Yeah, they're crazy.
They drink hard. How hard? So hard that my Dad used to barf for distance with other fighter pilots. That's hard drinking right there.
I made the mistake of telling my Dad what time of day my 5th grade class walked down the street to the library and back. If a kid tells their Dad a little detail like that, I would guess that it would be inconsequential with 99.999% of kids.
Well, there we were the next day, 30 kids and a teacher, walking down the sidewalk from the library to the building where the classroom was located. Both were located on the main drag. Birds were chirping. It was a nice, beautiful, peaceful day.
Suddenly the air was almost frying with an intimidating and excruciatingly loud explosion sound that filled our very bones, making it impossible to function or think straight, and the entire group of 31 people hit the concrete on their hands and knees, or fell flat on their faces. It was impossible to stand on two feet when hit by this incredible sonic blast.
It was an F-4C Phantom in full afterburner, flying barely above the lightpoles of the street, supersonic. He came up behind us, so we never knew he was coming. Even when he was 5 feet behind us, we never heard it coming. All we could hear is birds chirping.
A sonic boom is SO LOUD when you're only 100 feet from the source. It's loud enough when the plane is 15,000 feet overhead - that sounds like a bomb went off.
That evening, my Dad asked, "Did you see me?"
He was a hell-raiser. He got in trouble more than once for doing things like that. I think they made the movie "Top Gun" after him.
He'd also do things like going head-on with a passenger airliner or other "low performance" plane at full speed, then pull up and zoom right over their heads. They wouldn't even see him coming. He might buzz a passenger car on a lonely Nevada two-lane road in the same way that he buzzed my class.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Crazy? Yeah. Fighter pilots are crazy.
