Q: What is it that makes a flyer? Is it something that the Navy teaches? Is it something that God gives someone?

ARTHUR: The Navy can teach you to fly. But not everybody can learn to fly. Everybody can learn to do a little bit of it. To do it at the level of precision that it requires to be a military pilot, there has to be something inside of you, first of all. And it's a very misunderstood skill. Some people think that if you can fly an airplane, great. You can be a great officer. The two are totally separate. You can be a great officer and a lousy pilot. There's all combinations of this thing. But to be a good pilot, there has to be-- Inside of you, a special little thing that nobody knows where it comes from. We have all sorts of tests to predict, and they're pretty accurate. But you would think that somebody that was very mechanically inclined would always be a good pilot. That's not true. You'd think a great athlete would be a natural to be a pilot. Not necessarily so.

Q: But what the Navy has to be good at is discerning whether or not its aviators have that. How does it show itself?

ARTHUR: In the young stages of learning to fly an airplane, it shows itself first of all by the retention factor: how well you learn from one flight to the next; how well you retain that skill; how automatic does that skill become, once you've mastered it. Is your automatic reflex to do it right or to do it wrong? And so those are the things, as you're going through the training pipeline, that the instructors look at. What's the retention? What happens when stressed? Do they default to a solid position, or do they default to a position of instability, where they're unsure of what action to take next, or their maneuvers with the airplanes reflect this inability to really grasp the situation? Do they retain the skill? Can they move that skill up to the next level when required?

Q: You were shot off of the deck a lot of times, off of Vietnam. There was at least one time, up near Danang, that you had an engine failure and you had to wrestle the plane down. Tell me about that.

ARTHUR: We had been up on a bombing mission. And it was during one of the offensives. I forget exactly the time frame now. But we were back in the back corner of the border between North and South Vietnam and the Laos border, a pretty hot little spot at the time. We'd completed our bombing runs, coming off the target, I got a whiff of smoke in the cockpit, a smell. I took a look around, and called my wing man and said, "There's something wrong here. I think I've got oil fumes in the cockpit. Take a look at me to see if I've got any holes." He took a look and said, "No, I don't. It doesn't look like you've been hit. Your smoking out of your oil vent from the engine." I said, "Okay. I think I've probably got an oil seal problem. We better head for Danang." As we went sure enough, my oil level disappeared on me and oil pressure started to get a little low, but it was still within limits. Making the approach into Danang, the engine finally decided to give up the ghost. And I got a couple real bad backfires out of it. He thought I was on fire. We were over an overcast. I knew I was fairly close to the field, so I took a dive through, and took a look. Now I was over the bay, and there were ammo ships all over the place. So I had enough speed and altitude, and the engine had quit, so went in and put it on the ground at Danang.

I was ready to come out of it until I saw where I was. There was no way of predicting where the airplane would go. So as long as it was flying, I decided to stay with it as long as I could.

Q: After the Gulf War has ended what were the challenges, the needs perceived by the naval aviation community, even the junior officers, as those needs and challenges filtered up to you. What did you hear?

ARTHUR: I felt that we had seen the last of the usefulness of the A-6 in a true combat role; that it had become very vulnerable to modern day systems. The programs that we'd had in place to be the replacement had floundered back here in Washington. The old ATA which turned into the A-12, and the A-12 program ran into trouble. And so the replacement for the A-6 was not coming on schedule. And yet I felt that the A-6 had pretty much reached the end of its useful life in a real hard combat role. Still a very capable airplane, and certainly the people who were flying it and are still flying it today, extraordinarily talented people. But we were going to take too many losses with that airplane, if we ever got it-- hit into a major conflict again, it was time to start moving and making-- putting pressure on the system to fix this problem.

Our F-18 community acquitted itself well, but we found there were some limitations to the F-18 if we were going to keep the airplane on our deck for a long time. And consequently, the now continuing dialogue on the F-18-- Is it the right thing to do? I certainly thought it was. We needed to make a little change in the survivability features for the F-18 and give it a little bit more capability in all weather conditions and limited visibility conditions.

So there was a little reconfiguration going on of our air wings, as a result of what we learned in the conflict. And I think this brought a little nervousness to the people, because obviously, when a community goes away, it's pretty traumatic. And quite honestly, there had been nobody up through the rank of captain in the aviation community by that time, who had ever seen a community disappear. Naval aviation had been in such a stable mode for so long that there were people who didn't realize--- in the middle of Vietnam and said, "Hey, this airplane has outlived its usefulness in a combat role." We had all these people who had never seen communities go away, and realize that you can move from community. I have moved from community. I had moved from the ASW carrier ASW community into the light attack community, back when I was a lieutenant commander. But there were not many people around who could remember those kinds of days. And so it was very unsettling.

Q: You'd moved from propeller planes into the jets. Were we into the downsizing thing yet?

ARTHUR: We were into downsizing. We went into downsizing quite rapidly after Desert Storm. And in fact, the Navy had been in a downsizing mode before that. We had already started realizing that we were going to have to downsize. And unlike especially the Army, which froze their downsizing during Desert Storm, the Navy continued to make progress in downsizing. So we were still making progress relative to where we thought we would be going. And then of course that was fortuitous at the time, because the bottom-up review came along shortly thereafter, which really put the pressure on to get sized correctly in a hurry.

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