So There I Was: How ALL Great Aviation Tales Begin

New listeners always tell us the same thing: “I wish I’d found this show sooner.” So here you go. We pulled together 6 episodes that hook people instantly — close calls, bad decisions, dark humor, and aviation stories you won’t believe. Start here 👇 sothereiwas.us/starthere

So There I Was with Bonk x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

So There I Was with Kemo x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@shadrach_shad @MarioNawfal Buffoon posts bullshit

🇺🇸🇮🇷 HOW DOWNED U.S PILOTS IN IRAN STAYED HIDDEN AND CONNECTED When the U.S. F-15E crew ejected over Iran, they weren't cut off, they simply switched to a device called CSEL. Built by Boeing, it’s a small, rugged unit attached to the pilot’s vest that survives ejection and immediately starts working. Instead of talking over radio, it sends short encrypted bursts: location, status, and messages like “injured” or “enemy nearby” using frequency-hopping signals that look like background noise to enemy systems. That’s the key: no voice, no easy signal to track, no triangulation. It links to military satellites, feeding real-time data to rescue teams while letting the pilot stay silent and hidden. Only when extraction is close does it switch modes, allowing helicopters or aircraft to lock onto the exact position. In other words, even behind enemy lines, the pilot isn’t alone; they’re digitally tethered to the entire rescue network without giving away their position. Source: Ynet

So There I Was with Al C x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Easter Cross This Stopped Me Mid-Sentence youtu.be/1zcuZahtp_c?si… via @YouTube

Fighter Bar progress report: cabinets in, granite coming later today... What’s the call sign for this corner of the basement?

Fig & RePete Weekly Chat x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@BLackgold_5 stop with the ai bull$#¡+

Is this real or fake? Crazy Crosswind

Close Air Support A-10 SHOT UP OVER BAGHDAD youtu.be/zXWbKPYX72o?si… via @YouTube

@BskiMike22802 Hear about the inception of this plane from Professor Hal Sundt, who spent much of the last year of Pierre Sprey's life learning about how and why the A-10 was developed sothereiwas.us/episode/102

A LOVE LETTER TO THE UGLIEST, MOST IMPORTANT AIRPLANE AMERICA EVER BUILT I am a physics teacher. I teach my students that when a pattern repeats itself enough times, it stops being a coincidence and starts being data. And when the data contradicts the conclusion, you do not defend the conclusion. You throw the conclusion out and follow the data. The Air Force has tried to retire the A-10 Warthog something like seven times. Seven times. Every single time — EVERY single time — a real shooting war starts, the retirement plan quietly disappears and the Warthog shows back up doing the job no other aircraft on Earth does as well. You would think that pattern would eventually produce a different conclusion in the procurement meetings. You would be wrong. But the data does not lie, even when the procurement meetings do. And right now, on Day 26 of Operation Epic Fury — right now, TODAY — A-10 Warthogs are over the Straits of Hormuz turning Iranian fast-attack boats into what I am going to generously describe as floating debris. So I wrote it a love letter. Because somebody should. --- FIRST, LET ME EXPLAIN WHAT I MEAN BY 'UGLY' --- The A-10 does not look like a fighter jet. It looks like an engineer was given a GAU-8 Avenger cannon — which is, to be clear, a seven-barreled Gatling gun the SIZE of a Volkswagen Beetle that fires 30mm depleted uranium rounds at 3,900 rounds per minute — and then told to build an airplane around it. Because that is almost exactly what happened. The engine pods stick out from the tail section like afterthoughts. The landing gear, instead of retracting cleanly into the fuselage, leaves a little bulge hanging out. The nose is blunt. The whole aircraft has the aesthetic of something designed by someone who was told the specifications and then ran out of time to make it pretty. Beautiful aircraft are designed around aerodynamics. Around low radar cross-section. Around marketability to congressional appropriators who have never heard a radio call with their own name on it. The A-10 was designed around one question: how do we keep the pilot alive while he puts steel exactly where the guys on the ground need it to be in the next thirty seconds? Everything else was secondary. EVERYTHING. The titanium bathtub cockpit that can stop 23mm rounds. The redundant hydraulic systems so that if one gets shot out, the other keeps flying. The widely-separated engine pods so that one hit does not take out both engines. The foam-filled self-sealing fuel tanks. The manual reversion backup system — cables, physical mechanical linkages — so that if ALL the hydraulics fail, the pilot can still fly the aircraft home using nothing but the original mechanical connection between the stick and the control surfaces and the strength in his or her own arms. This is not 1970s technology that has not been updated. This is 1970s design philosophy that has never been wrong. There is a difference. Pay attention to it. --- APRIL 7, 2003. AND I NEED YOU TO STAY WITH ME ON THIS ONE --- Her name is Kim Campbell. Her callsign is Killer Chick. At the time of this story she was a lieutenant colonel, and I want to tell you what happened over Baghdad on April 7th, 2003, because I do not think enough people know it and because every time I think about it I feel something I can only describe as the particular combination of admiration and rage that comes from watching bureaucracies try to throw away things that matter. She was flying her A-10A on a close air support mission. Baghdad. April 2003. The city was not, shall we say, a low-threat environment. Her aircraft took a direct hit from enemy ground fire. Not a graze. A DIRECT HIT. The hit destroyed both hydraulic systems — both of them, completely — and caused significant structural damage to the aircraft. Everything that makes a modern aircraft flyable is, under normal circumstances, hydraulically assisted. You lose hydraulics, you lose the ability to move the control surfaces that make the aircraft go where you point it. She switched to manual reversion. This is the part I want you to understand. Manual reversion is not a computer backup. It is not a digital system that kicks in. It is a set of mechanical cables — physical, metal cables connected through pulleys — that create a direct link between the pilot's control stick and the aircraft's control surfaces. No assistance. No amplification. Just the pilot's actual physical strength and the mechanical connection that the A-10's designers put there in the 1970s because they assumed — correctly — that real combat means real damage and they were not going to let a hydraulic failure kill the pilot if they could help it. She flew that aircraft for over an hour. In manual reversion. Over hostile territory. Not knowing what else might be structurally compromised. Not knowing if the next thing that happened would be the thing that ended it. She landed it safely. She was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Now. I want you to answer this question for me. What is the manual reversion backup system on the F-35? There is not one. The F-35 is fly-by-wire. The pilot inputs go through computers. If the electronics are compromised beyond a certain threshold, you are not flying home on cables. I am not saying the F-35 is a bad aircraft. It is an extraordinary aircraft. I am saying that the people who designed the A-10 understood something that modern procurement culture has largely forgotten: the enemy gets a vote. The aircraft is going to get hit sometimes. The question is not "will it survive a hit?" — the question is "when it gets hit, does the pilot come home?" Killer Chick came home. Because the designers of her airplane thought about the moment she was in and built the answer into the airframe before she was born. I find that extraordinarily moving. I make no apologies for that. --- THE PEOPLE WHO KEEP SHOWING UP TO CONGRESS --- Every time there is a retirement hearing, something interesting happens. The Air Force shows up and argues to retire the A-10. They bring slides. They have acquisition cost comparisons and sortie generation models and capability matrices and everything else that looks rigorous and data-driven from 30,000 feet. And then the Army shows up. The Marine Corps shows up. The Special Operations Forces community shows up. The Joint Terminal Attack Controllers — the JTACs, the men and women whose job it is to call in airstrikes from the ground while people are actively shooting at them — they show up. And they use words the Air Force slides do not have a column for. Words like "guardian angel." That is a direct quote from official congressional testimony. Not my word. Not my framing. An actual operator, in front of an actual congressional committee, describing the A-10 as a guardian angel. You know what that word means when it comes from someone who has been in the situation where they needed it? It does not mean "highly capable air asset." It means: I was in a bad place, the radio call went through, and that aircraft showed up and the calculus changed. The Air Force does not have a metric for that. Because the Air Force was not in the bad place. The JTAC was. There is also the sound. I know that sounds strange in an official procurement argument, so let me explain it, because it matters more than the Air Force acknowledges. The A-10's engines have a distinctive low grinding sound that travels. The GAU-8 firing — that BRRRT — is one of the most instantly recognizable sounds in modern warfare. And the documented, verified, prisoner-interview-supported effect of that sound on enemy combatants is real and significant. It disrupts coordinated attacks. It changes behavior. Enemy forces who know the A-10 is overhead make different decisions than enemy forces who do not. A fast mover at 20,000 feet that drops a bomb and is gone in four seconds does not produce that effect. The aircraft that LOITERS — that circles, that is visible, that can stay for hours — that produces that effect. The A-10 loiters. It loiters at $6,000 an hour. The F-35 loiters — when it loiters — at $30,000 to $35,000 an hour. I have a student who can tell you exactly how much that ratio matters in a sustained campaign. She is sixteen years old. She figured it out in about forty-five seconds. --- THE FLY-OFF THEY DID NOT WANT YOU TO SEE --- The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act mandated a formal comparison test. A-10C versus F-35A. Close air support, airborne forward air control, combat search and rescue. The Air Force hated this idea. The Chief of Staff at the time, General Mark Welsh, called it publicly — on the record — a "silly exercise." A silly exercise. They ran the tests anyway. April 2018 through March 2019. The final report was completed in February 2022. And then — and this is the part that made my jaw drop when I found out — the Air Force buried it for over a year. Would not release it. Fought FOIA requests. The Project On Government Oversight had to sue them in federal court to get it. And when it came out, it was so heavily redacted that key findings are still hidden. That is not the behavior of an organization confident in its conclusions. Here is what the report actually found — even through the redactions. The A-10's typical loadout enabled MORE attacks per sortie than the F-35. Not equal. More. To hit the same number of targets, you need more F-35 sorties. That might be acceptable if the F-35 had a great readiness rate. It does not. As of a 2023 Government Accountability Office report, the entire F-35 fleet has a full mission capable rate of BELOW 50%. Below fifty percent. Half the jets do not work on any given day. So you need MORE sorties from an aircraft that is available LESS often. That is not a capability gap. That is a capability crater. The F-35's gun — the GAU-22 — has documented accuracy problems. The report actually recommended the Air Force "fix the F-35A gun." It carries 181 rounds of 25mm. The A-10's GAU-8 carries 1,350 rounds of 30mm. The A-10 pilots reported SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER workload than F-35 pilots on the most complex missions. Oh — and as of the testing period, F-35 pilots had ZERO dedicated training requirements for close air support missions. Zero. So what did the testers do? They loaded the F-35 side of the comparison with former A-10 pilots who already knew how to do the job, specifically to "minimize the impact" of that training gap. The former A-10 pilots, flying the F-35, still did not outperform the A-10. Let that land. The Air Force fought the test, lost the test, buried the results, and then continued retiring the aircraft anyway. At some point, as I tell my students, "I ignored the data" stops being an oversight and starts being a choice. --- WHAT I KNOW ABOUT WAITING --- I was a line medic in Iraq. Combat medic. Actual forward operating base, actual radio, actual contact. I want to explain something to you about what it feels like to be on the ground in a firefight waiting for air support, because I do not think the people making these procurement decisions have ever had to think about it from that angle, and I think they should. In a near-peer conflict without air superiority, we were told to plan for 48-hour medical response windows. Forty-eight hours. I am a former paramedic. I know what the golden hour means. The window — roughly one hour — inside which surgical intervention makes the difference between a soldier walking home and a soldier coming home in a flag-draped box. Tension pneumothorax. Hemorrhagic shock. Traumatic brain injury. All survivable. All survivable if you reach a surgeon inside an hour. Not survivable after forty-eight hours of waiting for a medevac that cannot fly because there is no air cover to protect the helicopter on final approach. When the A-10 is overhead, the medevac can fly. The A-10 suppresses the ground fire that would shoot that helicopter down. It is not just killing things. It is keeping the route clear. It is the reason the helicopter makes it to the landing zone and the reason the landing zone is still there when it arrives. The people arguing about sortie generation rates and procurement costs have not done that math. I have. I do not apologize for caring about it. --- THE PART NOBODY WANTS TO SAY OUT LOUD --- The A-10 community is the only community in the United States Air Force that still produces fully qualified Forward Air Controllers Airborne. FAC(A). This is the skill set that makes combined arms operations work — multiple aircraft, ground coordination, danger-close fires in complex environments, all managed simultaneously by a single aircrew who have spent their careers learning how to do exactly this and nothing else. That knowledge lives in people. Specifically in A-10 pilots. And when those pilots retire, it does not transfer to a shared drive. It goes with them. The Air Force's current plan — and I want to be precise here, because this is not editorializing, this is documented fact — the current plan involves zero dedicated CAS training requirements for F-35 pilots. Zero. They are retiring the one community specifically trained for this mission and replacing it with a community that does not train for the mission at all. I ask my students a version of this question sometimes. If you fire your only chemistry teacher and replace them with a math teacher who has never taken chemistry and has no plans to learn it, what happens to your chemistry program? They always get the answer right. They are sixteen. --- SO WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY BUILD --- Not a refurbished 1970s airframe with duct tape and digital displays. I want to be clear about that. Metal fatigue is real. The youngest A-10 in the fleet is older than the parents of my students. That is not a forever solution and nobody who has looked at the maintenance reality is pretending otherwise. I want a new one. An A-10X. Clean-sheet design, same mission philosophy, fifty years of technology applied to it. Modern high-bypass turbofan engines — more thrust, 25-30% better fuel efficiency, lower infrared signature, and specifically designed from the start to work WITH the GAU-8 instead of tolerating it. Gun-gas ingestion is a known issue on the TF34s; it can be engineered away with current combustion technology and active flow control. You want the plane built around the gun. Build the engines around the gun too. Selective radar-absorbent materials on leading edges and key surfaces. Not stealth. Low-observable. The goal is not invisibility — it is cutting detection range in half. If a SAM that sees the current A-10 at 40 kilometers only sees the A-10X at 15, the pilot has time to react. That is survivability engineering. It is not complicated and it is not expensive. A compact AESA radar — pylon-mounted or conformal, leveraging existing F-16 and F/A-18 arrays, under $10 million per aircraft for integration. Ground moving target indication. Synthetic aperture mapping. Self-defense tracking. The same array in electronic attack mode to jam enemy search radars. Software-defined. Redundant. Armored. Updated armor suite — hybrid titanium-ceramic composite with aerogel thermal insulation, better protection at 20 to 30 percent less weight. That freed-up weight goes to payload. The aerogel is not just for armor — it reduces the aircraft's infrared signature, which matters enormously at low altitude where IR-guided threats are the primary danger. Loyal wingman integration. Control stations for four to six semi-autonomous drones operating under pilot supervision. Scout ahead. Carry additional munitions. Draw fire. Act as decoys against radar-guided threats. The pilot issues high-level commands; the AI handles tactical execution. One aircraft becomes a multi-platform strike package. The GAU-8 stays. Upgraded ammunition options — programmable airburst for troops in the open, improved armor-piercing for vehicles, smarter ballistic computer integrated with AESA ranging. You do not redesign the part that works. You make it smarter. Cost per airframe in a production run of 200-plus: roughly $80 to $120 million. That is half the cost of an F-35. Operating costs: approximately $22,000 per flight hour on the upgraded platform versus $42,000 for the F-35. In a 100-sortie operational day that is $2 million in daily savings. Per day. In a sustained campaign. I am a physics teacher and I like a clean ratio. The math is not difficult. The will to acknowledge what the math says apparently is. --- DAY 26. OPERATION EPIC FURY. --- Let me bring this back to right now. March 2026. The F-35s went in first. When Iran's integrated air defense network was intact, the fifth-generation platforms did what fifth-generation platforms do — they penetrated contested airspace, suppressed and destroyed the air defenses, and dismantled the threat environment. That is the exact right use of those aircraft and they did it effectively. Not arguing otherwise. Then the A-10 showed up. 120-plus Iranian naval vessels sunk or damaged. Mine-layers: gone. PMF command infrastructure in Anbar Province: struck with precision, seven killed, thirteen wounded in a single pass. IRGC fast-attack boat fleet in the Straits: being reduced to floating scrap at $6,000 an hour. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs confirmed it. The A-10 is, in his exact words, "hunting and killing fast-attack watercraft in the Strait of Hormuz." One F-35A took a hit during a deep strike mission. Suspected passive IR sensors bypassing radar stealth. Emergency landing. Pilot with shrapnel wounds. Aircraft returned safely — and that is genuinely good news. But the aircraft that no one can seem to stop trying to retire has taken zero losses. Zero. Because the people who designed it assumed it was going to get hit and built the answer into the airframe before the pilots who fly it were born. Killer Chick flew home on cables. That is not mythology. That is engineering. And it is the engineering philosophy we need to preserve, update, and build again. --- THE CLOSING ARGUMENT --- The people who keep showing up to testify — year after year, hearing after hearing, retirement announcement after retirement announcement — are not defense contractors protecting a revenue stream. They are Army officers and Marine officers and SOF operators and JTACs who have been in the bad place, made the radio call, and watched what happened next. They call it a guardian angel. They use that word in official testimony. In front of Congress. On the record. And every year, the Air Force brings out another retirement package. I want us to stop having this conversation on a two-year loop. I want someone in the Pentagon to look at the fly-off results they tried to suppress, the testimony they keep ignoring, the current operational results over the Straits of Hormuz, and say the thing out loud: NOT EVERY MISSION REQUIRES A $200 MILLION STEALTH PLATFORM. Some missions require something that flies low and slow and stays for hours and absorbs a hit and brings the pilot home on cables if everything else fails. Build the A-10X. Keep the community. Preserve the institutional knowledge. Let Killer Chick's generation train the next one. The Warthog does not need your respect. It just needs your enemy to look up. What do you think — should we build an A-10X or retire the mission entirely? Reply below. I will be here But what do I know — I am only a physics teacher and former Army combat medic who stood on the ground in a combat zone and learned firsthand what close air support means when YOU are the one waiting for it, who wrote the physics textbook being used to teach the next generation of soldiers how the world actually works, and who apparently has run out of patience for procurement decisions made by people who have never had to make that radio call. #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

@ElektraVBarron @BskiMike22802 Hear KC tell how it all happened in her own words! sothereiwas.us/episode/135/

@BskiMike22802 BRRRRT!!!!!! x.com/Cardoso/status…

One wrong move and he dies mid-flight youtu.be/W4tU3acg3Ek?si… via @YouTube

aviation stories usually involve dogfights and carrier landings... but Greco-Roman wrestling in Speedos? 🩲✈️ This might be the most "wait, what?" moment we've ever had on the podcast. Watch the clip: youtube.com/shorts/YYL-Ymd… #Aviation #PilotLife #Podcast #SoThereIWas

@MB_EjectEject Glad the pilot made it out safely. Ejection seat stories are some of the most gripping in aviation. We dedicated an episode to exactly this on STIW — Ep. 62: Stay In the Ejection Envelope. sothereiwas.us/episode/62

Yesterday, a U.S. Navy T-45C Goshawk operated by TAW-2 crashed south of NAS Kingsville, Texas. The pilot successfully ejected using the Martin-Baker US14A (NACES) Ejection Seat. Martin-Baker Ejection Seats have now saved the lives of 2,273 U.S. Navy servicemen and women. This is the 161st successful ejection from the Navy Aircrew Common Ejection Seat (NACES) since they first entered service in 1990-saving lives in the F-14 Tomcat, F-18 Hornet/Super Hornet/Growler and the T-45 Goshawk. Martin-Baker are proud to support the U.S. Navy. #martinbaker #engineeringforlife

@SGTWipper1Each So many entertainers have incredible military aviation backgrounds that most people never know about. We've had WWII vets on STIW — including Rosie, a B-24 nose gunner who flew into combat at 19. Their stories deserve to be heard. sothereiwas.us/episode/95

The late Price Is Right host served as a naval aviator during World War II. In his autobiography Priceless Memories, Bob Barker described his time in the military by writing, "I was a Naval Aviator, a Fighter Pilot. I completed all facets of my training, including my qualifying landings on a carrier. I was all ready to go, and when the enemy heard that I was headed for the Pacific, they surrendered. That was the end of World War II."

@Turbinetraveler The Forrestal has some of the most dramatic naval aviation history — including the 1967 fire. We covered that on Ep. 85 with Hide, who was there. The KC-130 landing story is equally wild. sothereiwas.us/episode/85

The KC-130F BuNo 149798 "Look Ma, No Hooks" lands and takes off from the USS Forrestal in 1963; it is now at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola.

@wars Aviation creates a brotherhood that transcends sides. We had Rosie on Ep. 95 — a B-24 nose gunner who flew over enemy territory at 19. The humanity in these stories never gets old. sothereiwas.us/episode/95

In 1943, a German fighter pilot chose to spare an American B-17 bomber, and decades later, the two former adversaries finally met.

@citynewscalgary Prayers for the pilots, their families, and every controller working that night. We had two ATC controllers on Ep. 194 of So There I Was — they pulled back the curtain on exactly these protocols and what happens when staffing margins disappear. sothereiwas.us/episode/194

A fatal collision between an Air Canada jet and a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport late Sunday is drawing attention to the strict protocols that pilots, groundcrew and air traffic controllers follow to land planes safely. calgary.citynews.ca/2026/03/23/dem…

@DrEricDing Prayers for the pilots, their families, and the controllers working that night. We covered ATC staffing in Ep. 194 — two controllers described firsthand what being shorthanded feels like from behind the scope. sothereiwas.us/episode/194

Audio of runway crash of Air Canada Jazz flight with LaGuardia airport fire truck was tragic. But should have been preventable with more staffing of air traffic controllers. The U.S. is short of 3,000–3,500 certified ATC, leading to overtime & exhaustion.