My Flight With the Wannabe Space Pilots of the Mojave

Into the air with the aerospace engineers making themselves into the test pilots that the future needs.

Scott Glaser stands at the front of the pilot ready room at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, holding two sticks with plastic airplane models at the ends, one red and one blue. He demonstrates a maneuver called a crossover, moving one plane in an arc under the other. It’s effective—but it also looks like something a kid would do for fun, yelling neeoooooow.

Watching the demo are a scrappy bunch of civilian pilots who are learning to fly like aces---in close formation. Right now they’re sitting in leather chairs and taking notes, but in just an hour and a half, they will be in the grown-up versions of those toys, learning how to fly in formations like fighter pilots and airshow pros. And while the chaperones---like Jim Brown, who was once the chief test pilot for the F-22 program---usually have military aviation training, these trainees usually do not. They’re treading air trying to make up for it.

Since this is Mojave, many of them work for aerospace companies like Scaled Composites, which designed the Ansari X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne, or the Spaceship Company, which built Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, a spaceplane that will eventually take tourists, if not exactly to space, then at least really, really high. Working at these New Space firms is competitive, and employees will do whatever it takes to set themselves apart. The new business landscape of private aerospace companies demands new aircraft, which means someone has to see if they fly. Just as their employers are privately-owned upstarts in a government-dominated industry, they are civilian upstarts trying to become something once the dominion of the military-industrial complex: test pilots.

But in order to test, say, the actual SpaceShip Two, you have to fly while another plane chases from close behind. That’s formation flying, and it’s fighter-pilot stuff---a skill most civilian pilots never acquire. Why would they? Your Piper Cub can’t do what an F-22 can. But the new crop of wanna-be spaceships are a whole different story. Scaled is one of a handful of companies that promotes test pilots from within. But “they realized they had a crop of pilots who knew how to fly,” says Brown, “but nobody knew how to fly formation.”

So these hybrid engineer-flyers, and others who just want to level up, sit in this classroom with Glaser, a non-military guy who has learned the ways of that world and wants to open the gate for others. He goes over hand signals, acronyms, emergency diversion spots, the don’ts of parachute ejection. If your plane “trades paint” with another aircraft? “You’ve determined you cannot fly in formation,” Glaser says. “So don’t come back.” Brown, who in his (many, storied) Air Force days flew formation as a matter of course, occasionally chimes in.

“Good comments. Thanks,” Glaser says.

“Just enhancing the brief,” Brown says from the back of the room.

Glaser concludes his remarks with a mix of drama and bravado. “I was up late last night making gumbo,” he says. “So you all better fucking be there to eat it.”

He doesn’t mean they should cancel their evening plans. He means they shouldn’t die.

Sarah Scoles
Putting the Team Together

When Glaser moved to Mojave in 2011, he’d already been certified in the Redstar Pilots Association’s training program, one of 17 signatory organizations to offer official courses after airshow accidents led the FAA to regulate civilian formation flying in the 1990s. They require civilians to train and follow procedures instead of just flying really close together, a laissez-faire approach called “gaggling.”

Working at the Spaceship Company as a flight test engineer (he is now a Vice President at both Flight Research and the International Flight Test Institute), Glaser heard that some Scaled Composites engineers also flew formation. Glaser wanted to go up with them. But one day at a barbecue, Dick Rutan, a legendary aviator who set a nonstop ’round-the-world record, told him to hold up. Those engineers, he said, were gagglers. Rutan had planned to teach them right but hadn’t had time yet.

So Glaser started a group called Mojo to train them to FAA standards. He enlisted the help of pilots from across the Aerospace Valley, mostly military or ex-military flyers for whom this stuff was kinetic memory. Being an instructor, and seeing a trainee sweating into their leather seat, puts the instructors in a time machine. “It flashed us back into flight school, where we were learning formation, that extreme concentration,” says Brown. “And also how it has now become absolutely totally subconscious second nature.”

That happens fast for Air Force pilots, because they fly together day in and day out. “Civilians don’t have the same basic stick-and-rudder skills,” says Glaser, himself a civie. Their training isn’t as rigorous, or ritual-filled. Private pilots don’t have to reckon with as many bad situations, or airplane “upsets.” They may never have been upside-down.

Mojo students like Elliot Seguin, now an experimental test pilot with Mooney International in Chino, California, want to make those strange situations and sensations familiar, but it’s hard work. They’re constantly playing catch-up. “The civie guys have to wake up at 6 am on a Saturday, rent an airplane, and blow the day to get the three hours of experience that a military-trained guy got on the clock with a lunch break,” he says.

Flying Formation

During World War I, pilots discovered that they could both attack and defend better if they huddled up. With more eyes and perspectives, they could see the other side’s planes coming from all sides, and either maneuver or protect each other (with guns).

Today, the military also uses formation flight to shrink its carbon footprint and costs. The wings of each aircraft create vortices, air moving from under the wing around the tip to above it, where pressure is lower. That swirls the air into spirals that trail the plane on each side. The left wing vortex rotates clockwise; the right wing vortex goes counter. Both are upwash, pushing air higher. Between them, though, is a downwash that creates extra drag on the plane. But if a follower plane positions itself in the upwash of the plane ahead of it, as the birds flying in V-shaped flocks do, that’s an efficiency jackpot that saves fuel and therefore money. Aerodynamicists at places like NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center and Edwards Air Force Base, both near Mojave, analyze airflow around planes and try to help formations’ followers hit that jackpot.

The follower plane has to know where the wake is, stay there, and steer through the less-stable air, because with the wake comes turbulence. Autonomous flight-software programs, like those developed as part of the Air Force Research Laboratory's Surfing Aircraft Vortices for Energy project, aim to make jets position themselves in the right spot---and stay there---with autopilot and auto-throttle. The program reduced fuel use by 10 percent.

But without smart software---which the Mojo planes don’t have---formation flying’s challenge is one of proprioception. In neuroscience that’s the knowledge of where your limbs are, where your body is in space. In flying, it’s knowing where the other planes in your formation are, as if you had a psychic link. They aren’t often flying directly in or through each other’s wakes, but they still have to deal with bumpy air and not trading paint, but still sticking within 200 to 500 feet of their neighbors.

It doesn’t feel natural, or good. As Glaser says in the brief, “Move forward so you think you’re almost too close. As you feel the hackles stand up on the back of your neck, you know you’re in the right place.”

Within two years of starting the team, Glaser had elevated his first students to instructors. And last year, when Scaled announced two test pilot job openings, both jobs went to Mojo members. “They were told by the interviewing committee that one of the reasons they got picked was their ability to execute disciplined formation chase flight.” In private aeronautics, civie pilots were closing the gap.

Sarah Scoles
The Pilots' Swagger

For decades, aerospace innovation was a government thing. But now, operations like the Air and Space Port at Mojave are spinning the industry into something new. The Mojo pilots are doing something similar: taking a conquering tradition and making it their own, to challenge themselves, get better, and go somewhere and be something they have never been before. To learn, break in, disrupt.

Still, elements of the old school—think the alpha dogs in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, a book about the fraternity of test pilots who became the first astronauts—remain. As back then, beer is currency, punishment, and reward. Annoy the teacher? That’s a beer. Do a great job? Beers! There’s some bravado, some hero-worship. The group goes raptly silent at post-flight parties when Brown says, “I remember when… .”

Brown and the legends like him are the anointed ones, the kings of the airport. And every pilot’s goal is to be the person who is admired. “The guys that are here all want to think they are that guy,” says Seguin.

But truly becoming That Guy is no small task, especially when the becoming happens off the clock. Perhaps because of the long tail of learning, a bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it goes on—and what they fake is the archetype, like a teenager who wants to “be punk.” “The ones who run their mouths and strut around aren’t that great,” says Glaser. “When they’re good at what they do, they don’t have to swagger.” And when you’re flying a plane, being good at what you can is the difference between life and crashing. Perhaps some of the bravado is just meant to whitewash fear.

But flight-suit swagger is, in general, much less common among the civie set. “When you have to trade time with the family, or the money you should be spending on new tires for the car, to get the training after work hours while holding down a full-time job, its going to be different,” Seguin says. “It is probably only because it takes so long to become a civie guy in this echelon of pilots that any person who wasn't absolutely out of their mind for this stuff would move on.”

Seguin and his usual flying partner, Justin Gillen, a project engineer at Scaled Composites, actively rebel against the Right Stuff stereotype. Instead of giving themselves call signs like “Dagger” or “Talon Entrails” (both jokingly suggested at the pre-flight brief), they choose the names “Glitter” and “Sparkle.”

The pilots describe their interactions in almost marital terms. “You’re working as one machine,” says Glaser. When your partner comes over the radio, you understand what they’re not saying, by the way they’re not saying it. “You hear different inflection in their voice,” he says, “and you know there’s a problem.”

It’s kind of sweet, this intimacy. Like the planes they fly, they have moved forward until they feel almost too close. That’s how they know they’re in the right place.

Into the Air

After the morning meeting, the pilots split off into teams of six, in three airplanes. I’m flying with a student named Lou Junkins---the CEO of Dixie Fried Fabrication, a metal fabrication company in Highland, California---who got into formation flying because he wanted a personal challenge. He used to just fly to different towns and grab a hamburger, or land his rig on long Jeep roads, and chat with the strangers on ATVs. But after a while, he wanted to grow his skills. He came to a Mojo clinic. His red Thorp T-18 will be flying in formation with an old Air Force T-344 and a Lancair 4. The pilots go over the maneuvers and signals again and head out to their planes.

On the control panel of Junkins’ Thorp is a sign that reads “Don’t do nothin’ stupid.” When he closes the canopy, it touches my headset.

Junkins looks out the front as the T-344 zooms down the runway. After the wheels leave the pavement, the Lancair starts moving. Ten seconds later, Junkins pushes in his throttle and we roll out, too. The gap between us is partly to keep us safe from wake turbulence, which is rougher in takeoff and landing than it is mid-flight, because the craft is flying at such a steep angle.

Safely up in the air, the planes jockey into position. We approach from below, faster than the lead plane, and convert our airspeed—kinetic energy—into altitude—potential energy—and rise up to meet our leader. Soon, the planes are all so close to each other and so in sync that it hardly looks like we are moving at all. It’s not effortless: Junkins is constantly working to maintain this zero relative velocity, battling the molecules the other planes bat around as well as the air’s natural shimmying. He’s doing a solid job, though. Normally, a passenger can watch the stable horizon if they feel sick. In formation, I can just stare at the blackheads on the nose of the pilot one plane over (although, for the record, I feel fine and I don’t know if he has blackheads).

The lead pilot shows a single fist. Junkins nods big, so the lead knows he saw the signal. He maneuvers us under the lead’s fuselage. As our plane emerges on the other side, the propellers superimpose, their spins interfering like computer monitors recorded by video cameras. I expected to feel freaked out, a few hundred feet from another fast-flying aircraft, but I actually just trusted the pilots: They seemed calm, concentrated, in control.

Soon, the leader signals that it’s time to move into the formation. Later, the planes follow the leader, without using the throttle. We have to cut turns sharp to shorten our path, use elevation gains to slow down—Cinderella-ing kinetic energy into potential—and, in an opposite conversion, use drops to speed up. A few times, our plane twists almost 180 degrees to the Earth, pulling a 2-G curve. The ground fills the glass where sky used to be. In this moment, despite my trust, something animal inside does tell press on my “fight or flight” response. The choice here is, obviously, flight.

When we level out and pull in behind with the other two, the plane drops hard, like Tower-of-Terror hard. We flew through the Lancair’s wake turbulence, Junkins says.

“Do you get used to that?” I ask.

He nods. Just as new drivers learn not to swerve into trees to avoid possums, formation flyers train out natural panic responses.

After three sets of maneuvers, the leader rocks his plane in the signal for a return to base. An invisible hand pulls the invisible strings between the planes tight, and we whoosh together over a mountain ridge, wing tips almost touching, propellers raging, wind whipping through the crack between canopy and fuselage. It feels powerful, like we are about to go conquer something.