The Blue Angels are rock stars of the air, so the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” plays when the six pilots ignite the twin 14,000-horsepower engines on their blue and gold F/A Hornets. (F/A, for Fighter/Attack).
The Stones should be flattered. The Navy’s air demonstration team has been around even longer than they have—60 years. The Stones play loud? The Blue Angels perform at up to 150 decibels. The Blue Angels draw crowds of 1.5 million. Do the Stones?
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Shaun Swartz, Blue Angel No. 8 and the events coordinator for the team, sees no irony in the fact that songs that once fueled a counterculture now blare out of giant sound systems at air shows that are designed to demonstrate the terrifying power and astonishing precision of the American military. It’s a rock ’n’ roll world. “We don’t want the show to have a robotic feel” is how Swartz, ’95, sums it up.
Behind the scenes with him, it’s easy to see the ways in which the Blue Angels are as far from being a rock outfit as El Centro, Calif., is from London. Can you imagine rock stars spending January through March in the desert each year, running through their show 15 times during a six-day week—three times on three days, twice on the other three? In El Centro, where the air smells like cow manure most days? Where the Angels’ headquarters is a single-story building that could win a competition for the most unimaginative use of Sheetrock?
None of this matters to Swartz and the other 110 members of the Blue Angel team. Precision, that’s what matters. In the course of a year, the Blue Angels perform 68 air shows in 35 cities. When the six Blue Angel pilots begin training in January, the jets fly about three feet apart, wingtip to canopy. By the last shows in November, the jets, going 500 miles an hour, are about 18 inches apart. “We strive for an unachievable level of perfection every day,” Swartz says. “What more can you ask of life than a search for perfection?”
Recruiting for the Navy—demonstrating derring-do that might inspire youngsters in the audience to tell themselves, “I want to be part of that”— keeps the Blue Angels away from their Pensacola, Fla., homes some 280 days a year. Their mission requires members who will live harmoniously in close quarters. Who will always present their best face to the public. Who will genuinely enjoy shaking hundreds of hands, day after day.
There are 16 officers in the Blue Angels team: eight F/A-18 aviators, three pilots of the giant C-130T Hercules transport that carries the Blue Angels’ gear and opens the air show; and five support officers. The 16 officers vote on new members, and the vote has to be unanimous. There’s a long-standing tradition: when an officer’s selection is announced, all the assembled Angels yell at him, “Welcome to the team, asshole!”
Swartz experienced this happy abuse in his first attempt to join the Angels; most candidates need two or three tries.
He grew up in Leawood, Kan., and played high school football and captained the wrestling team. He attended Stanford on a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship, belonged to Sigma Chi and majored in mechanical engineering—a bit of a risk because grades are the main factor in determining who gets into flight school. The mantra, Swartz says, is, “Go poli sci/ keep it high/ I get to fly.”
ROTC left the Stanford campus during the Vietnam era, so a quarter-century later, Swartz and his fellow midshipmen got on a bus each Wednesday and rode to Berkeley, where they marched across the Cal campus. “Sometimes, somebody would yell at us,” Swartz recalls. “I’d think, ‘You’re sitting under a tree, smoking dope. What do I care?’ ”
After graduating, he reported to the Navy flight school in Pensacola, and eventually became a radar intercept officer in the F-14 Tomcat. He served two Western Pacific deployments and accrued 1,460 flight hours. He isn’t a pilot, but a flight officer who operates radar and weapons systems. His two-year term with the Blue Angels began in September 2004.
As events coordinator, he makes sure that procedures on the ground go as smoothly as the maneuvers in the air. He handles the itinerary for all 110 members of the group. In each city, he arranges police escorts for the pilots to the airfield and back. He meets with officials to plan local recruiting events. His phone never stops ringing: a hotel in New York City calls to say extra rooms are available; a police lieutenant in Fort Worth, Texas, wants to know what time motorcycle officers should arrive at the hotel.
Swartz and Blue Angel No. 7, Kevin Davis, fly to air shows in the seventh Blue Angels jet, the team’s only two-seater. Davis narrates the air show and Swartz stands beside him, cue cards in hand, ready to prompt if needed. Being earthbound is “the hardest part of my job, the hardest to stomach,” he says. “I’m on the ground; my buddies are flying.”
Watching an American jet scream low across the sky is one thing if you happen to be a villager in Afghanistan. It is quite another if you are a guest of the Blue Angels at a Naval Air Station runway. As theater, a Blue Angels air show provides one jaw-dropping moment after another, beginning in the same split-second when the twin G.E. engines on all the F/A-18s ignite, sending clouds of white smoke into the Imperial Valley air.
Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” hits the sound track as the jets roll past the ground crew, each pilot pumping a fist in the air. “We’re adrenaline junkies, hooked on a $40-million jet fighter,” says Swartz. “The responsiveness in the air is as addicting as can be.”
The F/A-18s don’t “take off”—commercial jets “take off.” These things rip the sky, like rockets. The four jets in the famous Blue Angels diamond go skyward as one and, still as a diamond, execute a loop. (Like dives into a swimming pool, these maneuvers have names. This one happens to be the Half Cuban Eight.) The No. 5 and 6 jets, the “Opposing Solos,” roar skyward simultaneously. The 5 executes a roll. The 6 does a high-power climb, turns on its back, and then the pair execute a split as they pass back over the runway.
Going back to the Red Baron, air warriors have been dashing, romantic, swaggering males. But at the center of the Blue Angels’ quest for precision is a woman. As F/A-18s roar past, Flight Surgeon Tarah Johnson evaluates the timing and spacing. “No. 4, a hair high,” she says after one pass. “No. 5, a split-second early,” she says after another.
Only in the past decade has the Navy allowed women to fly fighter jets. Because it takes six to eight years to log the 1,250 hours of flying time needed to try out for the Blue Angels, there has yet to be a female Blue Angel pilot. “We got the first woman applicant two years ago,” Swartz says. “It’s just a matter of time. And when it happens, it’ll be great.”
Flying so close and so fast is a physical ordeal. The sticks in the Angels’ F/A-18s are loaded with an extra 35 pounds of pressure—so that these hyper-responsive machines have no play. For a pilot, it is like holding a 35-pound weight in the cockpit—which is why if a Blue Angel is not in the air or a debriefing, he can be found in a gym.
But it’s the invisible force, gravity, that is the hardest to bear. Take a Porsche hard into a turn and it’s unlikely you will pull more than 2 Gs, no matter how you speed. An F/A-18 in a turn can pull 7.5 Gs. “It’s like having a refrigerator sitting in your lap,” Swartz says.
During the air-show season, a Blue Angel pilot typically puts in a nine- to 10-hour day. There are high schools to visit, people to meet. A Blue Angels air show costs $200,000 to put on. Swartz believes it is money well spent.
“It’s a way of telling the public, ‘This is yours. You can be proud.’ I remember talking to a kid at the fence after an air show. He’s looking up; he’s got stars in his eyes. He’s going to tell his mother he wants to be a Blue Angels pilot. He’s going to go online; he’s going to make models. He’ll go through life understanding that the military is an important part of the fabric of American life.”
JOHN HUBNER, a former San Jose Mercury News reporter, is the author, most recently, of Last Chance in Texas: The Redemption of Criminal Youth.
