By: Midshipman Julia Kalshoven
“I’m not trying to sell you on aviation – we have plenty of people who want to be pilots,” explained LCDR Delgado to a crowd of roughly 80 U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen. “I just want to give you a good week.”
It was Monday morning and we were sprawled out in borrowed flight suits in an auditorium we had only barely managed to locate among the winding streets of Naval Base Coronado.
This was the start of aviation week – my third of four weeks in a month long career fair called PROTRAMID. For one month, we bounce from Marines to Surface Warfare to Aviation to Submarines to experience the best each community has to offer. The training informs our decision regarding which community we want to join after graduation from the Academy.
LCDR Delgado may have claimed that the week wasn’t going to be a serious sales pitch, but on Tuesday morning I found myself in the backseat of an airborne T-34 listening to my pilot “Huck”, cut in over the headset.
“Alright, Julia, you have the controls.” Sales pitch or not, I was pretty sold.
I must have flown the aircraft for a couple minutes at most, but the amount of training necessary to be an aviator suddenly made much more sense. By the time we touched down [“Julia, you’re going to hear some alarms as we get in closer before I put the wheels down. Totally normal. Good?”] I was buzzing.
I had heard plenty of stories of other midshipmen and aviators who had wanted to fly since before they could walk, but it had not been my longtime dream to be a pilot. Stepping back into the hangar after the T-34 ride though, I realized that the thought of flying would now be a very difficult idea to shake.
That afternoon, my squad and I met up with HSC-14 to get in the air again. The smooth feeling of the helicopter’s vertical takeoff took me by surprise. I was comfortably enjoying the ride though, when the person in the gunner’s seat made eye contact with me, pointed at the helicopter door, and made a tossing motion with his hand. It took me a moment to believe him.
“Open it??” I asked incredulously, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me through his layers of hearing protection and the sound of the helo.
I reach over, twisted the door handle, and pulled. And suddenly there was all of the San Diego air rushing in at me and all of the San Diego land laid out below. I would be reminded of this a few days later when LCDR Delgado explained some of the rationale behind his initial commitment to serve as an aviator:
“It’s in a plane. How bad can it be? At least the view is great.”
The rest of the week consisted of more face time with aviators. We spent time in Osprey and Romeo simulators, doing our best not to crash into digitally rendered mountains and skyscrapers. We toured a control tower and three different hangars, including one full of Hornets and another for Greyhounds.
The over-whelming impression I got from the aviators could be summed up by one Marine’s enthusiastic talk with us in front of a hangar of Fighter Attack aircraft. “This is the coolest job in the world.” And even with the Romeo aviators showed us binders the size of dictionaries full of information that they had to learn, it was difficult this week to disagree.
Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a friend who bemoaned the fact that everything today is about cutting time and money. He sighed that the world has lost its craftsmen – we no longer have individuals working hours to create a chair or shoe beautifully, simply as a point of pride. Yet this week, I was among aviators who took so much pride in their craft simply for the sake of pursuing perfection. They lit up as they described “sh*t hot breaks” and flawless carrier landings.
And, rather quickly, my borrowed flight suit was no longer just a comfy beat-up onesie – it was a comfy beat-up onesie uniform that I could one day earn.
Julia Kalshoven is a 2/C Midshipman and Cyber Operations major in the 14th Company at the United States Naval Academy. She enjoys whole artsy things like dancing, performing theater, and collecting more tea packets than she can realistically drink.