Fate, Luck and Choice - Caesar Salad, Flying Fighters and Being Good Enuf

For more than 4 decades, I have been making a version of Caesar Salad that according to many is the best that they have ever tasted.? I use the highest standard of ingredients, honor the recipe, and try never to compromise.? And every time that I have, the quality of the salad is degraded.? For some, it doesn’t matter; for me: ‘Good Enuf Isn’t.’

That same logic applies to my world of flying fighters.? For me to perform at my best and be safe, I set the highest standards for myself for my preparation and training.? If I ever compromise my standards, I am no longer as competent or as safe as I need to be.? There is no place in my world as a fighter pilot for just being ‘Good Enuf.’

I have known this for many years, certainly for the 40+ years that I have been flying fighters and making my Caesar Salad.? And if I know this, then surely I have always followed my own rules and never compromised my training or preparation for flying…except that I did…and the situation I found myself in could have killed me.? I learned a harsh lesson yet again that I can never be allowed to compromise my standards and that for me: ‘Good Enuf Isn’t.’

Billie Flynn’s Fighter Pilot Caesar Salad

I have two rules: ?

#1 - You can’t change the name, it's called “Billie Flynn’s Fighter Pilot Caesar Salad” and,

?#2 - You can’t cheat on the ingredients or the preparation.

There are lots of Caesar Salad recipes out there and virtually every restaurant in North America serves their own version.? Many restaurants at least try to produce a Caesar that is worth trying, although some are outright horrible.? I have debated many salad makers including at acclaimed culinary schools, with executive chefs as well as friends about their recipes and the ingredients they use.? Everyone argues that their recipes are the best.? But I stick with mine and have 40+ years of people loving it to support my confidence.? Inevitably, when I have given my recipe out, people have then skimped on the quality of the ingredients or changed the recipe.?

For those others who I have passed my Caesar Salad recipe to, changing up the ingredients and not being so hard-nosed about it still produces a salad that for them, is “Good Enuf.’ ?Why wash the leaves of the Romaine lettuce and then tear them up by hand when you can soak them briefly and then cut the Romaine up with a knife?? Why not buy Costco parmesan cheese already grated in pieces and throw those into the salad instead of grating the cheese from a block of good parmesan cheese?? Why use so much fresh garlic?? Forget the anchovies, some people don’t like them anyway.? Anyone can find croutons at a store, why go through all the hassle of cutting up and baking a loaf of fresh sourdough bread to make croutons for the salad?? Why serve the salad in a single piece of wood carved into a large salad bowl when any big bowl will do?? And the list of compromises goes on.? I am sure for many, not following my high standards gives them a salad that is good enough to eat and feed others.?

But it just isn’t “Billie Flynn’s Fighter Pilot Caesar Salad” anymore.? And for me: ‘Good Enough Isn’t.’

The Flying Lesson

So with all this in mind, clearly I would always follow my own standards for how I need to prepare and fly safely in the world of test flying fighter jets.? But in one very public event, I did not follow my own standards and came very close to having an accident.

My third flight in the Eurofighter Typhoon was a near disastrous event. ?When I retired from the Canadian Air Force, I was hired as a test pilot on the brand-new Eurofighter Typhoon living in Munich, Germany for the company we now know as Airbus Defence (had a different name back then).? I joined Eurofighter in the fall of 1999 and had to wait impatiently for many months before I would get to fly the jet.? I first needed a German flying license, and then learned to fly the venerable F-4 and Tornado aircraft, staples of the Luftwaffe support that the company test pilots provided.? In March 2000, I went to the BAE test site in Warton, England and flew my first flight in the British 2-seat Eurofighter prototype to get ‘checked out’.? After that it would be a long wait until I would fly Eurofighter again.? We flew very few Eurofighter flights in those days as the two German prototypes were either always unserviceable or one of the other test pilots was flying them.? In August of that year, I flew a short test mission at our home base in Manching (just north of Munich).? My third flight was scheduled for nearly a year since my checkout.? And it was to be a simple one, ferry a jet from Manching to Laage Air Base in northern Germany.? Laage was the home of the Luftwaffe MiG-29 fighters, and I was going there to fly a week-long series of radar trials. Getting the jet there on a Saturday would give our technicians the rest of the weekend to prepare Eurofighter for the upcoming test flights starting on Monday.

While I had very little Eurofighter flying, I had spent hours and hours in the simulators working on the development of the flight control system.? I certainly had a feel for how the aircraft should fly, just not familiar with the cockpit or how things worked in the ‘real’ jet.? My first two flights had been in prototypes with no real avionic systems, they were essentially flying testbeds, known as Flight Sciences aircraft, meant for testing the engines, flight control systems and structure but without any of the real displays or avionics.? The jet I was to ferry, known as DA-5, was a full-up Eurofighter with all the bells and whistles.? At that point in the Eurofighter program, we had no training simulators or aids to show what the ‘real’ aircraft looked like to practice on.

As soon as I got in the jet, I was way behind the 8-Ball, completely unfamiliar with the real cockpit.? I slogged my way through starting the jet and got airborne heading north towards Laage.? It was not pretty.? I was fumbling through displays that I did not know and awkwardly navigating the airplane.? Enroute, flying by myself, I was then hit with warnings of what was likely a major flight control failure.? Eurofighter has a very sophisticated flight control system to manage the very unstable aircraft.? The best engineers in the world had designed this jet to fly as smoothly as any fighter in history.? But when the flight control system failed, things could go badly very quickly, and one could easily lose control of the jet; or at least our experience in the simulator warned us of this.

During the transit flight, I was communicating with a control room of engineers who were monitoring the aircraft systems from their consoles.? When the flight control failure was indicated, everyone tried to understand what the implications were, how to manage the emergency and how to get the jet on the ground safely.? We did not know if the failure indications were real or erroneous, and we could not take a chance of being wrong.? I knew that I had to be extra careful and smooth or risk losing control of the jet; yet I was way behind the 8-ball and clearly not in control of the situation.? I recall flying my approach into Laage that day treating the jet like I was flying on the head of a pin.? It felt like if I made any sudden input, I would lose control of the jet and something catastrophic would happen.? I landed, rolled out, pulled the drag chute to slow down and taxied clear of the runway without anything happening after all.? We did not find out until afterwards that what was indicated in the cockpit was erroneous and not the near-catastrophic failure that we believed it to be.?

But the flight exposed my lack of preparation and unfamiliarity with the jet.? I was enormously embarrassed.? Everyone knew how weak I was that day, and the word spread fast.? The Head of Flight Test, my boss, immediately sent one of my peer test pilots up to Laage to monitor me for the week.? ?I had allowed the 11 months since my first flight and lack of flying to lull me into thinking that I could manage a simple ferry flight, get some exposure to the real jet and then, at some point, get up to speed with how it needed to be flown safely.? For many, the ferry flight would have been good enough as a refresher flight.? For me, it wasn’t.?

I am a ‘tactile learner.’? I can study for days and days, but I only really learn from doing things.? I had allowed the lack of flying to make me think that I could do things their way.? Instead of insisting on ground cockpit time to power up the systems as if I were going to fly for real, I relented.? Instead of demanding that I get a refresher flight before the transit and planned week of radar tests, I didn’t and showed up that Saturday living with other people’s standards and not my own.

?The Fallout

And the fallout was ugly.? I had gone from being safe to unsafe and I was not competent enough to fly the prototype jet that I was testing.? If the ferry flight had gone on without any failures, I might have skated by.? But in our test pilot world, we have to be ready for anything, at any time, and I showed that I was not ready for the flight control failure.

Worse, I had lost the respect of the test team who needed to trust me and my abilities.

I was a foreigner, not a German, flying in their country in their new fighter and had shown myself to be a weak pilot.? They were already suspect of me as an outsider, and I had just solidified that view and crushed any hope of them trusting my abilities to safely fly the prototype jet.? And my superiors now questioned my ability and reinforced their doubts about the value of hiring me from North America in the 1st place. Oh, and by the way, there was a film crew from Canada filming a documentary about the Eurofighter and me and so it was all captured on camera.

I had blown it even before the week started.? I had to get my act together immediately.? Nothing like this had happened to me in my years as an operational fighter pilot or test pilot.? And I was determined that this would be the last time I would let something like this happen.?

It was a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment for me.

My standards, my studying, my preparation had to be exemplary, so I took control of my world.?

That Saturday night in the hotel, I re-wrote the checklist procedures so that they made sense to me.? And then dissected the entire week’s mission planning so that it was in a logical flow that I could understand. I spent all of Sunday locked in my hotel room studying. I wanted to know the jet like I was supposed to and I had a week to get myself out of the hole that I had dug for myself.? There were a lot of eyes on the missions that week and the Eurofighter’s performance.? Laage was to be the first German Air Force base to get Eurofighter so there were many fighter pilots and senior officers looking in.? And the finale was to be me in a single Eurofighter flying against 20 targets, the entire MiG-29 fleet.? 1 Eurofighter versus 20 MiG-29s (back-filled by F-4s if any of the MiG-29s broke on start-up). We were going to stress the new Eurofighter radar system and show that it could see and track 20 different fighters at the same time.? It was high profile and high stakes in the very politically charged Eurofighter program. And the Canadian film crew had been given permission to follow me everywhere, so I was to be recorded through it all.

When it came to Monday’s test flights, I was ready to start digging myself out of trouble.? I flew 2 missions that Monday and felt a sense of relief when the study and preparation showed.? As the week progressed, with increasingly difficult test missions, I started to gain my confidence back.? The final test, against 20 Mig-29 and F-4s came off incredibly well.? We celebrated with the German fighter pilots at the end of that day, and I earned my share of beers that night.? When I flew the jet back to our home base in Manching, I had at least shown the engineers, my peer fighter pilots and bosses that there was some flying professionalism in me after all. Oh, and luckily, the Canadian film crew had captured all the good parts for their documentary.

So What??

How does that apply to the real world? Well, it's a lot like the Caesar Salad.? If I lower my standards, my Caesar Salad will never be as good as it should be.? The people I give my recipe to are free to lower the rules for making the salad and their version probably tastes good enough to them.? They can cheat on ingredients, not buy the best cheese, use artificial bacon bits instead of real bacon, don't use anchovies or don't put enough garlic, not prepare the salad the right way, but it won't be the same.? But then, it won’t be Billie Flynn’s Fighter Pilot Caesar Salad anymore; it'll just be good enough.???

For many people, they can get away flying without studying a lot, cruise through preparing for a flight and not worry about the outcome.? They can hope that a flight will finish ok and that it will be good enough.? But as we say, ‘Hope is not a Process.’ I allowed myself, my training, and my preparation to slide and was hoping that I would be good enough…but I wasn’t.? Theoretically I could have flown from our home base up to Laage and nothing would have happened. I might have been OK; but something almost did happen, and I was clearly not prepared.?

I know myself and how I need to prepare as a tactile learner.? I have to touch things, work through the motions and I need ‘Sets and Reps’ to understand how a system works.? I never had the talent to fly on cruise control and just hope that everything would be ok. I had known that for the many years flying until that 3rd Eurofighter flight, had always followed my own rules for preparation to ensure that I was safe and effective.? The stakes in my world as a test pilot are too high, the prototype jets that I tested too expensive and exquisite to risk.?

The flight was a stark and embarrassing reminder of the standards I needed to hold myself to.? It was a very public lesson that I carried for the rest of my flying career.? Don’t compromise on Billie Flynn’s Fighter Pilot Caesar Salad and don’t compromise on my standards for flying…because for me: “Good Enuf Isn’t.’