Inspire, Fall/Winter 2008

Up, Up, a nd Away when I pulled that navy blue coverall over my jeans did I start to grasp what it meant to fly in an F/A-18 with the Blue Angels. It was the fall of 2007. The dark suit embroidered with “Blue Angels VIP” in gold letters marked me as a chosen one that day on the tarmac at Naval Air Station Brunswick, a military base in the coastal Maine town where I work. This was by far my most thrilling assignment since I started working as a newspaper reporter after graduating from Cedarville in 2005. Sure, I’d been reporting for two years at this point, but never had I been given an assignment like this one. With the Navy’s F/A-18 aeronautics squad coming to town as part of an air show at the base, I was about to hitch a demo ride with a Blue Angels pilot and then write a story about the flight to publicize the show. As I waited for my turn, someone next to me remarked, “I’d spend three months in the hospital to fly with them.” Ahead of me, a no-longer-enthusiastic Associated Press reporter hoisted his airsick frame from the cockpit. At last it was my chance. I climbed the ladder into the narrow cockpit, awed by the sophisticated equipment around me, ignorant of the laws of physics dictating the flight ahead of me, but ready to test them both. Not one, but two crew members underscored my inexperience by strapping me into the jet seat and showing me how to avoid ejecting it, or going on “the bonus ride,” as they called it. Then pilot Major Nathan Miller, a tall, blonde Michigander with electric blue eyes, walked toward the jet and hopped in. Talking to him earlier, I had learned this was his fifth and final flight of the day, and with the promise of a setting sun, it looked to be a beautiful one. We taxied down the runway. The engines flared on military power until Major Miller released the brake, and we careened down the airstrip. “Hit it,” he said, and the jet yanked up at a 45-degree angle. First the runway, then the base, then Brunswick fell away … and another world opened before me. by Rachel Ganong ’05 Onl y 14 fall/winter 2008