Reagan said, Hey, guys, but guess what?

We've got a chance.

He was my fraternity circle of about 200 people.

Hospice communities of healthy environments.

Trust me, she lived in Traficant for four years.

I really felt for a lot of reasons I felt, but I didn't have the guts to stand.

Paul Entrekin storied aviation career began in the late 1970s as a marine Corps helicopter pilot.

He would go on to become one of the most respected performers on the national air show circuit, performing in front of millions with his Russian MiG 15 jet.

He also holds several U.S. and world airspeed records, and chicken's accomplishments are not limited to the cockpit.

He has authored a few books along the way, including the bestseller Mr. MiG and a children's book Jasper and the Christmas Fairies.

For the past three decades, and for Ken has served as air boss for the renowned Pensacola Beach Blue Angels Air Show.

We welcome Paul interest in the conversation.

So thanks for joining us.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Jeff, you have quite the aviation career, but I want to set the stage.

I want to I want to go back here and because you trained here in Pensacola, Florida, you're from Alabama, but you're trained here in Pensacola, Florida.

How in the world you get into aviation to begin with?

That's a really good question.

After I graduated from Auburn thinking that I was going to teach in coach and I decided that I did not want to follow that career path, I struggled as to what I wanted to do and I didn't really have a clue.

And a gentleman that I did not know in Birmingham asked me one time if I had ever considered a career in the military, and I said no.

But if I did, the only branch that I'd be interested in is the Marine Corps.

And he said, Well, why is that?

So I pulled out my soap box and I got to telling them about how my grandfather won the Navy Cross and how this affinity that I had for the Corps.

And he reached in his wallet and he pulled out his card and he said, You need to call this man.

And it was the officer selection officer for the Marine Corps in Birmingham.

And I did call that man attested.

And they said, would you like to take the aviation portion of the test as well?

And I said, I'm not interested in the Air Force at all.

I just just want to be a marine.

And he said, well, the Marine Corps has aircraft, too.

I felt like such an idiot.

And I said, Well, yeah, yeah, let me take those test too.

So I tested and I did well, and they said, We'll be glad to offer you an aviation guarantee.

And I said, Well, sign me up.

And the next thing I knew, I had gone to officer candidate school and the basic school, and I was in Pensacola waiting to start flight training.

You start flight training, you do very, very well.

And in flight training, you think you're going to fly jets?

I did, yeah.

What happened?

Well, they tell you, study hard, get good grades, and you'll get the aircraft of your choice.

Not always.

The case turned out the needs of the Marine Corps superseded my desires.

And even though I wanted to fly a pointy nose jets, in particular, the F-4 Phantom, that was my dream jet.

They said, Paul, we got good news and bad news that the bad news is you're not going to get jets because the jet pipeline is closed.

The good news is you can pick whichever helicopter you want.

So I ended up choosing Hueys and it was a great choice.

I had a wonderful time flying helicopters.

I went kicking and screaming, thinking that I was going to hate it.

And as soon as I started learning how to hover, I absolutely fell in love with helicopters.

Now, at some point along the way, didn't you end up here as an instructor?

I did.

I did.

I had had an exchange tour with the Canadians, as a matter of fact, where I did get to fly pointy nose jets.

I flew the F five and the F 18 up in Canada, and then I came down here and instructed in the T 34 Charlie at equating field with V three.

Okay, I understand you're a pretty good instructor.

I did some of my research along the way, suggested that you may have had a couple of your students do pretty well, and perhaps somewhere along the way a couple of them may have flown a jet that was painted blue.

Maybe.

I don't know if I can take credit for it or not, but I must have done something right, because at least five of my students did go on to become Blue Angels.

Yes, That's pretty that's pretty awesome.

You know, we think of Northwest Florida as the cradle of naval aviation, you know, and it's pretty amazing what happens at Whiting Field and how many aviators go through there.

And and it's pretty impressive.

I'm just curious, as an instructor, what it was like for you, as you would see these young men and women coming through and and wanting to do something that is just so awesome as to be a part of the United States military in aviation.

It was possibly one of the most wonderful experiences of my life.

I made the comment truthfully that if they had let me stay a captain in the Marine Corps, I would have spent 20 years at Whiting just being an instructor because I taught formation, I taught aerobatics.

But the most rewarding part of the syllabus that I taught was fam or familiarization, where you take a student out for their very first few flights and you explain to them all the basics of flying and watching their gears kick in, watching them learn with a very, very steep learning curve was so rewarding.

And to see these guys go on and get their wings and then have wonderful careers.

It was as an aviator, it was one of the most rewarding things that you could do.

Yeah.

What's the secret sauce to being a great instructor?

Patience.

Because not all the kids are cut from the same cloth.

Some are a little bit hamfisted and they they need a little extra time and encouragement.

You have to know which ones need a kick in the pants to learn procedures and which ones need a little bit of patience because you can bring them along.

This may be good, it may be bad, I don't know.

But I never gave it down the whole time I was an instructor because I always saw promise in every student that I flew with.

What would the average person be surprised about that about in naval aviation, and particularly in the early days?

Because, again, you know, when you're first learning to fly, I mean, we see the glamor with the Blue Angels or you see, you know, on movies or whatever.

But what about those early days?

What would the average person be most surprised to learn?

Most likely, the intensity of the learning you really get taught through a fire hose.

There's such a tremendous amount of information that has to be memorized and assimilated and applied.

It's one thing for just rote memorization of procedures, and it's another thing entirely to be able to apply those things because lives depend on it and because of the nature of that type of flying in the military arena, it is truly life and death.

So it's imperative that that training be very, very intense from the very beginning to weed out those that aren't capable of processing the information like that.

So that was very, very key.

What advice would you give a young man or a young woman that is in middle school or high school today who says, I want to fly in the United States military, What advice would you give them and how to prep go for it?

I don't know that there is a good way to prep, just have a good broad base of knowledge.

It's not just math and science, but you need to know a little bit of English.

You need to know a little bit of history.

If there's an ROTC program available, take advantage of that.

If you get a chance to go flying with somebody, hop in the cockpit and see if you're physiologically adaptable for that type of thing.

When when I was on the air show circuit and I would sign pictures and posters and things for kids, the thing that I wrote on, every one of them was Reach for the Stars.

And I truly believe that if you go for it and you don't quit and you keep your dream, you can make it.

So you get out of the Marine Corps and decide you're going to go into the air show business, correct?

That's true.

Okay.

No, it's a it's a great story, but I'm not going to get you to kind of start from the very beginning.

So you get out and you just decide, hey, I'm pretty good at flying Aerobatics, right?

So take it from there.

Well, I bought a pit.

This to tube was a beautiful airplane, bought it from the factory, and I was working up my routine thinking that having taken students in the t34 to as a static display and watching a lot of civilians fly, I knew that I could do that.

I was very comfortable with that.

But I also knew that in the airshow industry you need some kind of a niche to get you hired to do shows.

But before that I had to sort of earn my bones and there was one person locally that I was acquainted with that he was known as the flying mayor of Milton.

His name is Bird Maples.

Yeah, well, I called Bird up and told him who I was and what I was going to do and went over to his house and pulled up a stump.

And we set out in the yard and talked for a while.

And he tried his best to discourage me because he said, I've known so many young men that have gone to their demise that were trying to be air show pilots for the wrong reasons.

And when he realized that I was going to do it with him or without him, he said, all right, you can you can kind of ride my coattails.

So he got me into the business and I had gone to the International Council of Air Shows Convention, and I was trying to get myself hired.

And a dear friend from up in Canada who was a snowbird that I had met when I was up in Canada named Steve Wallace, called me up and he said, Hey, I heard that there's a guy up here that has some MiG 17 for sale.

And we both laughed because at that time there were no MiGs flying anywhere in the free world.

And I said, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he said, Well, it only cost you a phone call.

Check on it and see.

I said, okay, So I call this guy up in Canada and he said, Yeah, I have five MiG 17 that I'm going to be bringing into Burlington, Vermont, because it was illegal to import them into Canada.

And he said, You could get the first one.

I said, Wow, that that sounds intriguing.

How about maintenance?

He said, You're on your own.

And I thought, Well, that's not good.

So I went through my you remember back in the days we had a Rolodex and I went through my Rolodex of business cards, and I called this guy out, Encino, California.

And I said, if I had a MiG 17, could you maintain it?

And he said, Yeah.

And we talked a little bit.

He said, Well, let me ask you, why do you want to MiG 17?

He said, How about a MiG 15?

It's doesn't have an afterburner.

It's less maintenance, arguably has a little more history, perhaps in a MiG 17.

I said, That's all well and good, Bruce, but where am I going to get one of those?

He said, Well, I have five of them sitting on the dock in Long Beach right now waiting to go through customs, and I'd be more than happy to make a deal with you.

I hopped on a jet.

I flew out to California, and the rest was history.

I became the first civilian in the world to own and operate a MiG.

What was it like in the early days?

So you actually, as I understand it, had to act as essentially a test pilot.

Right.

And that was not your background prior to that, right?

Correct.

That's So what was it like?

You have this aircraft.

I mean, I'm assuming there's not a whole lot of manuals or information about it or at least accessible to the U.S. at that particular time.

They're the free world, as is most people know today.

It's no longer classified.

There had been MiGs flown out of Tonopah, Nevada.

They had MiG 17, MiG 20 ones and other types of MiG aircraft.

And of course, they had all kinds of data with them in the military as a naval aviator, you have what's called a night ops manual.

That's the operations manual that explains to you every nut and bolt on an aircraft and how to operate it.

Of course, we didn't have that, as you said.

What we did have were manuals that came with the aircraft that were Russian translated into Chinese.

Well, none of us read Chinese, so we relied on the pictures, the diagrams, numbers, which we could read.

And I'm not kidding with when the guys at Mojave Airport where we were doing the test flights had a question and they would go down to the local Chinese restaurant with a manual and say, What does this say?

And that's how we translated a lot of the data that we had.

We interpreted a tremendous amount.

And yes, I had to be a test pilot.

I was given a test card and I went up and flew 15 hours worth of flights.

And we figured out what the aircraft would do, what it would not do and how to safely operate it.

What was that first flight like for you?

It was very much a Walter Mitty experience.

I strapped in, cranked up the motor, taxied out, applied, take off power lifted off first flight was the gear stays down as with most test flights and it it just hit me I'm flying a MiG I'm actually flying a MiG 15.

So I flew around for about 30 minutes just getting the feel of the aircraft and letting it get the feel of me.

I didn't do anything exotic or exciting in that first flight, but the best way to describe it is it was just totally a Walter Mitty experience to fly MiG.

I saw or heard somewhere along the way that you found out apparently, Chuck Yeager had had a little bit of experience.

So tell me tell me your story.

So you you decided to reach out and give Chuck a call?

I did.

I had read his book called What Yeager And Chapter 13 is entitled About Flying the Russians.

And he talks about his experience on Okinawa as a test pilot on the MiG 15.

And I thought, well, this is Chuck Yeager.

He's probably forgotten more about the aircraft than I'll ever know.

So back in those days, there were no cell phones.

And I called Grass Valley, California Directory Assistance, and he was listed and I just rang his number and his wife, Glynis, was still alive at the time she answered the phone.

And in my best Southern good old boy voice, I said, Mrs. Yeager, my name's Paul Entrekin and I'd like to speak to the General about some MiG flying.

And I could tell with a little bit of a pause there that she thought I was maybe not who I was representing myself to be, but she got him to the phone and we talked for a few minutes and actually I listened at first and it was a bit of an unpleasant experience because he was jumping to a conclusion that perhaps I was affiliated with a gentleman out in the Chino, California area that he was no longer friends with.

And when he finally took a breath after having called me everything but a nice guy for about two or 3 minutes, I explained to him that I did not have an affiliation with that gentleman.

And I just wanted to help to help him, for him to help keep me from getting dead right flying that airplane.

And he basically said, All right, well, there's just one switch.

Don't touch that one, because it'll blow the end off the aircraft.

And he said, all the shiny switches are okay, All the rusty ones.

Leave them alone.

That's yes.

Yes, sir.

Thank you very much.

And I let it go at that.

We did end up meeting a couple of years later at the the gathering of Eagles up at Maxwell Air Force Base for Air Command and Staff College.

And we did become friends after the.

Okay.

So after he figured out you're okay that I guess you've got a different side of it.

Exactly Yeah.

So so you get the airplane, you get comfortable flying it.

And so what what happens next?

You take it into the air show business.

How did that?

I did, obviously, as was expected, people were beating a pass to my door because every air show in the in North America wanted to have a MiG at their air show and you couldn't see one flying anywhere.

So I did it full time for three years.

It was a tremendously rewarding and lucrative occupation.

But I realized after about three years of that gypsy lifestyle that there's a good reason that when you're on the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds, those tours are limited to 2 to 3 years because it's stressful and it takes a lot of time away from home.

It's a it's a tough gypsy lifestyle.

And I realized that that wasn't something I wanted to do as a career for 20 years.

So as luck would have it, I ended up relegating it to an avocation instead, which was a smart thing to do.

Yeah, you had an experience I think, that you weren't expecting with Bob Hoover, and now anybody knows anything about aviation, knows that he's a big deal, right?

Absolutely.

So tell me about So, Bob, apparently was kind of checking you out, unbeknownst to you.

Right?

My very first year on the air show circuit, I was flying the Oklahoma City Air Show and it was an exceedingly hot day that day.

It was well into triple digits.

And of course, the MiG had no air conditioning in it at all.

I had flown my routine and I was hot and sweaty and they had a motorhome set up there for the performers to get in out of the weather and enjoy a cold drink and cool down a little bit.

So I walked into the motor home and there with this Panama hat sitting on the table is Bob Hoover, and he says, Come on in, young fella.

And I was like, Wow, I'm sitting in here with Bob Hoover.

So I got myself a Coke and sat down with him and he's just got this big Cheshire cat grin on his face.

And I thought, What in the world is he thinking?

And he leans over and he says, Young fella, you don't know it, but you just had a chick ride.

I said, Is that right, Mr. Hoover?

He said, Yes, my good friend Bob Goodrich at the FAA said that there's some cowboy running around flying a MiG and he wanted to report on it.

He said, I'm I'm really proud to tell him, you did a fine, fine job.

He said, you use energy management, don't you?

You didn't touch the throttle one time.

And I said, How did you know that?

He said, That's exactly the way I flew the F-86.

And I could tell by listening to the motor you weren't touching the power.

And I said, Yes, sir, you're absolutely right.

I did it just the way you did it.

Uh, that's awesome.

That's awesome.

What was the most rewarding part about your airshow career?

The most rewarding part was after the show was over, to see the faces of the kids and every Blue Angel that you'll ever talk to will attest to the same thing.

That's the rewarding part when you get to go up and meet the public and they look at you with these adoring eyes like you're somebody really, really special.

Although we know that we all put our pants on the same way and we're truly not.

But to give them a little gratification and to sign an autograph for them and offer them encouragement and tell them to reach for the stars was by far the best thing I experienced as an air show performer.

Yeah, Talk a little inside baseball right here.

You wrote the book, Mr. Big.

So for those of us who were aviators, what are we going to learn from this book?

What what what's it going to be like reading this?

The subtitle of the book is The Real Story of the First MiGs in America.

And that was the reason that primarily wrote the book.

I wanted people to understand how and why these aircraft came available in the country, and that there's a lot of history in there about the Mikoyan Gurwitch design bureau and how the MiGs were developed, how they came to this country, and a lot of interesting side stories about people that flew them and folks that I knew in the air show industry.

A lot of good stories and they're all true.

Interesting.

And just just to switch gears, because you are a writer, so you and your wife wrote a children's book together, right?

We did about that several years ago.

I had my grandson, Everett, sitting on my lap during the Christmas holidays and where our house has a very large ceiling in the great room.

It's about 35 feet tall.

And I had these laser light shining on the ceiling that we used to have as outside decorations and as our chair reclined, and we're watching some Christmas TV show, Everett said.

Grandpa, Oh, what's that?

And he's looking at the lights on me being me.

Jeff I can't just say, Oh, those are laser lights, they're Christmas decorations.

So I start shooting from the hip and I concoct this story about Christmas fairies.

And of course he buys it hook, line and sinker.

And somebody overheard me telling him that story and I said, You need to write that down.

Yeah.

And it evolved into the story of Jasper in the Christmas spirit.

Any more books on you?

Anything else you'd like to write?

I think so.

I was going to do a second edition of my first book, Mighty Hands.

But what I have decided to do is just create an entirely new one.

It will.

It will lean heavily on that first book, but I'll go ahead and share with you and your viewers for the very first time that the title of that book is Reckless Abandon.

And that title comes from my football coach, Shug Jordan at Auburn.

And that was one of the things that he used to preach to us, was playing with reckless abandon.

And it seems that I have somewhat lived my life that way.

Well, speaking of that, let's talk a little bit about a little bit about that.

So you're on a pretty famous team up there at Auburn.

I was indeed one of the most storied football teams in Auburn history.

The 72 amazing is the punt Bama punt team.

That was my freshman year and I was around some.

I stood on the shoulders of giants and to to be in the same room with Shug Jordan was was nothing short of amazing.

Yeah I can imagine what you what do you as you look back over your career and you think about you know you got you got a chance to play football with sugar for Shug and obviously work with some very competitive players and then go into the United States Marine Corps, which is, you know, considered the best of the best.

Right.

What and then let me also mention, you are also a captain, if I'm not mistaken, with Delta Airlines.

So since you worked with involved in numerous organizations along the way, as you look back, Paul, what what valuable leadership tidbits you learned over the years?

Wow, that's a tremendously great question, Jeff.

I wasn't really sure that I had a good would have had a good answer for that until a couple of years ago.

I was my wife, Lisa needed to have she already had one master's degree, but she needed to have another master's degree in educational leadership to be eligible to be an administrator in the Escambia County School District.

And she didn't want to dedicate the time that it would take to pursue that master's degree.

And I said, I tell you what, sweetheart, my bachelor's is in education, so I'll do it.

If you'll do it, let's do it together.

And so we did.

And I was able to earn a master's in educational leadership from the University of West Florida.

And one of the things that I learned from attaining that master's degree and specifically about leadership was that leaders, in my humble opinion, are born.

You can do your best to make leaders, but there's a tremendous amount of personality that goes with leadership.

And if you don't have that level of charisma, there's a limit to the leadership capabilities that one would have.

Where it comes from, I don't know.

But it's innate.

It's inherent.

Maybe it comes from your parent's DNA or the training that you got as a kid, but that's to me, that's a that's a key factor in leadership.

And I think I think that's a very valid point and very valid point.

You know, you're you're known around here, too, as kind of being the the guy at the Blue Angels Air show in the summertime as the Airbus.

So for people who don't know what is an Airbus, an Airbus is sort of the the director of the orchestra.

He's the ringmaster of the show that's going on.

I stand in a tower.

I speak very briefly on the radio to the performers.

I clear them on for their timeslot.

I clear them off when their performance is over.

And my job is to maintain the safest possible environment, a sterile environment for them to be able to fly and do their performance and entertain the spectators.

There's some paperwork at the beginning to get the waiver, but the paperwork is is not that big a deal, though.

The fun part is the actual show days and 100% total commitment and awareness to the safety factor to make sure that if anything does go wrong, the contingency is in place and it's followed to the letter.

And it's a I've been doing it for a little over 30 years now and it's tremendously fun.

And I'm very blessed that they keep asking me back to do it year after year.

I would think it would be a little bit more of a challenge doing it, say, off location, like at a place like the beach versus like a at an airport or a naval station or something.

It truly is.

It's much different having an overwater show than a show at an airport per say.

It's different for the performers.

It's different, much more dangerous.

And I do not hesitate to use the word dangerous.

It's over.

Water depth perception is key, and performers that aren't used to flying over water, it can be a tremendously different factor for them.

And so it is more dangerous than flying at a regular airport over land.

I'll ask you just real quick here.

We're getting short on time, but so many people and I've heard this, you know, in fact, we were we were talking earlier with some folks in the green room.

Somebody made the comment I'd love to fly.

So many people out there say that I'd love to fly.

I'd love to learn to fly.

Paul Entrekin advice to them, as you know, Jeff, your pilot and it's one of the most exciting things you can do in your life to slip the surly bonds.

Yeah, for those that have never tried it, I encourage you to just give it a go, see how much you'll you'll like it.

And I'm not talking about climbing in an aluminum tube in an airliner, Right.

I'm talking about actually getting in an aircraft where you can manipulate the controls and make it go up and down and turn left and right.

It is the joy of my life.

I made a career getting paid for doing something that I would have paid to do.

And everybody out there should try it at least once, because I guarantee you'll love it.

Yeah, Tremendous sense of accomplishment, too, when you do it.

Absolutely.

He is the author of Mr. MiG.

You can, I guess, available Amazon.

It is other booksellers and also a children's book, Jasper and the Christmas Fairies.

You can find out more about our guest, Paul Entrekin at Paul Entrekin dot com.

And by the way, you can see these and many more of our conversations on the PBS video app as well as a w sorry dot org slash conversations.

I'm Jeff weeks.

Thank you so very much for watching.

Hope you enjoyed the broadcast or the program because we're more than broadcasting these days.

We're all over the place anyway.

Take great care of yourself and we'll see you soon.

Thanks for watching.