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Peter Loucks, 72, a member of the East Hill Flying Club, is a professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. He flew for the Navy from 1955-1981 as a commissioned officer and in the reserves. Peter flew planes all over Europe, North America, South America, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Some of the planes he flew were the T-34, T-38, tailwheels, supersonic jets, and helicopters. He’s still flying with the club but not at 400 mph in formation.

An Afternoon Chat with Peter Loucks

By Elizabeth Grigoriu

Pete Loucks is an unassuming person. In fact, he’s so unassuming that when he asked my husband, a colleague, if he would like to fly with him to a conference in Boston, and my husband responded, “No way am I flying with a Sunday flier!” Pete never said a thing. He never let on that he flew 26 years for the Navy—straight and level, upside down, at 90º angles, and sometimes too fast to know where he was.

Pete knew that he wanted to fly when he was in college in the mid-1950s. His interest in the sleek B-47 strategic bombers inspired him to join the Air Force ROTC. He passed the flight physical, but one week before graduation, he received notice from the Air Force that he was medically unqualified to be an enlisted person. Apparently, after the Korean War ended, the Air Force had more people than they knew what to do with. Pete wanted to be an officer so he decided to join the Navy. His idea was to get a commission in the Navy, get on board a ship and then apply for flight training. If the Navy kicked him out of flight training because of medical history, then at least he would still be a commissioned officer. As an officer in training, he applied for flight training and got in successfully.

I sat down one afternoon to talk with Pete about his flying career. Besides being fascinated with pilot stories, I was inspired talking with Pete because of his encouragement that anyone can be a pilot. In his words, there are just some people who will be better at it than others. But pilots are ordinary people with the chance to do something not so ordinary.

I asked Pete if he remembered his first solo flight. I naively thought he would relate a similar experience I had soloing in a Cessna 152, a 110 horsepower mosquito. Pete’s solo was in a Beechcraft T-34, 250 horsepower airplane: “a neat little airplane that you can get on your back and do all kinds things.” The landing field was a mile square of grass so one could not miss the runway. The instructor got out and told Pete to take it around a few times. Pete relates what he had to put up with to get to that point in his Navy flight training: “You have to put up with a lot, a lot of lip. The instructors like to yell a lot. They have a different personality in the air than they do on the ground. They just don’t want you to make mistakes in the air. You get used to taking a lot of criticism. When I was soloing I pretended he was still in the back seat and was listening on intercom so I keyed the mike and began to yell at him. I said ‘Now, you *!@&*#, you’re not going to sit there and yell at me!’ A truly great feeling of accomplishment. After all that abuse, he actually trusted me with ‘his’ plane. I remember that very clearly!”

Before doing his solo, Pete always got airsick. The instructors would get bored training someone to fly straight and level: “They would let you fly for about ten minutes and then they’d say, ‘Great job, I’ve got it!’ Then they would have fun doing their acrobatics. I wasn’t prepared at all for these acrobatics.” After his solo, however, no more air sickness.

The next plane Pete flew was a 1425 horsepower T-28, a very high performance prop plane. Pete thought he had done a pretty good job in the T-34 and when he got in the T-28 with his instructor for his first ride, he said, “Let me do it. Let me take off.” The instructor told Pete to relax; he would take off. Pete told me, “Mentally I was still on the ground when we were at 10,000 feet! I was still thinking what do we have to do on the take off roll. It happened so fast! It was incredible.”

The next phase of flight training was precision flying. A pilot had to demonstrate maneuvers such as the ability to do two and half spins, not 2 ¾ or 2¼ but 2½, 90º from the original heading. Pete spent many hours learning and practicing unusual maneuvers: “For a barrel roll, when you’re flat on your back, you should be 90º from where your heading was, not 85 or 95 but 90! I remember one exercise that is called an unusual maneuver. You’re simulating sort of screwing up in the airplane and not paying attention to what’s going on and all of the sudden you don’t know exactly where the plane is in the sky. The instructor would say close your eyes. He would then do his acrobatics. I would have no idea the attitude the plane was in. Then you would be told to open your eyes and ‘recover.’ Once he put me in a position where the plane was facing straight up in the air—looking right up to the top of the sky. The plane is falling down on its tail with zero, actually negative, airspeed and then he told me to recover without using the engine—simulating an engine failure. So you learn. It’s not a big deal. You just kick a rudder so you’re headed straight down and then start flying—or in this case gliding. I mean it sounds scary, but it’s not a big deal to do it. You just need some altitude to get out of that ‘reverse flight’ and then glide to a landing in some field. Once you do these kinds of exercises you begin to think you can fly the box the plane came in.” Sounds similar to learning stalls in a 152.

Practicing these maneuvers builds confidence. A lot of confidence that can lead to dangerous complacency. Pete said, “You think you’re good. And then after that you’re learning that you’re not so great!”

The third phase of training after precision flying was acrobatics, including acrobatics in formation. This built even more confidence: “For example, a wingover is just a nice smooth 180º turn maneuver where at 45º of turn you’re 45º nose up at a 45º bank, at 90º of turn you are slicing through the horizon with a 90º bank, and at 135º of turn you are 45º nose down with a 45º bank, and finally coming out on your original altitude in the opposite heading from that when you started. Then you do another putting you back on your original heading. I used to do that with DC6’s. I got caught and scolded for that once. Apparently one of my crewmembers didn’t enjoy that and told my boss. There are a few g’s involved, but if you do it nicely, it’s never more than 2 g’s. Looping the T-28 required 2½ all the way around. Anything less would mean you would begin climbing inverted. Some did because they blacked out. The blood tends to drain out of your head at that acceleration. And if you are doing these acrobatics in formation, whatever the lead pilot does, that is what you do, too, whether or not it is a good job. All this builds up confidence.”

One of Pete’s early experiences in the Navy was flying Super Constellations or “Connies” as they were called. Two crews to each plane would fly on 18-hour trips from Newfoundland across the Atlantic to the Azores and back looking for Russian planes. That was not his first choice of jobs or airplanes. After a certain amount of training, the Navy asked student pilots which planes they would like to fly. Pete thought it would be neat to fly a machine with maximum maneuverability to do rescue work. He volunteered to fly a helicopter. What plane did he get? The least maneuverable airplane in the fleet, the Super Connie, heavily equipped with radar. His squadron was the ocean extension of the DEW line, a defense early warning system set up over Canada and the Atlantic Ocean to detect enemy planes flying towards the United States.

The Navy base in Newfoundland was great for ships but the worst place in North America for advection fog. There was no ILS available. Instead, ground-controlled approaches were used. Controllers would talk down planes to about 50 feet above and within an 1/8 of mile of the runway threshold—much lower minimums than airlines use at places like Ithaca today. Pilots listened to the controller’s directions, “One degree left and you are 5 feet high.” Pete exclaimed, “Five feet high in a Connie! With its radar, the plane was over 40 feet high itself!” If the pilots did not see the runway at 50 feet and an eighth of a mile, they would divert to an alternate airport.

One time the whole east coast was fogged in beyond the places Pete’s plane could make with their fuel: “There was nothing better to do than to fly into our home base in Newfoundland where these really great controllers were. I remember flying the approach. At minimums the copilot couldn’t see the runway or even the approach lights. I wasn’t even looking outside since I was ‘flying on instruments.’ I landed on instruments without seeing the ground. When we stopped, we still couldn’t see the ground, but we were on the runway, thank goodness. We couldn’t even see enough to taxi off the runway, nor could the ground crews see enough to drive out to lead us in. The fog was that dense. It was blowing in off the water with a good wind. We were sitting on the runway for two hours getting rid of our excess adrenalin (and eating left over chow) before someone could lead us to our hangar. How I remember that 0-0 landing! We also took off occasionally in 0-0 conditions. One time we had to take off with really low visibility from falling snow and there was snow on the runway. The ground crew drove a truck along the center of the runway just before we took off. We just followed their tracks until we were airborne! That’s called having faith in the ground crew.”

Another memorable experience was flying close together in a four-plane formation when “a DC3 split us in half.” I cluelessly asked, “On purpose?” Pete graciously explained, “No, we didn’t see each other. When you’re flying formation, what you look at solely and intently, except for the lead person, is the pilot you are flying wing on. You’re only about 10 feet apart going at about 400 miles an hour, but motion is all relative.”

“When you talk to each other in the formation, it’s just by using hand signals. You don’t use the radio because you’re so close you don’t need to. On this hazy day there were 4 of us in formation. The instructor, about a half mile behind, asked the lead guy when he was going to be over the point at which we would change leads and continue on our cross country flight. Immediately this lead pilot lowered his head in the cockpit and started to do some arithmetic to figure out the answer. So nobody’s looking out in the direction we are headed! Here’s this 4-plane formation—all of us not looking where we’re going. All of the sudden the instructor yells over the radio ‘Scramble!’ We all looked straight ahead and saw this ‘huge’ gray Air Force DC3 right in front of us.”

“I had a wingman flying on my right. I was flying on the lead plane and I immediately pushed over to go below this DC3 menace. That’s dangerous because the wingman could fly into my right wing, but he was clever enough to also push down. The two of us went under the DC3 and the other two went above the DC3 and the DC3 just kept going straight!”

“I remember I was so close to that DC3 that I felt the turbulence of its slip stream. I looked back and here’s this DC3 going straight ahead as if nothing happened. My theory is that these guys were flying on autopilot and either reading the newspaper or having heart attacks! That was the end of that. The four of us in T-28s were all over the sky—I mean we weren’t flying 10 feet apart anymore!”

“We got a thank you from the instructor. The instructor, who’s normally by himself, had a new student who had just checked into the base riding in the back seat of his plane. The new guy had asked if he could ride along with the instructor just to see what it was like. One of the things you learn about Navy flight instructors is that they can and do yell at you but not vice versa. You don’t even talk to them if you don’t have to because they will just yell at you again. But this student saw this DC3 coming toward us, so apparently he keyed the intercom and said, ‘Sir, I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but if you don’t mind me telling you sir, I think there’s a DC3 headed towards those guys.’” Then the instructor saw it and yelled at us, as was his custom, saying ‘Scramble’! He could have said ‘look out’ but there was no time for full sentences.”

Another flying experience Pete would not want to repeat was flying in a DC6 around Hawaii with passengers, including a couple of newspaper reporters: “I was giving them a nice tour of the Hawaiian islands. On the main island is this big volcano. I thought, oh, wouldn’t it be nice to go up and look at its top. On the way up, for some stupid reason, I got into a cloud. I’m thinking, ok, there’s rock out there. I’m headed up to this volcano. I’m not over it yet and I’m in a cloud. Not good. My day could be ruined. As it turned out, we broke out a few hundred feet above the rim of the volcano at a low airspeed because I’m trying to get as high as I could! I lowered the nose to get more airspeed and flew right into the hole of the volcano. Everybody on the plane said that was the best experience they’d ever had! And I was thinking that was the WORST experience I’ve ever had!”

More fun experiences were doing maneuvers in a twin engine Beechcraft, C45 or SNB, a tailwheel plane, such as doing touch and go’s without changing its heading. Huh? “If you’re going to stay in the pattern, you’ve got to fly around the pattern which takes up time. What I was doing was taking off and then letting the wind blow me back for another touch and go. It wasn’t that the wind was so strong. I was getting on the backside of the powercurve with the Beechcraft so that I was more like a helicopter. The wind was strong enough to blow it back at 20 knots indicated airspeed. That’s way below the stall speed, but I was hanging on the props while watching cylinder head temperatures. Engine cooling isn’t so good at those low airspeeds. Then I’d drop the nose, start flying normally again and do a touch and go and climb up to altitude, begin this helicopter portion again, and so on. I never had to change my heading.” A year or so later he heard on the radio someone getting credit for doing this for the first time.

Pete had the thrill of flying a supersonic jet when he was on active duty. He met a Navy test pilot who was also a medical doctor and flight surgeon: “Talk about somebody you can look up to! That’s incredible.” Before Pete could fly he had to complete seat ejection training and proudly earned a Navy issued OMIAS card (“Oh, my ass!”). Pete was ready to fly with the test pilot-medical doctor-flight surgeon: “I went on this flight with him and all he had to do was check the brakes so that took about 2 nanoseconds. This was a jet that could fly supersonic with full power straight down. He asked me if I wanted to do it. I said sure. He told me to take it up to 40,000 feet and do a split S. A split S is turning yourself on your back and then pulling the stick into your lap so instead of climbing you’re going down and very fast. We’re screaming down at full power and broke the sonic barrier at 30,000. At 15,000 feet, I reduced power, pulled out of super sonic flight and leveled out at 5,000 feet. As you can imagine this took place in a very short time. That was my first super sonic flight.”

Ask any pilot to describe flying and he or she will say it is endless hours of boredom marked by moments of stark terror. There are also experiences of smug satisfaction. Like greasing a landing: “One time I was so lucky. I had a bunch of professors from Yale University with me, in a Navy airplane, taking them down to Pensacola for a Navy orientation trip. Our job was to land exactly on the time that we were suppose to land because the Navy had a band there. They were going to play Yale music with these guys getting off the airplane. I got there a little early so we gave our passengers a tour of the some of the bases around Pensacola. We came in and landed on schedule. I happened to land that airplane so smoothly that no one could feel the touch down. It was one of those rare perfectly smooth landings. One of the passengers was a professor who taught me at Yale. He came up to the cockpit and said, gosh, what a landing. I said, ‘Well, we do that all the time. We can’t understand why these airline pilots can’t land!’”

“That was just lucky. I can’t do that everyday. In fact what typically happens to me is that I can have a whole string of really nice landings. That gets me to think that I really know how to fly and then all of a sudden I, for no reason, bang one in and then I’m back to reality again. You still have to concentrate.”

Throughout his Navy career, Pete engaged in good-humored mischievousness. Before he was allowed to fly the T-34, he and his buddies were assigned to fuel the planes. They would take out the chokes, start the plane, taxi ten feet ahead, stop the engine, push it back, and start the plane again. They weren’t suppose to be in the planes but the exhilaration of starting the engine—the noise, the fumes, the movement—was too much to resist. (My sisters and I learned to drive a car this way. We drove a red ’67 Dodge down the driveway to the mailbox, put it in reverse, backed up the driveway, and then did it again to get the newspaper.)

Pete’s mischievousness extended to the higher echelons of the Navy. He was on one of the 18-hour flights across the Atlantic in the 1950’s to look for Russian planes. The admiral in charge of the whole operation, involving planes and ships, was in the copilot’s seat in the cockpit with Pete, “a lowly lieutenant junior grade” and his flight engineer, in the middle of the night, flying on autopilot over the ocean: “A very boring way to log flight time.” There were no clouds in the sky. Only a bright, full moon. So bright it obliterated the stars. To liven up the flight and without the admiral knowing, Pete got the engineer to cut the electrical power to the compasses and attitude instruments, which froze them in position.  Pete turned the autopilot handle slightly, causing the plane to enter into a very shallow turn.   The full bright moon started its circle around the airplane.  The admiral watched the moon as it disappeared behind the plane. When the moon came around in view again on the other side, the compasses still registering the original heading, the admiral reached over and punched Pete in the arm and said, “Loucks, did you see that?!” Pete said, “Yes sir, it's strange, but it always circles us at this time of night every time we are out here and we can't figure out why.”

I asked Pete if there is a personality type that makes better pilots. He said, “All types make pilots. In my early youth, I thought pilots must be Jack Armstrong type people, whatever that means, but pilots are just ordinary people. Some are obviously better than others. If you get a thrill out of being a little bit free in the air, if you can take some criticism and you don’t get sick (after soloing) and you do your homework well before each flight, you are likely to enjoy flying for a long time to come. In the Navy Reserves, flying with airline pilots, bankers, lawyers, garbage collectors, post office clerks, and everybody in between was just a neat experience. You really find out what’s going on the world.”

If Pete had to convince others to fly he would simply tell them, “It’s fun! That’s all. Lots of people fly. If you’re smart enough about its risks and your capabilities, it’s safe, although you can be unlucky. It’s exhilarating. It’s also satisfying to some extent to know that you can do it and do it well and command the respect of your peers and your loud mouth flight instructors!”

Pete offered to go flying with me. I don’t have the same reservations my husband had many years ago. My reservations are related to being flipped over sideways. I’ve worked so hard to stay straight and level.