The training was strenuous, and there were few active duty pilot places to fill—it was not unlike an entire college senior class showing up at NFL summer camp and vying for a position on the forty-man roster. At this time, the Air Force was capable of producing far more pilots than they needed. Their pilot factory had been constructed to satisfy the huge need for pilots during the Korean War, but now the Air Force was smaller and more stable, and thus the name of the game was to wash out anyone who showed a weakness. Instead of receiving additional instruction when he made a mistake, a student pilot entered a process designed to eliminate him from the program. He was gone, no second chances. That meant he never left blood in the water, or else the sharks would come to visit.

The overall washout rate from entry into preflight at Lackland to graduation from Basic Training was near 85 percent, with the vast majority coming from the aviation cadets, men who did not have a college degree. (Student officers tended to be older and more mature than the cadets; and they had additionally made it through college—itself a screening process—and had passed through the light-plane screening program.) Every day someone would be out-processing after being eliminated.

To make sure he was never in jeopardy, Horner studied as he had never studied in college. He actually practiced the next day’s flight maneuvers sitting at home in a chair, going over in his mind all the challenges he might run into the next day. The hard work paid off. He was soon headed to jet training at Laredo AFB and, if he made it, his wings.

The T-33 (T Bird) Horner would fly there was a two-seat training version of the F-80, one of the first jet fighters. F-80s had fought in Korea.

The T Bird was a good-looking aircraft, but old—most of them had been around for five or ten years; the T Bird’s technology was from the 1940s. It was fully acrobatic, very honest to fly, reasonably fast, and could stay airborne for two and a half hours at high altitude, but since it was straight-winged, it was subsonic. The worst thing about the T Bird was the seat. Though there was a seat cushion, you sat on a bailout oxygen bottle, which was like sitting on an iron bar. Flying a T Bird meant you had “a one-hour ass.” After you were in the jet that long, your tail hurt so bad you wanted to land.