One night in the squadron bar, another lieutenant colonel and I had a long, beer-fueled discussion about fellow F-15 pilots who’d died in crashes. The guys who didn’t eject in time. The guys who flew into the ground or water, or who were instantly killed in mid-air collisions. And we concluded that there could be worse things than dying in a jet.
Being the first captain to lose a 1.2 billion-dollar B-2, for instance.
That would be worse.