In aviation, “get-there-itis” is a term used to describe the determination of a pilot to reach a destination even when flying conditions are dangerous. Jeff’s get-there-itis landed him in a dangerous situation, but also taught him a valuable lesson.
“I was flying a T-38 in a program meant to help strategic air command copilots build time. We were going across the country one time, a copilot and I. We were trying to get from point A and point B, and we really wanted to get to point B. We didn’t do a really good job of checking the weather, and the weather had been good leaving point A. We took off and we’re en route, and there's a line of thunderstorms ahead of us.
“‘No problem,’ we thought, we’ll just outclimb it. We’re at around 30,000 feet and asked the control center for a higher altitude. They cleared us for whatever altitude we wanted above 40,000 feet.
“We started trying to outtop this thunderstorm, and this thing is a lot taller than what we realized it is.”
“It had a very defined wall, it wasn’t just a cumulus buildup, it was like a wall of thunderstorm.
“We had a pretty bad case of ‘get-there-itis,’ so we decided to climb over it. From our perspective, it looked like that wasn’t gonna be a problem. We started climbing, and immediately hit the face of the thunderstorm which was up sloping towards the top. We’re skimming along the upslope, and we’re probably at 41k feet. Something dawns on me that the engines sound very rhythmic, which is a sound I’ve never heard before. I got out the checklist, and went to the engine envelope portion. I put in our altitude, airspeed, and we were way out of the engine envelope.
“Now we’re kinda stuck. We’re climbing up this upslope and thinking, ‘maybe we should turn around.’ But that’s never a good idea.
“On top of that, there were embedded thunderstorms on both sides of us. I thought, ‘If I get out of this, I will never ever do this again.’ We kept climbing, and the engines kept sounding more rhythmic. We eventually got to the top, and wanted to start down the other side. But we couldn’t touch the throttle. Coming down the backside, we had to ask the center if we could go supersonic because we needed to get to a lower altitude before we could adjust the throttle. They said no problem, and as we looked in the mirrors after we got past the wall, it was clear exactly what we expected. We could see the line of thunderstorms behind us.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘How would this have read in a mishap report?’ The safety investigators would have come in. They would have interviewed the folks at the weather shop, who would have said we never got a weather brief. They would have questioned folks where we were going at point B, why were we in such a hurry. And they would have said the pilot had ‘get-there-itis’.
“So hindsight being 20/20, what I learned from that is, not only would I question events in terms of whether or not it was in accordance with the dashlist, but how this would have read in a mishap report, and that would not have read well.”
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