by Scott Kelly
We also did a great deal of coursework. We learned aerodynamics, flight physiology, aircraft engines and systems, aviation weather, navigation, and flight rules and regulations. Most of this material was new to me, but it wasn’t too dissimilar from what I had studied in college. Some of my classmates who had chosen undergraduate majors in the arts and humanities struggled more with the material. But I knew this was one aspect of the training I could excel at if I applied myself to it, so I did. The grades we earned didn’t count in the same way a GPA does in college, but I knew that the better I did at every aspect of aviation indoctrination the better my chances would be of getting assigned to jets.
As part of our survival training, we were dropped off in the woods for days to learn to build shelters, make signal fires, navigate on land, and feed ourselves on only what we could hunt or forage. We couldn’t find anything to eat except for a rattlesnake we killed with a big stick.
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PENSACOLA WAS the top of the world for a young officer like me earning a salary for the first time—the princely sum of $15,000—with no dependents and no responsibilities other than to the Navy. I walked around town feeling like a rock star and spent a lot of that salary in bars. At Trader Jon’s, a dimly lit dive, the brick walls were crammed with photos of pilots and other aviation memorabilia, and metal model planes hung precariously overhead. At a bar called McGuire’s, hundreds of thousands of one-dollar bills signed by the patrons dangled from the ceiling like sleeping bats. I added one of my own.
After we got through classroom and physical training successfully, which took about six weeks, it was finally time to learn to fly airplanes. We started off flying the T-34C Turbo Mentor, a propeller-driven trainer. It’s a post–World War II–era airplane, small, with a tandem seating arrangement, one seat in front and the second in back. The flight manuals we had to study were phone-book thick, packed with charts and graphs and studded with unfamiliar terms and abbreviations. The material was incredibly dry, but we had to master it before we could fly.
My strategy was to study everything assigned for each day and get ahead on the next lesson’s reading as well. I committed the emergency procedures to memory as I’d been told to. If the instructor asked me what I would do if I lost an engine on the T-34, I could tell him, “Put the PCL idle, T-handle down clip in place, standby fuel pump on, starter on, monitor N1 and ITT for start indications, starter off when ITT peaks or no indication of start.” I haven’t flown the T-34 for nearly thirty years, and I only flew it a total of seventy hours, but I can still rattle this off without thinking. I could still recover from the loss of an engine, or a range of other emergencies, in that plane.
When I was declared ready, the first phase of my actual flight training began. In the briefing room, I met Lieutenant Lex Lauletta, my on-wing instructor, a tall blond guy who greeted me with a congenial smile. That set me at ease, since some of the instructors were said to be real assholes, especially to guys like me who were dead set on flying jets. Lauletta was a former P-3 pilot who was building his flight hours in order to become an airline pilot. I would do most of my initial flights with him, and he kept me from killing myself as well as instructing and mentoring me. He would also be grading me, and his evaluation would count more than anything else to determine whether I would get to go on to meet my goals of flying jet aircraft or would be sent to fly helicopters or larger fixed-wing airplanes—or nothing at all.
That day in the briefing room, we talked about what the syllabus looked like, what we would do when we met next, and how my preparation was going. During that initial meeting I tried on my own “green bag,” or flight suit, for the first time. For me, this was like getting assigned a uniform you get to wear for the rest of your flying life that lets people know you’re a badass Navy pilot. I would rarely go to work wearing anything other than a flight suit for the next nine years.
Later, we walked out to the airplane for the first time. It was a cold, foggy fall morning, weather I wouldn’t be allowed to fly in alone for a long time. As I got strapped in, I was excited and nervous. I had invested so much in the idea of being a carrier aviator, had worked so hard to get to this point, but I had no idea if I could actually fly a plane. Some people can’t, no matter how hard they try, and you can’t know that until you’re up in the air.
Out on the airfield, I saw hundreds of T-34s were lined up, one after another, stretching out into the horizon, their distinctive bubble canopies covered with condensation. Lieutenant Lauletta figured out which airplane was ours, and as we walked toward it he gave me my first lesson about how not to get killed: never walk through a propeller arc, even if you know the propeller isn’t turning. When he found the airplane that had been assigned to us, he jumped up on the wing, opened both canopies, and threw our helmet bags onto our seats—his in back and mine in front.
He led me through my first preflight check. We checked the wings, flaps, and flight control surfaces on the wings, then opened the engine cowling and inspected the engine, including checking the oil. We looked at the propeller, checking for damage. We checked that the tires were properly inflated and that the brake pads weren’t overly worn. We agreed that everything looked normal, though in reality I wouldn’t have been able to tell if something was wrong. Lieutenant Lauletta tried to give me as much detail as he could about what he was looking for. Then it was time to climb into the plane.
The first moment I settled down into the seat was surreal. On one hand, it was the end of a long struggle to get there, starting the afternoon I first cracked the cover of The Right Stuff. There had been many moments when it seemed that I wasn’t going to make it. Now I could say I had—I was a student naval aviator. On the other hand, this was going to be the start of a whole new set of challenges.
Lauletta helped me get strapped in properly, then we both closed our canopies. I’d studied diagrams of the cockpit of the T-34 in the flight manual as if my life depended on understanding them (because it would). I’d learned the controls and practiced using them in the simulator. Now they seemed to have multiplied into a field of thousands of knobs, switches, gauges, and handles. I had to tell myself to get on with it, that I was ready to do this. It was time to start the plane.
Under Lauletta’s instruction, I applied power and started moving forward. Taxiing was more difficult than I had anticipated, because the airplane didn’t have nose-wheel steering, like a car. Instead, I had to use differential braking to steer the plane, meaning I would partially apply the brakes just on the left side if I wanted to turn left, and just on the right side if I wanted to turn right. This was so completely counterintuitive, I felt like I was learning to ride a bike, trying to keep my balance with someone watching over my shoulder the whole time, grading me. I was already struggling.
A pilot must also learn to use the radio, which is harder than you would think. Talking and doing anything else at the same time can be challenging, as it requires using two different parts of the brain. And of course I wanted a cool Navy radio voice. When Lauletta cued me, I spoke into the radio and said, “Whiting tower, Red Knight Four Seven One ready for takeoff.”
Somehow this did not sound nearly cool enough to me. I felt like a little kid playing make-believe. But the tower responded as if my call had been legitimate. “Roger, Red Knight Four Seven One, taxi to position and hold.” This meant we could head out onto the runway but weren’t cleared for takeoff yet. Eventually the tower came back: “Red Knight Four Seven One, you are cleared for takeoff.”
I ran the power all the way up to maximum and accelerated down the runway, trying my hardest to keep the airplane pointed in the right direction using the toe brakes. Once I was going faster, it was a bit easier to control the plane’s direction using the rudder, and with Lauletta’s instruction I slowly pulled back on the stick to make the nose come off the ground. The runway, buildings, and trees tilted back and fell away as we pointed up into the sky. We porpoised a little, undulating up and down as I struggled to find the proper att
itude—an aircraft’s orientation in the sky—but we were airborne. In that moment, I was elated. I was flying a plane—albeit very poorly.
We headed out using the “course rules,” a set of formal instructions on where to fly using reference points on the ground. These rules are designed to keep student naval aviators from crashing into one another in the air. I checked in on the radio, announcing where we were so other pilots could avoid us.
Once I was settled into the flight, I could concentrate on mastering the most basic skill: maintaining altitude. I looked out the window at the horizon to judge my attitude, and though we were going only 120 miles per hour, I lifted and dropped us wildly, struggling to keep the airplane within five hundred feet of our intended altitude. Years later I would fly the F-14 at more than twice the speed of sound and control the space shuttle in the atmosphere many times faster, but nothing ever felt as hard to control as that training airplane on that first flight. It seemed to resist my efforts at every turn.
After about forty-five minutes of demonstrating how bad I was at this, I was relieved when Lauletta directed me toward an outlying airfield so we could practice touch-and-go landings. He demonstrated the first one, carefully describing everything he was doing. He slowed the airplane as he approached the runway, lowered the landing gear and then the flaps, came in low over the threshold of the runway, and then idled the throttles and showed me how to slow enough to touch down without stalling or losing control. He then added power and immediately got airborne again—a touch-and-go landing. He made it look easy, and in fact the T-34 is a relatively easy airplane to fly, which is why we started out on them. Now it was my turn.
Landing an airplane requires controlling the direction, altitude, and airspeed to put it down within the first few hundred feet of the runway, gently enough that the landing gear don’t drive through the wings. Despite the airplane being small and the runway large, and despite the controls being relatively simple and responsive, I had a surprisingly difficult time putting landing gear and runway together properly. Eventually I managed to smack the wheels down onto the runway without killing us, then immediately took off to do it one more time, then another, then another. I didn’t feel I was getting any better.
I had hoped I would fly well from the outset, but it was already clear that this was going to take some time to learn, and nothing about it was going to come easily. Still, Lauletta said I had done pretty well for my first day, and he gave me an above-average mark on “headwork,” meaning that I had come prepared and that I had made good choices. This was one of the few subjective criteria he could grade me on out of ten or fifteen categories. I think he was trying to reward me for having a good attitude. He couldn’t reward me for much else.
We started off flying visual flight rules, which means flying in good weather conditions so the pilot can see the horizon and avoid any obstacles or other aircraft. After twelve flights with an instructor, I was declared “safe for solo.”
The first time a pilot flies solo is a big day. I climbed into the airplane not feeling particularly confident; I hadn’t slept well the night before because I’d been too busy lying in bed thinking about ways I could screw up. The weather was perfect, though, with clear skies and low winds. After a good takeoff and a flight of about an hour and a half, during which I demonstrated my competence by maintaining altitude and airspeed while not crashing into anything, it was time to land. In my mind, I ran through the steps I’d performed the other times I landed. One important thing to remember was to lower the landing gear below a certain speed. I was so intent on all the things I needed to do to land the airplane that I released the landing gear too early, while I was still going fast enough that the aerodynamic forces could damage them, or in the worst case break them off. I knew I had screwed this up the second I did it, but there was no way to undo it. I had to fess up.
I called down to the tower. “Tower, Red Knight Eight Three Two.”
“Go ahead, Red Knight Eight Three Two.”
“I lowered the landing gear too fast, but all the gear are showing down and locked.” I cringed as I waited for the response to come back.
“Okay, circle overhead at fifteen hundred feet until we figure out what we want to do. How much fuel do you have?”
I reported the fuel level, feeling relieved that the controller didn’t seem very alarmed by this turn of events—he sounded just as bored by this exchange as he had been by the rest. The decision was made to have me fly by the tower so the controller could look at my landing gear and confirm that they were down and undamaged. They were, and I was allowed to land.
It’s not unusual for a student pilot to commit this kind of error on a first flight, and I knew I could recover from it. Still, I was disappointed. I’d wanted to absolutely nail everything the first time I soloed.
There is a saying in the Navy about mistakes: “There are those who have and those who will.” It’s easy to look at someone else’s screwup and say, “I never would have done that.” But you could have, and you still may. Bearing this in mind can guard against the kind of cockiness that gets pilots killed, and in retrospect my error overspeeding the landing gear was a good early lesson.
There was a T-34 simulator, and some of our graded flights were “flown” in the simulator rather than in the airplane. We could sign up for practice time in the simulators, and whenever the new schedule went up, I was first in line to book as much time as I was allowed. I did extremely well on all my graded simulator flights, and since the instructors had to help us set up the simulator for the practice sessions, it didn’t hurt that I was making an impression on them as a motivated student.
Once I had soloed a few times, I started learning aerobatics. I went out with an instructor again, listening while he explained the maneuver he was about to demonstrate. I found I had a real knack for it, and I enjoyed this part of the training—the sense of freedom it gave me—more than anything else. Flying around the big, puffy clouds, rolling the airplane upside down and around at will, feeling the force of acceleration pushing me down into my seat—I never felt like I was disoriented or sick, which happened to some of the other newbie pilots. It felt great to find an aspect of flying I was good at. As I finished up that part of the syllabus I couldn’t wait to try aerobatics in a more powerful plane, and I couldn’t wait to fly that way while simultaneously pretending to shoot another airplane out of the sky.
Some people washed out even before they got the chance to fly solo: they couldn’t pass the swim requirements, couldn’t pass the survival training, or failed their safe-for-solo check flight. The program wasn’t meant to weed people out—the Navy had already invested a lot in each of us, and they wanted us to succeed—at the same time, they needed to be sure we wouldn’t endanger ourselves or others. Only a small percentage of those who start flight school wind up being assigned to a jet squadron, and I had done everything I could to establish a place among them.
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WE KNEW THAT our next assignments would be announced on an upcoming Friday. That day, we waited in the hallway to learn our fate. I didn’t feel as nervous as some of my classmates seemed to be. I knew I had made every effort and held nothing back, working as hard as I could at the things I could control and ignoring what I couldn’t. I was ready for whatever was to come.
Finally a secretary tacked a simple sheet of paper to the bulletin board. We all crowded around. It had ten names on it in alphabetical order, and next to each one an assignment. Next to KELLY, SCOTT I found the words BEEVILLE NAVAL AIR STATION. I had done it. I was one of two guys in my group to make it to jets. I felt for my friends who didn’t, but I was elated knowing that my dream was still alive.
7
April 25, 2015
Dreamed I was on Earth. I was floating a few feet above the ground, to be exact, flying around New York City. I flew over the George Washington Bridge, down Fifth Avenue, through the Holland Tunnel, over to New Jersey, and around Giants Stadium. No one seemed to notice me. I was doing
something important as I was floating around, maybe some kind of antiterrorism reconnaissance.
TODAY IS SATURDAY, almost two months into my mission, and Terry is euthanizing a mouse. Last night we got a call from the ground telling us that one of the mice was “in distress” and would need to be put down today. When we look into the cage first thing in the morning, we find the distressed mouse in a terrible state—missing a limb, apparently chewed off by the other mice or by herself. We work quickly to give her an injection. We are upset to know the mouse was suffering all night while we were sleeping. We tell mission control that in the future we want to know about a situation like this right away. They were trying to protect our time, but we would have liked to make that choice for ourselves. They seem surprised by how strongly we feel about it. I haven’t made the mistake of getting too attached to the mice, knowing what their fate will be. But it’s been hard not to take an interest in them, as their bodies go through the same changes ours have. They started off looking sick and disoriented, moving awkwardly, but as the days go on they look healthier and get better at negotiating the subtleties of moving around in zero g, just as we do.
When we got the call about the mouse last night, we were just finishing up with movie night—Gravity. We’d set up the big screen in Node 1 facing the lab and gathered to watch it—all of us but Samantha, who was finishing her workout. I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon when people watch movies in space: we instinctually move to a position that looks like lying down with relation to the screen. In weightlessness our positions make no difference in the way we feel physically, but the association between lying down and relaxing is so strong that I actually feel more relaxed when I get into this position. The film was great—we were impressed by how real the ISS looked, and the five of us were an unusually tough audience in that regard. It was a bit like watching a film of your own house burning while you’re inside it. When Sandra Bullock got out of her space suit and floated in her underwear, Samantha happened to come floating by the screen in her workout clothes—later I regretted failing to get a picture of them together.