Iu2019ve had the privilege of working as a photojournalist to cover the Blues and I can answer this question. Iu2019ve flown in all the positions within the four- and six-plane configurations and watched them close up. I am appending at the bottom of this answer my impressions based on time with them in the F-4 Phantom, A-4 Skyhawk and F/A-18 Hornet. I hope a current or former Blue Angel will also respond, and correct me when (not if) I get it wrong.Blues are aviators (Navy, Marine) with excellent skills and experience in the aircraft being flown, currently the F/A-18 C/D and soon to be the F/A-18 E/F (C /E= single seat, D/F = two seat). Pilots entering a career phase where they could take the time to be Blues apply and are vetted by the incumbents for their congruence with the team. u2018Newbiesu2024 go with the team to winter training at NAF El Centro, where they work up slowly and carefully to tighter and tighter spacing. This is a three-month period, from January to March, that ends with the first show of the season, flown at El Centro.The flying is a continuous, focused exercise in excellence, and does not get easier. Every show is a test of skill and courage, though the team members do not show this in their demeanor.All too rarely a freelance writer gets into special, unique places where few have gone. This enabled me to be the first photojournalist to fly and photograph the U-2 . This also happened to me in the case of the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy Flight Demonstration Team, whose formation aerobatics have been seen by hundreds of millions of spectators around the world since the team was formed in 1946.The goal of this activity is straightforward: to attract volunteers to the Navy who would like to fly military airplanes. It works, because it shows pilots working at the ragged edge of the possible. And it is insanely beautiful. Thus when I was invited to go in the cockpit with the team, in various slots of the six airplanes, I could hardly wait to accept. Yes, this is a military endeavor. Pacifists should not apply. But it is also athletic and sporting, and that was my approach. In the end I flew with them over two decades in three different aircraft, the McDonnel F-4 Phantom, the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk and the Northrop F/A-18 Hornet. My Honorary Blue Angel membership card is a treasured artifact.While I was becoming the first photojournalist to fly with the Blues, and the fine cinematographer Paul Marlow was filming his magnificent Threshold, I wrote an article about the experience, titled Dancing on the Rim of Eternity. Why this title? Because these men (there have been, as yet, no women pilots in the team, though they fly the support C-130) put their lives on the line every time they fly. Blues have died. Paul and I were at the Bluesu2024 winter-training site at NAF El Centro, California. Here is my report. It stands the test of time.DANCING ON THE RIM OF ETERNITYThere are few dangerous sports. In baseball, the bean ball or gravel rash. In football, broken bones or concussion from a collision, clip or blind-side block. Track? Salt loss and athleteu2019s foot. Horse racing?u2014watch that fence. Mountain climbing is mostly mental, quite slow. It's endurance, risky only for the inept or rashu2014say, climbing the Eiger or Everest solo, as some do at marginal sanity levels, risky to no one else.Auto racing, then? Well, only individual drivers decide how fast to gou2014the effete Grand Prix Drivers' Association, in the record, struck courses it considered risky. Runoff and gravel traps protect the foolhardy, even in MotoGP (the Isle of Man, Northern Ireland and Macau races remain lethal). Bullfighting? Hemingway might hate us, but is it really more than just a marvelous machtrip, ballet with a horn in the groin? Ice hockey? Hardly: face and shin protection is effective these days. No, there are few dangerous sports.Carrier flying, especially traps on moonless nights without horizon, in heavy weather with a lot of deck motion, hangs way out there. Do it right and be lucky, and live. The rest? Bush. Then there is formation aerobatics, as practiced by the Blue Angels.The Bluesu2024 show, aerial performance art, is superbly choreographed from start to finish, from the detailed pre-brief that takes an hour or more, to the walk-down, to the final handshake back on the ground as they meet, humans again, in sweatu00adsoaked flight suits. Nominal Bluesu2024 wingtip-to-canopy separation is thirty-six inches, maintained virtually without letup from start to finish, from maneuver to maneuver, for an hour.Well, itu2019s not really thirty-six inches. Thatu2019s just a number. Itu2019s often much less. Nudging contact is not rareu2014zero inches. At five hundred knots. Believe. A Blue Angels F-4J Phantom lies at the bottom of San Francisco Bay, off Hunters Point, dumped there in October 1969 out of NAS Alameda after a midair during the u2018changeover rollu2024 in which echelon becomes diamond. Truly a game of . . . well, of inches.Tension in the cockpits sometimes rises to intolerable levels, at up to 7Gs without G suits that would inflate and deflect their wrists at the wrong instant. Blues have been known to say to themselves, inside their secret souls: u2018Just let me make it through the next maneuver, not even think about anything after that.u2024 The next, then the next.Photo caption: The u2018opener,u2024 with minimal separation (F/A-18s),Though millions fly daily and spectate at air races and exhibitions, only a tiny fraction understands what they are seeing. Yet normal flying is to the Bluesu2024 formation aerobatics as the sandlot is to the Superbowl. What gives?Close up with the team, in the cockpit and on the ground, you sense a knowing, an uncanny rationale that is almost disbelief, in the Bluesu2024 attitude to their work. The pleasure is the basic, sensual delight in doing something difficult, doing it well, representing a proud group, being an elite, chosen few. The joke is a wry oneu2014actually being paid to do these great things with airplanes.This is dangerous territory for outsiders, like the rarified atmosphere around the Grand Prix and Indy stars, the MotoGP pilots, the brave few who tame monster surf at Mavericks, the Eiger and Everest challengers, the surviving bullfighters, the special-forces guys. For the uninitiated the atmosphere is almost too thin to breathe, let alone speak or write.In many high-risk spectator sports, the easy is often made to look difficult. But with formation aerobatics, such as those practiced by the Blues for over seventy years, the opposite occurs. The just barely possibleu2014such as the roll into the trailing edge of the echelonu2014must be made to look what they call u2018routine.u2024 The very word u2018routineu2024 is understatement, yet no public authority sanctioning air shows, including or especially the FAA, would permit such flying if it were not performed safely and professionally.Of all the popular spectator and participant sports, few are more ubiquitous yet less understood than flight. Any eight-year-old can ape his quarterback hero, football cocked. All you need for track is legs. u2018Race driversu2024 leave circuits in their family car s by the tens of thousand after every u2018go.u2024 Millions dunk into hoops worldwide. What gives?Itu2019s simple, really.Simple. All you need do is spend ten or more years learning to fly a Navy or Marine jet safely, at a level of controlled aggression that hovers close to overconfident sociopath. If your schedule permits, you can apply to the team for acceptance. Only one in ten or twenty is accepted. Then you strap yourself into a 30,O00-pound flying device day after day in winter training and for the next two hundred days, stay alert for sixty minutes, operate some simple controls with good manual dexterity and accurate timing, follow a set of instructions you've practiced a few hundred times.Not much to it.Not much. As long as you can concentrate relentlessly, second by second, for that eternal hour, instants spinning out agonizingly, with all the complex systems of that fifteen-ton piece of living sculpture functioning as though your every nerve-end extended into the furthest plate and rivet and nut and bolt. Controls must be operated by autonomic reflex. Your life depends on it. So does the life of each man in the team.Nothing to it.Nothing. Until you start to see and feel beyond the elegant three-dimensional aerial ballet and look at the men and machines as raw extensions of the limits of sporting skill, the necessity to excel. Only a handful of men in the world have been thereu2014with flyingu2019s traditional zipped lip, they donu2019t say much about it. Ask the man who drives one and chances are heu2019ll look straight through you. Words donu2019t work. You must be there, witness it, let yourself feel it. It is humbling.Czech aerobatic pilot Mira Slovak, who invented the u2018Lomcevaku2024 (tumble) was asked how he recovers from this shattering maneuver. u201cIt's simple,u201d shrugged Mira. u201cYou just wait till it does something you recognize.u201d With the Blues, the fact that their maneuvers appear recognizable is irrelevantu2014few pilots in the world are qualified to attempt them.Thereu2019s an essential difference with the Blues. They are not competing individuals, but a team whose existence, literally, depends on each other. They must know their own and each otheru2019s skills, wills, intellects and emotionsu2014and trust these qualities in each other. So the interior joke is ultimately turned inwards, like a knifeu2014a frozen smile that hides the unspoken, unspeakable knowledge of what a moment's inattention, a single error, could mean. Blues have died, too often. They have learned, as all pilots do, that every action must be planned, precise and timely. The consequences of error lurk behind every flight, not just with formation aerobatics.This acceptance of mortality is the glue that holds these men together, creates a bond man for man, naked in front of his peers, that is the spirit of the group, akin to combat brotherhood. For make no mistake about it, the flying of the Blues (and of the Thunderbirds, England's Red Arrows, the Patrouille de France, the Frecce Tricolori in Italy, with whom I have flown, and their few peer teams worldwide) is of a quality that defies description.All right, then. Letu2019s face the really tough question: why? Why do it?The answer is complex, especially for professional pilots working, as the Blues do, at the ragged edge of what can be done consistently. At its heart, perhaps itu2019s the terrible discipline and fundamental artistry of flying well. You canu2019t fake it, or paint it on, or wear it. You canu2019t really talk about it. You just have to do it: put your life on the line each time you go. For real pilots, for honest humans, thatu2019s a mystical discipline worth living or even dying to experience. Thatu2019s what audiences sense: truth.For spectators, or especially for a journalist watching up close, in the cockpit, there is an equally important and unmeasurable effect, buried in the mind and heart. One felt it watching Neil Armstrong set his boot on the Moon almost half a century ago, through a blurred and flickering TV signal. One feels it as one watches the Bluesu2024 six pilots fight for inches, for control, for precision, to make it all look easy.As the unyielding earth waits patiently below, sudden seconds away, the Blues weave their almost mystical patterns in air, to standards set man for man, up there, beyond the view of us mere mortals. They are dancing on the rim of eternity, locked together by the intellect, will, reflexes and training of six skilled and courageous men. Foru2014as Emerson put itu2014u201ca great part of courage is having done the thing before.u201dI met the Blues through a friend who had served in the U.S. Navy with the teamu2019s (then) maintenance officer. I visited the team and they invited me to winter training at NAF El Centro in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border, where I bunked at the BOQ, flew ten hops with them in the F-4J Phantom and took 1,100 photos of which fifty-eight were sensational, about the right proportion. My proposal to a major magazine was accepted, provisionally, based on good photos. I made good friends then who remain close to this day.I wrote the story and waited to get my photos duped (never send originals to a publication, always get dupes made), to send to New York. At the time, no photojournalist had written about or photographed formation aerobatics in any of the major worldwide teams. This Blue Angels story, with photos, would be a career-changing exclusive, a national-level u2018door openeru2024 that would resonate far into the future.The man who gave me my first writing job in Silicon Valley, Lawson Jones, had escaped the ad-agency business and created a photo lab. Grateful for his earlier leadership and writing guidance, I took my fifty-eight Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides to him for reproduction, though Kodaku2019s Palo Alto lab was conveniently nearby. On the second of the three days in process, his establishment burned to the ground and all my photos were destroyed.The magazine cancelled its commitmentu2014no pix. Since my first visit to the Blues, many others have sat in those same fighter-aircraft seats and many have taken fine photographs and video. I was too discouraged to attempt encore work, though I did offer a condensed version of the above to the San Francisco Chronicle for use during Fleet Week. They used it, as the top op-ed, but paid me nothing, though I had contributed op-ed items in the past.
