Eye of the Viper: The Making of an F-16 Pilot - Hardcover

Take the best pilots. And the best teachers. Put them through a taut-nerve, adrenaline-infused training program where only a handful of mistakes will lead to dismissal. The stakes are high and few succeed.

Hand-picked, pressure-tested, and astronaut gung ho, the young pilots of Eye of the Viper are poised for the toughest assignment of their career: the exhaustive six-month training course at Arizona’s Luke Air Force Base, at a cost of $2 million each. Luke, the world’s largest fighter wing, is the only F-16 fighter training base in the United States, and each year it produces one thousand pilots who will fly the F-16 from Korea to Afghanistan to Iraq.
But being among the elite pilots who are selected for the course is by no means a guarantee that they will earn the right to fly the F-16, perhaps the most agile jet fighter ever sent into combat. Only a few select individuals have what it takes.
Award-winning journalist Peter Aleshire, given unprecedented access to the pilots and teachers at Luke, provides a full blast of the rigors and intensity of the course—the personalities, the incredible machines, the irreverence, the bravado, and the toughness, not only of the hand-picked students seeking a place in the warrior subculture, but of the veteran plots who must teach them how to stay alive.
Readers will quickly come to understand the extraordinary mental and physical demands on a modern pilot—and the incredible joy and sense of freedom that makes most F-16 pilots describe their single-engine, weapons-laden, needle-nosed jet in terms that sound more like true love or helpless addiction.
Eye of the Viper is a frank, ambitious, and eminently entertaining look at the ambitions, fears, frailties, and courage that make or break the young pilots at the exquisitely sensitive controls of a $35-million jet.