Memory, And The Pilot

It happens to all of us:

A former Navy Top Gun with decades of flying experience forgot to put his plane's landing gear down during an air show practice run in Tucson in March, the Federal Aviation Administration found.

Retired Capt. Dale "Snort" Snodgrass, a seasoned pro on the military air-show circuit, was piloting a Korean War-era F-86 Sabre that scraped to a stop and caught fire in the March 4 mishap at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

... Snodgrass remains on the Air Force schedule this season. The service still has "total confidence in his abilities," according to a statement from the Air Combat Command.

... If damage is minor and the incident is a simple oversight, discipline usually consists of giving the pilot a talking-to, Schultz said. The lecture would be "kind of demeaning" for a highly accomplished aviator, he said.

Snodgrass, who retired from a 26-year Navy career in 1999, is renowned in the air-show world. He has 10,000 hours of flight time under his belt, half of them in the F-14 Tomcat, a Navy record for the jet. In 1985, Snodgrass was a Top Gun graduate and the Navy's Fighter Pilot of the Year. From 1994 to 1997, he was commander of all the Navy's F-14s. He flew the Tomcat in air shows for more than a decade, and is qualified on at least six other aircraft, including several vintage warplanes.