If you were sent to Tactical Air Command, however, you would check out in F-84s, F-86s, or perhaps F-100s, and spend six to eight months in gunnery school.4 Since the Air Force had no need for fighter pilots, however, you would probably then go to bomber school for another six to eight months and graduate as a Strategic Air Command B-47 copilot, or, if you were one of the top students, you might be asked to remain in Air Training Command and become an instructor pilot. There you would spend three years building flight time and teaching, but a lot of that flying would be in the backseat of the T Bird, a fate Chuck Horner did not relish. After that, if you wanted to fly fighters, you would probably get assigned to gunnery school, and if you wanted to fly heavies, to bomber school, or to air transport school. There was in those days—and there is still—an informal screening system: people believed to be incapable of flying fighters were urged to fly, or were otherwise sent to, heavies.

Because Horner had graduated number one in his flight and was fighter-qualified, he was eligible either for instructor training or for one of the few gunnery school slots. The matter came to a head when the Group Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Watkins, offered him a teaching spot at Laredo. When the offer was made, however, he gulped, refused, and somehow found himself picked for one of the few F-100 gunnery school slots. He figured you better follow your destiny, even if it might take him to B-47s. The main thing was that fighter flying was in his blood. Even if he got sent on to B-47s, he knew that somehow in the future he would find a way to fly fighters.

★ One of the proudest moments in Chuck Horner’s life came on the day Mary Jo pinned a very tiny set of pilot wings on his uniform. The ceremony took place in Laredo, in a paint-peeling, run-down, non-air-conditioned base movie theater, straight out of World War II. He had never worked so hard for anything as he had for those wings.

It was also in Laredo that Horner was introduced to the tough side of military aviation, the missing-man formation flyby, to commemorate a pilot killed in an aircraft accident.

One day, he was sitting on the end of the runway in his T-33, awaiting takeoff clearance, when the aircraft ahead of him, as it was lifting off, rolled abruptly and flew into the ground. The ailerons—the movable surfaces on the aft part of the wing that enable a pilot either to keep his wings level or to roll the aircraft—were incorrectly rigged5 so that both of them moved in the same direction. When the pilot made an input to level the wings, the aircraft rolled; the more he tried to level the wings, the more he kept rolling.