But when they can't, he says, you need a long runway to aid a landing. But at Cherry Point, North Carolina which is where I was we had a very long runway.'ĭanielson says jets can sometimes be restarted in the air. Bradley chuckles as he listens to Danielson's off hand description of one life threatening episode. So you're losing people and you're not losing them occasionally, it might not be one of the guys in the squadron, it might be one of the guys in the squadron next door, but you knew who he was.'īoth Danielson and Bradley came close to being casualties. And those casualty rates are pretty high,' Danielson adds. Just your accident rate for peacetime flying in those days when we were first started flying the jets was around 25 to 30 percent of the pilots wouldn't survive. When I was flying, and this would be the same as Lyle. You look at it a lot different,' Danielson says. 'It's sad when it happens, but it's a lot different than when you are out there than for example in the civilian world when someone gets killed in an automobile accident. When pressed the two combat pilots struggle to find words to describe how they coped with the death of friends, losses that in peacetime many would find emotionally crippling. 'Don't do the same thing.' We learned from other people's mistakes.' And I can remember one of the guys that put an airplane in (the water) right next to the carrier, and his canopy jammed, and we saw the whole thing right in front of us,' Bradley says. 'You learned from other peoples' mistakes. He put the deaths of his friends in a compartment in his mind, while the rest of his brain concentrated on surviving, Bradley says. They'd run out of fuel and ditch in the ocean or overshoot the deck and their plane would sink before rescuers could reach them. Both Danielson and Bradley lost friends, fellow pilots, who didn't survive carrier landings.

Corsair pilot gun jam