Humble pilot in elite squad
Casa Grande High grad with 'zero desire to fly' becomes F-22 flierBy ALAN LEVINE, Staff Writer
"I also liked the idea of going to Colorado because I'm an avid skier, so the natural choice was the Air Force Academy."
- Lt. Austin Skelley, Air Force F-22 pilot
You wouldn't know it from his rather unassuming demeanor, but former Casa Grande resident Austin Skelley recently joined a very exclusive club.
That club is known in Air Force parlance as the F-22 Raptor Community, which currently numbers just under 150 pilots of the new stealth fighter plane.
When Skelley graduated from Casa Grande Union High School in 2001, his desire was to go to an out-of-state college and experience another part of the country. Originally, he thought of going to one of the Ivy League universities on the East Coast because he had a strong interest in business and management, but the cost was prohibitive.
"My next best option was to get a degree at a military academy," he said, "and the Air Force Academy had an excellent scholastic reputation. I also liked the idea of going to Colorado because I'm an avid skier, so the natural choice was the Air Force Academy. I was surprised when I got accepted, and after some deliberation, I decided to give it a shot."
It was while he was studying at the academy in Colorado Springs that he met and married Julia, formerly of Dallas.
Austin, a devout Christian, moved to Casa Grande from Iowa with his parents, John and Jan Skelley, at age 2 in 1984.
"Prior to going to the academy, I had zero military experience. I had to jump through a lot of hoops before I was able to qualify for acceptance. What they do is they take a whole-person concept, which is a little bit different from other schools in that they factor in your academic achievements, your grade-point average, SAT scores, and then they look at your extracurricular activities, how involved you are with sports, student government and other activities. But in addition to that, you also have to get a nomination from a U.S. congressman or a senator, and I actually got my nomination from Sen. Jon Kyl.
"The majority of students go there with the assumption that at some time in the future they're going to do something aviation related. I had absolutely zero desire to fly. I actually had motion sickness problems. My intention was to graduate from the academy, serve my five-year commitment and then enter into the civilian business world. The service commitment for pilots is 10 years from the day you finish your pilot training."
Seeing no appealing Air Force career, he and a friend, on a whim, decided to choose flight.
He took his first training while stationed at Luke AFB in the Valley, then went to Sheppard AFB in Texas to train in the T-38 primary jet fighter trainer. After about a year and a half, he began training at Randolph AFB, also in Texas.
"I had done well in my student pilot training and generally, after the 13th month, you're allowed to put in a request for the type of fighter that you want to fly, and my goal had always been to fly the F-16 because I love Arizona and wanted to go back to Luke AFB."
Skelley arrived at Luke to train as an F-16 fighter pilot, but he had heard of the F-22 Raptor, the latest generation of high-performance stealth fighters.
"At that time," Skelley recalled, "the F-22 had an aura about it as a kind of futuristic plane, and they never let lieutenants without previous fighter experience fly the aircraft, so guys going through their initial pilot's training don't really consider it an option to fly that aircraft, and I had not considered it a possibility.
"A week before we finished our flying training in the F-16s, we put in our requests of what aircraft we wanted to fly, and I had put the F-16 down first, and one of our supervisors came to our class shortly afterwards and said: 'Look, if you have any desire to fly the F-22, you need to tell us now.'
"Of course, everyone in class said yes, and what happened is that they somehow considered me as a candidate to try out for that plane, so prior to my graduation, the wing commander in charge of the flying training operations told me about the potential for the program and that he wanted me to do a tryout with him as my instructor. Essentially, he sat in the back seat of the T-38 trainer while I flew a mission to see if I was qualified enough to compete for the F-22 program.
"The catch was that over about a three-month period, they took eight lieutenants from all the pilot training bases and said that they wanted us to compete to see who the top four candidates will be to go to the F-22 program and then the other four will go to the F-16. You were either going to fly the F-22 or the F-16."
The eight candidates were sent to Randolph AFB, and they went through extensive training to learn the basics of dogfighting, basic fighter maneuvers. It was a three-month training course that ended in December of 2007.
"They stood us up in pairs and called our names, and I could barely believe what I was hearing when I heard my name called out and then the announcement that I was selected to fly the F-22. I was the only lieutenant selected. All the others were captains."
Because they had never trained in high-G (gravity pressure) conditions, the four candidates to fly the F-22 had to go to Luke AFB for approximately two months to fly the F-16 with an instructor pilot and were taught how to air-refuel, how to land a high-performance airplane and how to handle as much as nine Gs, according to Skelley.
The candidates did their training in the F-16 because there are no two-seat models of the F-22.
"It was great being back at Luke because I got to spend a lot of time back in Casa Grande. Three months later, in March of 2008, we were sent to Tyndall AFB in Florida for F-22 lead-in training."
Skelley said the F-22's primary role is to provide "air superiority" for the United States and its military in general. "It's very important that we provide protection for the United States, and the best way of doing that is for the United States to own the skies, and the F-22 gives us ownership."
Now at Langley AFB, Va., his mission no longer is training. "At Langley, we are an actual combat Air Force squadron. In the event that our nation became engaged in a war, and the F-22 is considered a necessary asset, this squadron would be deployed to a combat zone."
Source
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20234186&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=68561&rfi=6
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