Long Beach, CA
This is the first testimonial I’ve written, and after our experience at Air Combat USA, I just feel compelled to write this note, partly to thank you all for the wonderful time we had, and partly to kind of share the experience from my perspective.
As you might expect, safety was a concern for me when I made the decision for my son and I to participate in the Phase I program. After reading about the pilots’ experience, and then seeing the clean, and apparently well-maintained planes and facility, I began to feel pretty good about the decision to mix it up with Casey over Long Beach. After talking to the pilots and attending the pre-flight briefing, I had pretty much written off any concerns I may have had. They presented a very professional image, and easy mannerism that really made me comfortable with what I was about to do.
As for the flight, in a word “wow!” No, I mean WOW! Talk about sensory overload; I woke up this morning still trying to find solutions to get at Casey’s six, and trying to figure out what the plane was doing during certain segments of the ‘engagements’. :o) Phase I seems to be a well designed program for beginners like me and Casey. They started us out with some shallow turns to practice gunsight tracking, and then moved on to practice controlling closure rate with yo-yo’s. After that, the fight was on! The difficulty of maintaining a situational awareness with the high closure rates, the g’s, and the rapidly changing attitudes of the aircraft, impressed upon me how skillful these pilots are. (Oh, they must also be hate going to work.)