Two pilots, two eras, one shared mission
It happened to Louie Landini numerous times, just when he was slipping into a nice nap, that low-flying F-16 fighter jet would thunder-buzz his house south of Greenwood. Up there screaming by at 800 mph was his young friend, Wes Hoeper, practicing to defend America from whatever threat may come along.
“I’d say, Gol-dang-it, he’s doing it again,” Landini says. Hoeper won’t be doing that anymore, now that he’s retired from a 21-year career as an Air National Guard F-16 pilot. Hoeper, a Greenwood native, flew out of Madison’s Truax Field for the last 15 years, and often had the chance to say hello to his old buddy from above at Mach 2 speeds. It was Landini, after all, who inspired a young Greenwood kid to not only reach for the sky, but to do whatever it took to achieve one’s dreams.
Landini attended Hoeper’s retirement ceremony in Madison in early October, just like he was at the graduation ceremony from flight school in 2003. At that first ceremony, Landini pinned on Hoeper the Air Force wings he had earned as an F-100 pilot in the mid-1950s. At Hoeper’s retirement, he gave the wings back to his old friend.
It’s an unlikely relationship this one, Landini at 88 years old now and Hoeper just 45. Landini was a fourth-grade teacher in Greenwood in the late 1980s when Hoeper was coming through the local school system, and one day the young kid got a glimpse of his future.
As a former pilot turned educator, Landini took his Greenwood Elementary School classes on field trips to the Hardwood Bombing Range in the south central part of the state. Hoeper’s St. Mary’s Catholic School class was invited to tag along. Hoeper was already intrigued by the jets he saw in the sky at times, and Landini’s words spoke even deeper to him.
“As a kid just seeing those jets fly over all the time, I was kind of taken by that,” Hoeper said.
At the Hardwood Range, Landini says the kids got the chance to watch jets screech by and drop live ordinance for practice.
“The airplanes come so low you can scratch ‘em on the belly,” he says.
Landini also shot in a local trap league with Hoeper’s dad, Jeff, and Wes got more chances to talk about flying with the veteran.
“I would constantly be in Louie’s ears over stuff,” Hoeper said. “OK, how do I pick this path?”
It wasn’t as simple as Hoeper expected, as a back injury forced him out of his Air Force opportunity. By chance, he met someone who knew about pilot opportunities in the Air National Guard, and Hoeper followed that road instead. By 2003, he was a fullfl edged F-16 pilot flying out of a Syracuse, N.Y., base. In his career, he would log some 2,500 hours in an F-16 cockpit and fly live combat missions around the globe, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
Despite their age difference, Landini and Hoeper speak the same lingo. Landini joined the Air Force just after the Korean War, and wanted to be a mechanic. To his surprise, an aptitude test showed he had pilot skills.
“What the hell,” Landini said he thought when he first got word that he could enter flight school, “You’re just a dumb farm kid, you couldn’t make it.”
Turns out, he could. Landini said he had “coordination like you wouldn’t believe,” and the intelligence it takes to process things as they’re happening at supersonic speeds.
He trained in the F-100 fighter jet, which Hoeper says “was kind of like the F-16s of the 1950s.” Landini also flew B-47s, which he said the pilots called “a 6-engine bedpan.”
“It was so underpowered it was ridiculous,” he said. But Landini flew in an era when the Air Force commander at the time believed in absolute readiness “every second of the day.” Landini said he flew numerous missions between 1953-58, and would get such orders as to fly from Kansas to Greenland and back, just because.
“We were always on standby,” he said. “You never knew.” The operational screen in the F-100 was monochromatic green, Landini said, a technological dinosaur compared to the computer systems that controlled Hoeper’s F-16s. The technology is staggering, Hoeper says, with pilots able to pull real-time data from other planes in their squadrons, and watch their bombs and missiles strike targets.
“We just dropped the bomb and hoped it hit,” Landini said. Hoeper flew live combat support missions in Iraq. He said the planes he flew were loaded each day with multiple weapons systems, for varying circumstances. The action on the ground was so chaotic at times that Hoeper said he and his squadron mates would fire everything they had. “It wasn’t uncommon for us to come back with no ordinance,” he said. “We kind of just stay overhead and club people when they need it.” A pilot’s life is all about preparedness, both pilots say, and many of Hoeper’s hours were logged in the skies over his home area. Clark County is part of the Truax Field base’s practice area, and Hoeper said at times he’d make almost daily passes over Greenwood -- and the snoozing Landini. Many times he and a fellow pilot would pick out a vehicle driving on a local highway and follow it, pretending it was a terrorist target in a desert on the other side of the planet. Hours of debriefing followed each training run, just as Landini said it did 60 years ago.
While some things remain the same, others don’t. Hoeper said pilots in Landini’s era were the first of their kind, and their’s was a more dangerous world.
“Louie was in the Air Force at a time when the jet age was relatively new,” Hoeper said. “There was obviously a lot of learning and accidents.”
Landini’s time was also more tense, what with Korea just ended, a Cold War underway, and Vietnam imminent. Landini said being ready was the ultimate goal, even if it meant then that any Air Force response to a crisis would not be nearly as fast as now.
“You’re talking 10 or 15 minutes now, like we had hours,” Landini says. When Landini’s time in the Air Force ended, he said his time in the sky was over. He decided to take over the home farm near Willard, and wanted to focus on that.
“After my last flight, I saluted it (his jet) and walked away from it and I said, ‘If I’m going into farming, I won’t go back to flying,” he said.
He tilled the land for 12 years, then went back to college to get his teaching degree. He and his wife, Gwen, raised three kids and built a home south of Greenwood after selling the farm.
Hoeper won’t be returning fully to the ground just yet, as he’s now flying commercially for American Airlines. He’s looking forward to that lifestyle now, of seeing more of the country than he ever could while flying an F-16. As far as fulfilling that dream he had as a kid, consider that done, he said.
“The F-16 is absolutely the most fun airplane to fly,” he said. “It’s fun, but sometimes it’s so mind-bogglingly intense, you forget it’s fun ... I’ve done everything a guy can do in the F-16. I really have left nothing on the table.”
Besides, Hoeper said, it’s not just about being airborne. In the military, he said, one is part of something much larger, a team that is dedicated to protecting a country’s freedom.
“I’m around an incredible group of humans,” he said. “Just trying to keep up with them makes me better.”
One other thing differentiates Landini and the young kid he inspired so many years ago. For Landini, he said it was simply “pure luck” that put him in a fighter jet cockpit. Hoeper, on the other hand, saw that role as his mission.
Even though his first Air Force stint ended early, he found a way.
“A lot of that was because of the upbringing I had,” he said, “and the tenacity to see things through.”
Also, that inspiration, that F-100 pilot who was his bridge between fantasy and reality. While Landini says watching Hoeper’s progress through his career was “like reliving a life,” he takes little credit for his prodigy’s success.
“I showed him where the path was to start this,” Landini said. “Only he could get through it.”
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
