The Flyboy Podcast: Guest Steve "Ray" Charles

Aircraft flown:
A-4 and A-7 for the Navy
A-7, F-111, F-117 for the Air Force

Join us as we explore the fascinating world of military aviation with retired Colonel Steve 'Ray' Charles. From flying Navy and Air Force jets to unveiling the F-117 stealth fighter, discover insights, stories, and lessons from a seasoned pilot with over 23,500 flying hours.

Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the Flyboy Podcast, where we bring you just one thing cool flying stories. I'm your host, David Moore, and today I'll be talking with Steve Charles, callsign Ray. He is a retired colonel who flew for both the Navy and the Air Force. He flew both A-4s and A7s with the Navy, and he flew the F-111 and the F-117 for the Air Force. He has 3,500 flight hours combined in those two military services, and he has over 20,000 flying hours with Delta. Steve, welcome to the podcast. You've flown for both the Navy and the Air Force. Can you give us an idea of how is the flying different in the two communities? The Navy and the Air Force have vastly different corporate cultures. The Navy is fond of saying that in the Air Force they have a book of rules to tell you what you can do, and in the uh Navy they just tell you what you can't do, and as if to imply that there's more freedom in the Navy, and there might be, but I found the Air Force to be a far more disciplined uh program with uh far better maintained aircraft and really a lot more focus on flying. Not a criticism of the Navy. They have a very unique job they do, and I was honored to, and I loved flying off a ship. I mean, catapult shots are great. Uh I love day traps. I was never crazy about the nighttime stuff, and half my traps uh in the fleet were at night. You know, there's a great group of pre professionals in both services and uh with a tough job to do, and they both they just both have their own styles of getting it done, their own very separate methodology. I want you to put us in the cockpit of a Navy fighter versus an Air Force fighter, the physical, tangible office space where you do your work. What are the differences between the two? Well, obviously in the Navy I was flying the A7E Corsair II off the constellation, and the cockpit is virtually identical to the A7D I was flying in the uh Air Force chasing uh F-117s. But the parameters are different in the Navy. Never once did I ever launch off the constellation and have the ship be in the position that they told us we were in. I would always have to get an update and then trying to find the ship again after, yeah, this is well before GPS. And you know, we're supposed to be what we called MCON, uh, which meant emissions control. So I wasn't supposed to use the radar I had. And if I was allowed to use a radar, I'd say maybe a quarter of our radars actually worked. So sometimes finding the ship again was a real challenge. So there was a level of chaos in the Navy that did not exist in the Air Force. And the Air Force, a little bit more structured, a lot more disciplined, tremendous support. Uh, you were part of a team, and uh I would say the Navy has some severe challenges when it comes to maintenance on an aircraft carrier, whereas the Air Force didn't release a jet until it was good. The quality of the aircraft I flew. Now still you still have problems like you will in any fighter, but uh the workspace, while it's similar, similar airplanes, uh vastly different support structures in both the services. So you made the decision to request an interservice transfer from the Navy to the Air Force. How did that go? Tell us about that process because that's pretty unique, I think. It was. I took the requisite amount of um grief from my Navy compatriots. They would say uh things like, Oh, you're weak, you can't hack it. The way I looked at it was I was leaving the Navy. I was grateful for the opportunity. No airlines were hiring back when I did that, so I was gonna go be a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch or something else and see, you know, what happened. But I uh I had two little kids, and they were like three and five, two little boys that I just adored. And the thought of leaving them again for another six or seven months or ten months like carriers are doing right now with the Gulf, I just couldn't do it. I just was not going to uh do that. And I my temperament, my personality, um, I didn't ever see myself as being much of a success in the Navy. I just wasn't wired like the guys who um achieved flag rank or captain. I just didn't I didn't feel like I fit. And when I got to the Air Force, I fit. I felt like I had come home. I felt like I was working with people that were like me, that had the same values and the same dedication to flying that I had. I can't tell you how much I loved and continue to love the Air Force. My oldest son went to the Air Force Academy class of 2002. I have a granddaughter who's at the Air Force Academy right now, Ava Charles. Big shout out to her. We are so proud of both of them, obviously. And and well, her brother. You know, she's class of 28. I I just can you can you you view a video? You can see my shirt puffing up here as I You can see the pride. It's visible. Oh, and I keep telling her she's serving such a great, great country and a great service. I love the Air Force. So when you came over, uh you started out flying the F-111, and then you transitioned to the F-117. And I believe when you did, the program was still in the Black World, uh, uprange of Tonopah, is that right? That is correct. Yeah, it was uh what we referred to as Deep Black. We did, we called Tonopah PS-66. That's where that's the unclassified name for it. But it was great people. We knew uh we were part of something that was really, really special. Incredible camaraderie, incredible esprit de corps. It was tough because you fly all night, and then on weekends you had to take the kids to baseball games, stuff like that in the daytime, and one more cup of coffee. It was tough. You left the Navy because you didn't want to be away from family, but then you went to Tonopah and wound up being away quite a bit of the time. Well, that's true. Everything was so classified though. You know, uh prior to Gulf War I or Desert Storms, Desert Shield, we would make it home on Friday morning or Thursday night sometime. So we had a three-day, almost a three-day weekend every weekend. So that really did give me a lot more time uh with the family. So as we've talked about, you and I, I've written a novel about the F-117 called Have Blue Sky, which will be published on Veterans Day this year. And one of the scenes in the book is the first public appearance at an air show of an F-117 on April 21st, 1990. And so I've written a fictional chapter about that unveiling, but you were the pilot who actually flew that mission. So my question to you is, and I know you've read this part of the book, did I did I get it right? Well, I think the term would be shack. You you nailed it. It's uh, you know, I I was able to correspond with you a little bit and give you a couple of uh a couple little minor nuanced changes, and I can give you some background to that. You know, there was originally going to be one jet. And Randy Peterson was gonna fly that, and apparently the Air Force took a little criticism. Some people were saying, well, that's because you only have one of them. And so about a month before the unveiling, they decided to make it two, and for whatever reason, I was chosen to fly the second one. And I was honored. I mean, I still to this day an unbelievable uh honor to have been able to participate in that. And uh it was fun. We had a we had a great time. Randy Peterson was the stealth fighter pilot of the year, and uh, he had to be a company grade officer, brilliant, tall, handsome, great stick. I mean, he's just a superman, and it was obvious why they'd want him out there. Uh we had a spare with us until we hit uh just north of Nellis. Uh Joe Salata was number three. T Bag. T Bag just in just in case either Randy or I had a had a problem, had to go back to Tonapa, he would he would fill in. Didn't so he he peeled off and went back to Tonopah. And uh Randy was a lead and uh I was his wingman, so we came up initial and pitched out, and we were instructed to uh you know keep it tight. I had I had up until that time never pulled that many G's. I really never come up initial on 117. Choreography was for Randy to do a low approach and then a closed pattern, and for me to land. As a result, I was the first one to taxi into the parking space. So all the initial photos were of my jet, and then Randy came in next to me, and one of the high emphasis items that we actually even rehearsed once up at Tonopah was for our canopies to come up at exactly the same moment. So you remember the old gun bolt barrel locking mechanism. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And so I had that all set, prepped, ready to go. I must have checked it a thousand times as as I was waiting for Randy to come over. And then um, I don't remember exactly what the cue was. I think maybe he moved his head or something like that and then hit the switch, and sure enough, they both came up at exactly the same pace, time. And Colonel Tony Tolin was happy with us, and General Kemp was happy with us. So there you are. You've just flown the planes into Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas. The public has never seen the jet before, other than that one sort of blurry photograph uh held up at the news conference by uh Dan Howard at the Pentagon. Right. And so there you are, and you see, as I understand it, there was a small group of just a couple of thousand people, VIP, press, that sort of thing. Then you open the gates and let the public in. And I understand I thought it was a hundred thousand people. I was at our listening to a uh local news clip of that day, just and they said it was 200,000 people, an amazing number of people had come out to the air show that day. And so tell us about what it's like to suddenly see a human tide coming toward you and toward an airplane that has been deep black for all those years. For someone who grew up in the culture of America that still had a lot of Vietnam angst, for me, it just made my heart swell that there were so many patriotic Americans that wanted to see this, that were so positive, that were so uh joyful that the Air Force had something like this. You could feel the pride. The people would come and say, Well, can it do this? Can I do that? You walk all around it and they go, Where's the tailpipe? And because from the back, from you know, can't see it. You've got to be like eight feet tall to see the platy area where all the exhaust comes out. And so uh people had a lot of questions. Uh we had a little fun with them. You know, I had a woman ask me, Can I take a picture? Is it is it okay to do that? I said, You take all the pictures you want. Of course, it won't develop on the film. This was back in the days of film cameras, and she went, It won't? I'm teasing you, I'm pulling your leg. Yes, you can take all the pictures you want, and yes, they will develop. Some people in the crowd were asked very good questions. They were aviation enthusiasts who really had a thirst for knowledge, if you will. And now both Randy and I had been what we call media trained. We had to go through a training program. There was a message that the Air Force wanted us to get out, and that was quote, the Air Force has been a good steward of taxpayer funds. Guinness, I tried to get that out, it just didn't roll off my tongue quite as fluidly. It just weren't my words, but I tried to get that out there as we were told to do. In preparation for the day, because General Peter T. Kemp was uh strict, Tony Tolin called Randy and I. He said, Before you do this, I'm gonna brief you on exactly what I expect. And me having the kind of personality I have, I contacted the Mardon company and I got Randy and I two new name tags. But the name said Tony Tolin. So we are outside his office, and I gave one to Randy to go, oh, Ray, I can't do this. And uh Jenny Whitnack was out there, she was the exec, and she's like, Stevie, Ray, what are you doing? I said, put it on. I went through Tucson with Colonel Tolin, great guy. So we each put him on, and sure enough, we marched in right face, hand salute. He saluted us back and he said, All right, now listen. And I know he was doing it because he had to be able to say, I have briefed them and I let them know what I was expecting. So he gets about halfway through his prepared spiel and he looks at the name tags and he goes, Charles, take those off. I pointed to Rain. I said, He's innocent. I just made him do this 10 minutes ago. So, but he had a great sense of humor about it, and um, it kind of broke the tension in the room, and he said, Listen, I just need to make sure you guys know. I said, Absolutely, Colonel, we'll do whatever you want. And because we were, we were interviewed by ABC, CBS, NBC, uh, CNN. And I was really encouraged. All but two of the interviews were very, very positive. And I can't remember what network it was that led with uh I think the statement was in what must be the most or the worst kept secret in military history. But the others were saying what a great job we had done in maintaining a wing-size project and keeping it secret. And I I think the Air Force did a fantastic job keeping it secret. Best secret ever kept. I think it was. And we had one local report, not two or three feet away from me all day long, was a public affairs officer who was helping me. He said, Be careful with this next one. And I said, Okay, a female reporter came over and asked very reasonable questions, and I couldn't sense any sort of bias one way or the other. And then she said, Well, would you eject out of this if you had to? I said, Well, you only eject if the airplane's not flyable. I said, if you can fly the airplane, you fly the airplane. If it's not flyable, then it is going to hit the ground. You have to. It's a mechanism that allows us to save our life. She said, Would you hesitate? I said, I hope not. I don't think so. I I didn't quite know where that was coming from. And sure enough, her article said, Despite the fact that it's $82.6 million, Captain Charles, or Major Charles, I think, at the time, says he would not hesitate to eject. Well, that wasn't really honest. Yeah. Gosh, thanks. Yeah. But you know, we had um Randy and I did the unveiling. The next week, I was in uh Carswell. We had a similar crowd there, and uh it's just a huge crowd. The Thunderbirds were there. Uh so it was a fantastic. And the next week we were at uh Andrews. Again, record-setting crowds. And after that, I hadn't been home in a month. And I said, Colonel Clausa, find somebody else to do this. And they found uh put in Rob Donaldson, uh Robson. And he's just, you know. Do you know Robson? Great guy. I don't, but I'm actually planning to have him join the podcast here. He's he and I've connected on email. You're gonna love everything he has to say. He's just larger than life. So let's let's shift gears for a moment here. We've been talking about the F-117, which is obviously at the time it was the state-of-the-art fighter in terms of its technology and precision and many other things. But let's now talk about a different kind of airplane. Tell me about your first solo. My first solo was in a uh Navy T-28, uh, which kind of filled the gap while the Navy had sold all the T-34Bs and hadn't gotten to T-34 C's yet. So they put us all through the T-28, which they said had as much horsepower as World War II fighter. And it did. It was quite I'd love to fly it today, but learning how to fly in that airplane was a challenge. I got 50 hours in it. After that, I was selected for jets and went up to Merdian, Mississippi. But I only had three solos in that airplane. I would like to be able to say I enjoyed them, but I didn't. I was nervous and I was scared to death. And I think anybody with like I had never flown an airplane before. I I had no love loss for that airplane. I was so glad to get jets. Went to the T2 in Merdian, Mississippi, and after flying the T-28, the T2 was a joy. It was wonderful. Uh T2 was where I had my first night solo, and you know, this is back before any infrared or it's just dark, and you fly minimum en route altitudes, and I think we just had like the circling, arcing thing we did around Merdian. But it was like a bunch of us, it was time for our night solos, and sure enough, out we went and took off and kind of put your heart in your mouth. But, you know, that's just the rites of passage. Every every pilot goes through that. You know, your first night solo is something you'll always remember because you're so because you're so darn scared. So, what's the worst in-flight emergency you've ever had? I think the worst in-flight emergency I've ever had was in the F-111. My my wingman and I had flown a um high low, it was gonna be a high-low-high. We hit a tanker, we hit a range that neither one of us had been to south of McConnell, out of New Mexico, and we were beating up the range, and I got a master caution, and I lost uh my primary hydraulic system. The airplane has two hydraulic systems, it flies on the backup just fine, but in this case, the backup hadn't been uh serviced properly, it had air in it, and as I watched the um fluid level go down in my primary, the stick got real heavy. And I got the wings level, nose pointed up, and the stick froze. And I looked at my wisdom and I said, we may have to get out of here. And I moved the stick and it would move a little bit, and the airplane correspondingly moved, and then it would freeze again. You know, I could so I could kind of keep it wings level. I don't remember how far south of McConnell, but we were south of it, and it has a north-south runway, and I said, We're going to McConnell. And I think I can I think I can do this. He was ready to eject, and I said, let's just give this a shot. And uh so we blew the gear down, we blew the flaps down pneumatically, we blew the hook down, and uh we took the uh barrier uh at the the field end just I favorable winds, whatever, but I could get a little bit of movement out of the stick and give a little correction. And fortunately, we touched down prior to the the cable and caught the cable and it stopped us. That was one of those we go, thank God. I was just wow, yeah. I felt very, very fortunate uh that we didn't have to eject, that we caught the cable. I didn't know 111 had a capsule. Uh if we hadn't caught the cable, pneumatic braking may have stopped us. Could I have kept it on the runway? I think so. But I didn't have to find out. That's the one that that I look back on my flying career and go, I got really lucky that day. As you look back over your career, is there any one sortie uh that stands out as where you feel the greatest sense of accomplishment for what you did? If you can believe what my wingman said when we were all done, yeah. Uh I was flying A7s in the Philippines. Uh my wingman, uh, and we flew together a lot. Uh my our squadron tried to do that. I was a seasoned lieutenant, uh, second cruise. My wingman was a uh brand new JG, new to the fleet. So we flew together a lot. And that morning we went out and flew a Cope Thunder mission and hit some tactical targets with little practice bombs, came back, had lunch at the uh BOQ, Bachelor Officers Quarters, uh cafeteria, and he got a bad hamburger. And uh we went back and we were gonna attack two uh Navy destroyers coming through some straits south of uh QB point. And uh we got about halfway down to where we expected them to be. And he he came up on the radio, and we didn't talk on the radio very much. We only had one radio, we didn't have like a tactical radio, and he said, Ray, I've got to go back. I said, What's the matter? Uh his name was Joe Gattuso, great guy, played football for Annapolis and just a superb person. And he goes, I'm sick. I said, Okay, uh, want me to go with you? He goes, No, no, I'm I'm okay. So I said, All right, well, you're cleared off. I'll see you back at QB. And uh he turned, but he only turned 90 degrees, and I looked and he's going the wrong way. So I turned, I said, Salami, his nickname was Salami. Salami, where are you going? Long pause, no answer. Salami, where are you going? He goes, I'm I'm going back to QB. I said, Turn right 90 degrees. So you turned, and I used the cutoff and I joined up on him, and I I had to go way up on his wing to look in and see him because he was hunched over throwing up. He uh he came up. I said, Are you alright? He says, I don't know. I have never felt this sick. I feel like I'm gonna pass out. And I said, Salami, if you're gonna pass out, you have to eject. He said, Okay. And he said, I think I can can you hang in there? Yeah. Hit your G suit a couple times, inflate that. You know, what do you if you feel like you're gonna go, pull the handles? And uh he said, Okay. He said, I think I can make it. So we headed back to QB and I just basically talked him down. You know, pull the throttle back, put the gear down, put your flaps down. I had declared an emergency, I'd gotten on, uh I went off frequency for a minute, talked to Squadron on the squadron radio said, have a tow truck down at the end of the runway. Salami's sick. He's throwing up. Have somebody there to meet him when he pulls off the runway. And then I came back and basically just kind of talked him down, you know, just your standard, your three-degree glide slope. And uh he touched down and I said, All right, get on the brakes. He stopped, pulled clear, and then, you know, they had a tow truck there and they had a crew to meet him. And I just stayed in the pattern and did a couple things. But he had um he had completely lost it. He had thrown up, lost control of his system. And uh when I saw him later on in the shower in the hangar, I went up, got him in a clean flight suit, and brought it down to him, and he said, Yeah, I think you saved my life today. I said, I don't know about that, but I'm glad you're okay. And uh he was so sick. He got food poisoning, and we had the same thing. We both had a burger, and I didn't get food poisoning. So lucky I was lucky. So, Steve, what is the strangest runway you've ever landed on? The Edwards Dry Lake Bed. When I was in the Navy Adversary Squadron flying A4s, the test pilot school there would uh ask us to bring an A4 out, a two-seat A4, and uh let them evaluate it, uh the uh student test pilots. We would sit in the backseat, put them up front, walk them through everything, uh, let them fly it and go through their checklist on how to evaluate a new airplane, what to what to do as a test pilot. And on one of those times I was able to um and I was able to land it on the dry lake bed. Uh I got permission to do that. And uh it was kind of cool. I really enjoyed that. Something I can say I did, a little milestone in my career, aviation career, landing on Edward's dry lake bed. So I I landed on a dry lake bed uh once up north of Nellis in uh in the A-10. It was one of our practice elements well when we were at a red flag. I heard a story that, and this was probably well before my time, early days, and the only example I've ever heard where pilots were allowed to legally fly drunk. And you say, wait a minute, what? When we flew in, we landed on the dry lake bed, got gas from a C-130, and then took off again. But apparently, in earlier years, pilots had and you know, crews had spent the night on the dry lake bed, you know, flown in all the provisions, you know, cooked up grill, probably brought in, you know, a cooler of beer and that sort of thing. Yeah. And so everybody's out there on the dry lake bed, you know, sun's gone down, and everybody's having fun, kicking back, and all of a sudden, thunderstorms start building and it starts to rain. And the squadron commander says, Oh no. We got to get everybody out of here right now. Dry lake bed might not be. We're gonna be we're gonna have A-10s mired in a lake. Oh, so he so he picked out the you know, four or five soberest guys and said, get in those planes and get out of here now and take them to Nellis. That's one of those apocryphal stories, if you will, handed down to young A-10 pilots when uh when they started out. Can't verify if it's true, but uh I can neither confirm nor deny. I just got a couple more questions for you today, Steve. We know flying is a dangerous business, and all of us have lost friends along the way. And so I wanted to ask if there's anyone in particular that you've lost that you want to be sure we remember. Oh gosh. Uh probably the my first taste was losing a good friend in Crow Valley in the Philippines, Ben Tappan, in June of 1980. I knew Ben, his wife, his kids, beautiful family. Uh good guy. Uh he his wingman was uh a guy by the name of Craig Thomas, and uh I just remember uh Craig came back up on the uh squadron radio and said I can't find Ben. I don't know what happened to him. And uh it's captured, the video of it was captured in Crow Valley in the Philippines, and it's on a video called Thunder Blunders, and you can see a little pull. And unfortunately, Ben saw got the ground rush um too late and impacted um almost tail first. I mean, he got the A7 nose up, but flight vector was still into the ground. And um I uh it was my job to ship his remains back to the States, and he was a good he's a lieutenant commander, he'd flown hundreds of hundreds of uh combat missions in Vietnam. He'd survived those to die in a peacetime training accident and uh with target fixation. I don't know what it was. The they say the targets in Crow Valley in the Philippines were uh made by the Negritos and they were like one-third the size of an actual he was attacking a train, and he probably just made the train look right as he was bombing it, and of course, if it was one-third size, he was much closer to it, had an optical illusion. So yeah, losing Ben was tough. He was such a good guy. Uh didn't need to happen. Unfortunately, we back in that era, maybe we didn't always do the pre-flight prep or the numbers uh in the Navy like we were supposed to. The Air Force was far more disciplined when it came to release altitude, pullout altitude, bomb, you know, blast frag altitudes, thing things like that. We were a little cowboy-ish, if you will, in the Navy, especially during that time frame. And it cost Ben his life. Thank you for remembering him today. Nickel on the grass. Uh yes, nickel, Ben Tappen. Great guy. So, Steve, my last question for you today is what advice do you give young people when they tell you they want to grow up and be a pilot? Standard answer. You can't do both. You can't be a pilot and be grown up. No, that that always gets a chuckle. But um I would say uh it's a lofty aspiration, no pun intended. Give it your best shot. Uh I've always been an advocate of setting your sights very, very as high as you possibly can, working as hard as you can toward that. And if you have a goal and a purpose and you work as hard as you can work to get there, even if you don't get there, you'll find yourself in a position that's far better than you would have been in had you never had any purpose, had you never had any goal or aspiration. So I say go for it. Now, you've got to temper that with there's some people who will want to do that that just can't. Uh physical disability. I mean, if you're uh vision impaired to a degree, it that just unfortunately it's a cruel world and that's not gonna work. But uh uh give it your best shot, go for it. I have never wanted to be anything else. I have my earliest memories as a child were watching jets out of Westover fly over my house in Springfield, Massachusetts. I have always wanted to be a pilot. That's all I've ever wanted to be, and I feel so blessed and so fortunate that I was able to do that. Steve, thank you so much for being on the Flyboy Podcast today. It's been an honor. Thanks for having me. You've been listening to the Flyboy Podcast. This podcast is brought to you by our parent organization, the Flyboy Lab. The mission of the Flyboy Lab is to elevate awareness and appreciation of aviators, their service, sacrifices, and contributions, and hopefully we've fulfilled that mission today. New episodes of the podcast drop every Thursday morning. And you can find previous episodes on our website, theflyboypodcast.com. Until our next sortie, push the mock, use the vertical, and fly safe.