The Gift: The Beginning

From my earliest memory I have been fascinated with airplanes. I don’t know where this fascination came from, but it was always there.
When I was eight or nine years old I started building model airplanes. I began with the balsa wood and pa-per models that were powered by rubber bands. I soon graduated to the control line models that were pow-ered by small gasoline engines. I spent hundreds of hours flying those things round and round.

I was born during WWII, so a vast number of movies about air combat were there to watch while I was growing up. I probably saw every airplane movie ever made. One movie, “Aviation Cadets,” was about some men who went through Air Force Pilot Training.
I had always wanted to go flying, to see what it was like up there, and I finally had the opportunity, one summer day in 1957. That one flight convinced me that being a pilot was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and it led to a very enjoyable and exciting forty-five year career in aviation.
I invite you to come along with me, and share my expe-riences as I learned to fly, built my flying time, and achieved more advanced pilot credentials, through high school and college. I was determined to get into the U.S. Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training. This is the story of how I got there.