno to the coast to know what real speed is and you can almost hear a little a little glee in the controller's voice like we have put an end to this dusty five two we show you six twenty six two zero knots across the ground and it was that across the ground see that little knife like i hope nobody else has the nerve to get on frequency now and there wasn't an airliner from seattle to san diego that wanted to be next on freak it's sort of an etiquette thing amongst flyers and a 12 year old was reaching for the mic button and i thought oh no wait walter's in charge of the radios i flew single seat all those years but i'm in the family model now and i i want no it's a navy that has died you must die now and i thought no but if i do i'll upset walter and i want us to be a good crew and at that moment i heard a click of the mic button in the back seat ladies and gentlemen walter and i became a crew at that moment his best innocent voice la center aspen 3-0 have you got a ground speed radar for us you could almost hear a collective gasp on freak like all the poor fools didn't hear the previous transmissions oh they got crushed like a grape it's it's just a pilot thing but center had to give you that same voice aspen 3-0 we show you 1992 knots across the ground when i knew i was going to like walter a lot is when he came back said center we're showing a little closer to 2000. ladies and gentlemen we did not hear another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast the king of speed lived the navy had been flamed and a crew had been formed for just a moment it was absolutely fun being the fastest guys on the block so what do combat hard and kami fight and fighter pilots do when they retire i shoot pansies now and uh very proud of that i'm opening a gallery in marysville of my nature photography and my jet stuff now there's an eclectic mix so our motto is are you ready for this from butterflies to blackbirds okay so yeah it's pretty good only took us two years to come up with that another two years and we finally developed a logo which we think is pretty cool that's pretty cool gallery one has been in the works for 10 years now we're not quite done but we've renovated an old 100 year old building up there everybody will know when it's done because we'll put it in the paper i'm going to close a little special treat here for you today since i have this incredible nice audio visual set up here one i'd like to say before i show you this little film many of you get what i'm saying today make the most of each day don't miss your opportunity life is short god live it pursue your passion don't wait you get it and you're going to come up against a situation where you don't see a way around it over through it but you need no you need to get to the other side and you cannot see a way around you don't even understand why it's happening when you meet that obstacle just remember this little story that one day an sr-71 at kadena air base took the runway out of taxiway alpha there rolled down the runway sat there for 30 seconds waiting for its appointed takeoff time as it sat there just dripping and using all the pilot that day could look out his little window on a 153 degree heading for 2.6 miles he could see the roof of the hospital he'd laid in 12 years earlier legend has it that on takeoff that day sr-71 instead of climbing straight out to the south china sea to hit the tanker made a hard 90 left turn at the end of the runway full burner 250 feet some say much lower buzzed a certain soccer field sending kids screaming and falling down and crying and throwing the ball running for their life rattled every window in a certain hospital without breaking one as that big black jet made an arc back to course now that the entire base was awake it was as if all things had come full circle for that pilot that day for the first time you could realize some of the reasons and understand better the events that had transpired in his life that he could not possibly fathom while they were happening he realized at that moment that when einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge that it was indeed true and that the sky was truly not the limit so for all of you that said you knew the words i'd like to conclude with a little special treat for you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] on its final flight the sr-71 flew from palmdale california to the smithsonian museum in 64 minutes setting eight official speed records before they put the jet to bed i want to thank you for allowing me to come and share a little bit of this ancient technology with folks who are working on cutting edge i'd like to thank my audiovisual crew that was excellent like to thank melissa for inviting me to come i'd like to thank my mom and dad for supporting every dream their wild kid ever had don't miss the moment joy every day i will sit at my table as long as any of you like have questions or like to see the book or coin we're supporting wounded warrior today it's a treat for me to be in this prestigious facility i've toured about every one of the other top secret places and this is one of the last few so you i didn't know what to expect and just been a terrific audience i gave you a little extra day you had a few extra stories i'm sorry if i cut into your your lunch i'm sure the food here is just spectacular [Applause] so i'll let you get back to your important work and and thank you very much thank you [Applause] you

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Length: 70min 57sec (4257 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021