Page 158 - Never Fly Solo

11

New Day, New Jet

Fail with Honor, and Bounce Back
from Adversity

I didn’t flip the switch. It was as simple as that.
We all have our unflipped switches in business—things we
forget to do, mistakes we make, deals we don’t close because
of something dumb we did, and straight-up bad decisions we
made—but this one was a whopper. The little switch in ques-
tion had put my entire flying career in jeopardy, and now I
was suddenly down to my final shot at becoming a fighter
pilot in the United States Air Force.
How could I have been so stupid? I had rehearsed the
move a hundred times, but when I lifted that T-37 jet trainer
off the ground and raised the gear handle, I left the landing
lights down—a key mistake that cost me big-time.
If you exceed 135 knots with the landing lights deployed,
you can damage them and cost the Air Force a few thousand
dollars while the jet sits in the maintenance hangar awaiting
repairs—not a good thing in an extremely busy flying squad-
ron. My instructor pilot (IP), Capt. Scott Perko, caught the

131