--- id: flying-free-08-know-your-cockpit title: Chapter 8 – Know Your Cockpit category: Aviation Memoir predicted_narrative_arc: Mentor delivers harsh reality check that forges survival skills sentiment: Reflective and cautionary emotions: - grateful - anxious - determined keypoints: - Ken’s inverted roll exposed the fatal flaw in textbook roll-ins - Combat aircraft are warped and unpredictable unlike training planes - Preparation and shared knowledge with wingmen built battle confidence - Testing beyond syllabus standards saved lives in theater - Faith in prepared people parallels faith in Christ during uncertainty summary: Dean recounts how his instructor Ken flipped the aircraft during weapons training at Hurlburt Field to demonstrate that precise, slow roll-ins would get him killed in Vietnam combat. The story contrasts a prior instructor’s safe, textbook method with Ken’s combat-hardened corrections, including spin recovery with full armament and the reality of battle-damaged aircraft. The lesson underscores that thorough preparation in calm conditions produces automatic survival responses under fire. tags: - faith - work - testing - conviction - combat-preparation - flight-training - instructor-lessons - vietnam-era - personal-story - vietnam-war - forward-air-controller - hurlburt-field - instructor-pilot - spin-recovery sycophancy: 1 truth_score: 9 entropy: 3 updated: '2026-09-08T20:49:34Z' vault_stage: 07_CODEX headwaters: COMPA prefix: COMPA enrich_status: ok enrich_blockers: [] enrich_method: llm pipeline_filename: COMPA_2026-09-08_chapter-8-know-your-cockpit.md proposed_topic: Stories lane: Stories description: Preparation is not optional. Dean shares how his Vietnam instructor’s extra training — going beyond the syllabus — saved his life when his aircraft spun out of control over Laos. corpus_topic: Stories --- # Chapter 8 ## Know Your Cockpit – Be Prepared for Crisis **Full book:** https://deanrush.net/downloads/flyingfreebook.md --- ### Context for the Reader This chapter drives home the importance of **preparation before the crisis arrives**. The memorable story of Dean’s instructor “Ken” flipping the aircraft upside down during training to teach him the danger of precise, slow roll-ins on target is one of the most vivid illustrations in the book. Preparation in the calm produces automatic, life-saving responses in the storm. --- In Vietnam, I quickly learned there were some guys I wanted to fly with and others whom I steered away from in heavy combat. The guys whom I wanted to be in battle with were the ones who knew every aspect of the airplane they were flying and all of its systems. The guys who took time to know the capability of their aircraft could react automatically when something went wrong. Those pilots were the ones who spent time preparing for the battle. They were ready for the abnormal situations and unforeseen problems. The pilots who prepared and practiced developed the confidence and skills to do a better job in battle. I remember talking to some of those trusted guys the night before a mission and discussing how we would handle various situations. I gained confidence from the shared knowledge of those great warriors. It was those times when I developed faith in the capabilities of my wingmen. That faith, at times, helped me endure the stresses of battle. I developed confidence in the assurance of knowing that I was putting my life in good hands when flying the mission. Faith in Christ can do the same thing for you when you are entering the uncertain periods in your life. I owe my life to many people, but one person stands out because he was an instructor pilot who helped me prepare for combat by challenging me to prepare for real battle situations. I was assigned to the Special Operations Training School at Hurlburt Field in Florida as I prepared for my mission in Vietnam. He taught me how to fly as a forward air controller (FAC). I will call him “Ken.” Ken had just returned from a tour in Southeast Asia and his assignment was to prepare me and several other aviators who were going to a similar special operations assignment. Ken was very quiet but also very serious in his approach to teaching us what to do in combat. One of the important lessons in the school was learning how to fire the weapons on the airplane. I was not initially assigned to Ken, and the first instructor I had for the training told us to raise the nose of the airplane very precisely to ten degrees above the horizon, kick the rudder gently in the direction of the target, pull the nose of the airplane down to the target until we could see it through the pipper (firing scope) and then pull the trigger. It all seemed very simple and precise and I always put the rocket on target as it left the wing of my airplane. There was only one problem that became evident later in the school: my instructor had never been in combat. A couple of days after my initial firing range missions, I was reassigned to fly with Ken. We flew out to the firing range as I had the first times with my other instructor, and as we approached the target, I carefully went through the procedure of raising the nose, pushing in the rudder and gently pulling the nose of the airplane down to the target (an old target ship anchored in the Gulf of Mexico). Suddenly, I realized that something was amiss because the airplane rolled inverted and I was staring at the bright blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico less than 1,000 feet below me. There was nothing gentle about the maneuver as there had been with the previous instructor. Ken had grabbed the control yoke on his side of the cockpit and pulled it all the way over, causing the airplane to flip upside down, and as I scrambled to recover, he announced to me that I would have been dead in combat. He explained that if I had followed the same procedures I had learned from the first instructor in the combat theater, the mission would have ended in disaster. My desire to be so precise in rolling in on the target would have provided the enemy a full target for over a minute and resulted in my airplane being blown out of the sky. Ken understood the full scope of firing at the enemy in combat, and he passed his knowledge on to me. His lessons had been learned firsthand, as he had just returned from flying missions in combat in the same special operations group I would soon be joining in Vietnam. Ken also told me during the training at Hurlburt Field that the perfectly rigged aircraft we were learning to fly would be rare in combat. The airplanes in the combat theater had been pulled, jerked, bent, shot up, and repaired to the point that their wings might be warped, and their controls slow to respond. He said they would spin on a dime because of their warped condition. He therefore taught me how to recover from a spin when the airplane’s wings were fully loaded with armament, because that was normally the configuration which precipitated the entry into a spin. Ken went way beyond the approved standard syllabus and he provided me knowledge of what was going to happen when I arrived in theater that others did not receive. Some of the guys got through the preparation training at Hurlburt in a much easier manner but then had difficulty in combat because they had not been tested during training. The testing we endure in training can save our lives, or at least prepare us for the difficult situations that follow us through life. I was panicked when Ken started those lessons, thinking that I had enjoyed the steadiness and predictability of the previous instructor. It had felt good and secure to know that we were flying within the boundary of safety. The first instructor would always keep me comfortable and didn’t stretch the limits of my knowledge. There was a comfortable approach to each of the training lessons. Ken took me far outside that boundary and prepared me for what was going to happen later in combat. A few months after the training in Florida, I was in the battle zone and out over Laos with a navigator who sat in the seat beside me in the airplane. His job was to plot a course to get us safely to and from the target, keep a keen eye outside for anti-aircraft bursts targeting our airplane, and help keep me alive as we traversed enemy territory. My job was to fly the airplane and get us home in one piece. This particular day I had a guy with me who shall remain nameless, but he may be described as a large barrel-chested Irishman with a furious temper. We were being shot at with 37 mm anti-aircraft guns, and when an airburst exploded under our airplane the aircraft almost immediately entered into a spin just as Ken had predicted. I did just what Ken had taught me. I pushed forward on the yoke to lower the nose and gain airspeed and then rapidly pulled the yoke back to recover from the ensuing dive. I did that three times and the trees on the mountains below were growing much too distinct as we spun towards the earth. The recovery was not working. Ken’s one step at a time plan for recovery was failing. I pushed the yoke of the airplane forward one more time, just as Ken had said, when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw my burly flying partner fly forward in his seat. His shoulder harness was not locked and he was flying forward into the control yoke as I was jerking it back. When I took the next action to recover from the dive and pulled the yoke in front of him back rapidly, it was hitting my partner squarely in the chest. After striking him I was not getting the yoke back far enough to slow the dive and regain flying speed. As a result we were heading right back into another spin. I suddenly realized the spin had persisted because I hadn’t fully completed step one. If we were going to get out of the situation alive I had to take one more step. I reached over, grabbed my navigator’s shoulder strap and pulled him back against his seat as I pulled the yoke back towards my stomach and the airplane gently flew out of the dive. It recovered as sweetly as if it had done it on its own. The airplane recovered exactly as described in textbooks, and more importantly, as in the training Ken had provided. My poor navigator was quite bruised and worn by the whole affair but always kept his seat belt a little tighter when we flew together on future missions. I also became forever indebted to that instructor back in Florida who cared enough to go a little further in my training. He had equipped me to recover from an uncontrolled situation one step at a time. He had prepared me for that moment when we encountered the unexpected emergency and he had provided the knowledge of how to recover. He had helped me build faith in a plan that would get me back to base alive. The discomfort I had experienced in Ken’s realistic training for combat proved to be an enduring lesson for survival. Preparation for emergency situations provides great reward when the real situation arrives. We are destined to be challenged, and if we prepare for challenges we can get through them by correcting the problem one step at a time. If we use our faith in God we will have the strength to handle any emergency. Recovery from problems, no matter how large, should include God. --- **Next chapter:** Choose Your Weapons – Determine How to Fight **Full book:** https://deanrush.net/downloads/flyingfreebook.md