One Mans Career: Fighters To Airliners To Drones
The World War II pilot generation went from pistons to jets. Gen X pilots got the piston part, too, but some of them are completing their careers from inside air-conditioned vans half a world away from the airplane they’re flying.
This week, AVweb's blog space will feature a two-part story from James Belton, a Gen X pilot who has done what the previous generation of pilots could not: Evolved from pistons, to jets, to drones. Here's part one.
When I was a young man, I desperately wanted to fly. I wanted to fly fighter jets and nothing short of that goal would satisfy me. I was exposed to aviation early in life as my father was an Air Force F-86 Sabre Jet pilot. He went on to fly for Mohawk Airlines and finished his airline career as a Boeing 767 captain for US Airways.
My father was typical of pilots who ushered in a new generation of flying. His career began with the jet age. This era was populated by men who shot down Migs over the Yalu River valley, bombed Hanoi or were chosen to break the sound barrier and pioneer space travel. By the time I got to fly solo at age 16 in 1983, most of the cool stuff had been done. Or so I thought. My career has taken me from piston singles, to jet fighters, to airliners and now remotely piloted unmanned aircraft: drones.
Like many, I started my career with a degree in aviation management. I hustled in college to earn my ratings and by the time I turned 21, I was a college graduate with 1000 hours of flight time and was working as a flight instructor for the Florida Institute of Technology. I did a stint as a charter pilot and later hired on with an American Eagle to fly copilot in a Shorts SD3-30. I was finally an airline pilot. In a hiring market nearly at hot as the current one, I made captain on the ATR-42 at age 24. I was an airline captain.
While many airline pilots come into the business from the military, I went the other way. I was hired by the 174th Fighter Wing of New York Air National Guard in Syracuse, New York, and soon shipped off to complete Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training in Lubbock, Texas. UPT wasn't particularly challenging, but flying the maneuverable T-37 and the sleek and speedy T-38 was exciting. Just as I had imagined it would be, the Air Force was everything I wanted in my aviation career.
I missed the first Gulf War, but by October of 1995 at Luke Air Force base in Phoenix, I was born again as an F-16 pilot. Flying the mighty Viper was the most excitement you could have with your clothes on. I was blessed to be flying the premier fighter in the premier air force in the world. Within two years of my first flight in the F-16, I was flying combat missions over Northern Iraq, enforcing the no-fly zone set up between the first and second Gulf Wars.
Times like this in a pilot's life are magical. Training and transitioning to several different aircraft and flying to many different places is exactly why pilots fly. And for military pilots in Guard slots, the variety couldn't be better. Two years later, United hired me back and from 1997 to 2009, I flew as a 727, 757, 767 and 777 pilot, a range of models many pilots don't get to see in their careers.
All the while, I was still flying the F-16 part time for the New York Guard. But in the modern military, part time still means deployments. I flew in five combat deployments to Iraq and, eventually, Afghanistan. But my flying life was about to change in a big way. In the spring of 1997, I was sent to Air Force Combat Archer training at Tyndall Air Force Base. My mission was to fire an AIM 120 AMRAAM missile to shoot down a full-scale F-106 drone.
This was my first exposure to drone operations and I was intrigued by the technology. What Tyndall was doing—what it has always been doing—presaged the era of unmanned flight. Old F-106 and F-4 fighters were configured to fly unmanned. They were drones. The Air Force had been conducting drone operations for many years, but during this time, it was developing a new age of drones.
The General Atomics MQ1 Predator would usher in a new era of aviation. Unmanned aircraft were certainly not a new creation. For many years, private hobbyists have flown remote-controlled miniature aircraft—RCs. Nothing new about that. What was new was the sheer scale and capability of military drones.
When I started flying in the 1980s with an airline job in mind, it never occurred to me that my career would lead me to remotely flying a drone on the other side of the planet that could loiter for up to 18 hours over targets in hostile areas. But that's exactly what happened.
