E365: Pete Stavrides: From Watching Challenger Explode to Flying Super Hornets

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Pete Stavridis was nine years old, watching the Challenger explode on live TV, when he decided he was going to fly airplanes. No pilots in the family. No money for it. So he enlisted in the Navy out of high school in 1995 — not the optimal path to fighters — flew P-3 Orions as an enlisted aircrewman on counter-drug ops over Panama and Colombia, and worked his way into a commission. He selected #1 out of T-34s, got the Super Hornet, and flew combat over Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now he's an Airbus first officer (by design), an FAA examiner with roughly 700 checkrides behind him, an aircraft management guy specializing in the Piaggio, and he runs upset recovery training in the L-39. He also raced at Reno in the gold jet class at 500 mph, four to six feet off another airplane — until he watched his friend and competitor Aaron Hoag G-LOC and go into the ground in front of him in 2022.

We get into:

• Why enlisting first was a risk he'd take again
• What a Navy flight surgeon prescribed when Pete was struggling in T-45s (hint: Halo)
• Being shot off a carrier deck, and why nothing else compares
• Fighter pilot ego vs. actual humility — and why humility can't read as weakness
• What air racing really takes: micro-knots, wake vortices, and why pole position changes everything
• Losing Aaron, "stem power," and how he got the jet on the ground
• Why the DPE shortage isn't a DPE problem, it's an FAA problem
• What he can read about an applicant in the first two minutes
• Honesty, knowledge, determination — his three traits of a good captain, FO, or wingman
• Exposing your kids to aviation without pushing it

"When we get in an airplane, we're in a survival situation. We're not supposed to be there."

Happy Flying,

Justin