Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder

Almost every day here in Daejeon, I hear fighters screaming overhead from a nearby air force base.

For someone who once served in the Air Force, it’s a bit like Pavlov’s dog—my ears perk up at that familiar roar of afterburners as jets rip across the sky.

And every time I hear that sound, it carries me back to 2002, when I had the chance to ride in one. 

The runway blurred beneath us.

A second later, the afterburner ignited, and the F-16 surged forward with a force that pushed me deep into the seat. Rain streaked across the canopy as the jet roared down the runway at Osan Air Base. Then the nose lifted and the ground dropped away.

Within moments, we were climbing through the clouds.

Strapped into the back seat, helmet on and oxygen mask tight against my face, I had a sudden thought that still seemed slightly unreal: Just days earlier, it was a classroom at Yonsei University, teaching English. 

Now it was the back seat of an F-16, one of the most advanced fighter jets ever built. punching through the clouds over Korea.

The path that led to that cockpit began with a newspaper story.

At the time, I was also working as a feature writer for the Korea Times, covering a variety of stories about the United States Forces Korea (USFK). One of them involved a dramatic rescue mission in the West Sea.

Late one foggy night in February 2001, a pregnant Korean woman living on a small island near the Northern Limit Line suddenly went into labor. Her water had broken, and doctors soon realized that an underlying medical condition made the delivery dangerous. The small medical clinic on the island simply did not have the facilities to deliver the baby safely without risking serious harm to the mother or the child.

The island sat uncomfortably close to North Korean waters, in one of the most tense and heavily watched areas along the maritime border. Visibility that night was poor, and the waters around the NLL were never considered routine flying.

Her life—and that of her unborn child—hung in the balance.

Airmen from the 33rd Rescue Squadron at Osan Air Base launched an emergency mission and flew through the fog to reach the island. They transported the woman safely to a hospital in Incheon. Without that flight, both she and her unborn child might have died.

I later covered the hospital visit with the aircrew and medical staff. It was one of those rare stories where everything came together—urgency, professionalism, and a happy ending. The article highlighted the humanitarian side of the U.S. Air Force mission in Korea.

In no small part because of that article—and several others I had written—someone in the Air Force had been paying attention.

That same year, while attending a USO event at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Seoul, the commander of the Seventh Air Force came up to me and asked, “Jeffrey, when are we going to get you up in an F-16?”

“Any time you want, sir,” I replied, grinning.

A few months later, I found myself reporting to Osan Air Base.

Before anyone would let a civilian climb into the back seat of a fighter jet, there were a few formalities. I sat through a briefing on egress procedures—what to do if something went wrong and I had to eject from the aircraft. It was not the sort of thing you wanted to think about, but the Air Force made sure I understood it.

Then came a quick flight physical with the base flight surgeon to make sure I wouldn’t black out the moment the G-forces kicked in.

Once the paperwork and briefings were finished, it was time.

The day of the flight was gray and rainy. Our F-16 taxied slowly down the runway with another Falcon rolling behind us. Strapped into the back seat, helmet on and oxygen mask in place, I knew I was in for the ride of a lifetime.

The afterburner ignited, and the jet leapt forward, the kind of acceleration that tells your body instantly: this machine was built for another world.

Within seconds, we punched through the clouds and climbed into clear blue air high above the Korean Peninsula. The ground disappeared beneath a blanket of white.

Then the pilot began to play.

For nearly thirty minutes, we climbed, rolled, banked, dove, and twisted through the sky, the horizon spinning while the clouds rushed toward us and then dropped away again. The G-forces pushed me deep into the seat as the aircraft banked sharply and flipped through the sky. At times, the earth seemed to tilt sideways beneath us. At others, we were diving toward the clouds before pulling sharply upward again.

I may have only been along for the ride, but for those few minutes, I felt like I had stepped into Tom Wolfe’s world of The Right Stuff.

Oh, and just in case you’re curious—I did not black out, and I did not throw up.

There was also a small historical footnote to the flight.

Twenty-four years earlier, I had caught my first glimpse of the F-16 when one arrived at Howard Air Force Base in the Panama Canal Zone for tropical testing. Back then, I was just a young airman watching from the ground, squinting up at a sleek new aircraft that seemed to belong to the future.

That afternoon over Korea, I finally saw that future from the inside.

Above the clouds, the sky was perfectly calm, the peninsula hidden beneath a blanket of white. Somewhere far below were the cities and mountains I had come to know so well—Seoul, the Han River, the long ridges that run like a spine down the country.

For a few minutes, I simply looked out across that quiet blue horizon and thought about the strange turns life can take.

Just days earlier, I had been teaching English in a classroom at Yonsei University.

Now I was flying above Korea in the back seat of an F-16.

Life, I realized, sometimes climbs faster than you ever expect.