Probably better than life as not an F-15 WSO
Seriously, for all the bitching I did above and that others in this business probably do at times, it's still kind of first world problems. You get paid to fly thousands of hours in airplanes that few ever get a chance to even sit in, you get to (hopefully) succeed in one of the most demanding and dynamic jobs anywhere in the world, and you get to experience things that your friends can't even comprehend. How about sitting in the ready room of USS Ship, in all of your flight gear, when the 1MC calls "launch the alert 15 fighters".......which is pretty much what you have been waiting to hear your entire life since you were about 4 years old since you saw Top Gun.....except now it is actually happening, and you are one of those dudes. You go sprinting down the pway as fast as you possibly can, with people literally jumping out of your way. Get up to the flight deck, and in the time it takes a guy to preflight a cessna, your jet is already in tension on cat 1. You are shot off the front, and without ever bringing the motors out of full afterburner, you get to completely disregard every procedural rule in the book short of flying into the water, and you just point the nose towards the bad guy and climb like a scalded cat as you blow through the number. For a few minutes, you are the guy who would be in a picture next to the definition of "hard dick fighter pilot", if such a term were in the dictionary. Every E-2 controller or helo pilot hottie in the airwing is watching you too, and they know you are infinitely handsome, debonair, and pretty much just dead sexy. Your boner fest is slightly diminished by the time you get to the "merge" and realize the bad guy is just a G-1 or something weird and the whole thing is a training exercise, but you know that had it been a Bear, you would have absolutely shot it, because that is what you were put on the earth to do. You might even close your eyes, and imagine sweeping the wings of the big fighter, while turning the ICS knob down to drown out the troll in the backseat saying things like "dude that is the 7:15 out of Tampa". But then you are suddenly thrown back into reality when you realize you are simply talking to yourself because there is no backseat, and you are way below ladder, and you pretty much need to just chill out and hold overhead the ship at 250 knots because you have been in max AB for the last 10 minutes trying to be the first dude to get to the bad guy.........I mean how else were you going to tell everyone else in the airwing that they love the weiner, at 0200 on friday night when you are all sipping things like juice and milk and real party foods like cereal and jello, without a hot selfie of you next to some bizarre prop job that looks like Hef's personal ride from 1963. But you just seal the deal, when all those hotties get to watch you rip it off a mile behind the stern at like 10000 knots, and you go from a high start, to a settle, to a underline fly through down at the ramp to a taxi 1........boom.........they wouldn't put it there if it wasn't for stopping. As you play out in the wire, your canopy opens up and while the boss and everyone else is screaming for you to close your damned canopy and get out of the LA, you calmly say "not now chief, I'm in the zone", shut that hog down right then and there, get out and toss your helmet into the ocean, and walk straight across the flight deck like a rockstar and giving bro hugs to all the weirded out yellow shirts you can cross paths with.
Seriously, thats what we do on the reg
