I was flipping through the channels last night and came across a program about test pilots on the Discovery Wings channel. For the first 20 minutes of the show, they highlighted a test flight being ran down at Eglin AFB, FL. The test pilot was one of my classmates at Squadron Officer School (SOS), Major (now Lt. Col.) Troy Fontaine. It was pretty cool to see someone I knew doing a job that I'd live any redundant part of my anatomy to do.

The program was probably filmed in 1998. Troy is now the commander of Test Operations at Edwards. Sounds like he's doing well. The picture below is of him giving a tour on the F-15 to June Lockhart, star of Lassie and Lost in Space. He was also in the back seat when Chuck Yeager made his last supersonic flight.

At SOS, we were divided in small flights of perhaps 14 people. Troy was a real character and a frustrated F-111 pilot at the time. He was frustrated because we were at SOS when the Gulf War broke out. He wanted to be there so bad. In the last week of SOS, he received orders to transfer to his dream job, flying F-15E Strike Eagles. He was tired of running away if he got in trouble - he wanted to "turn around and shoot them in the face!"

When the war broke out, we all went to donate blood. It wasn't easy convincing the pilots to give blood because if they passed out, they could get grounded. He gave, but for some reason, his veins in his arm collapsed about halfway through. No matter what he did, no more blood would come out. After that, we called him "Half Pint."

There was a woman in my flight who did well, too. Her name was Sharon Pressler (sp?). She was a navigator on Looking Glass with orders to pilot training later that year. I read the next year that she was the first woman selected to fly the F-16. Pretty cool.