SANTA CLARA, CA – FEBRUARY 07: The Blue Angels perform a fly-over prior to Super Bowl 50 between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers at Levi’s Stadium on February 7, 2016 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
Two of the Super Bowl 54 flyover pilots, Chad and Adam, recount their scariest moments flying throughout their career.
It’s an incredible honor to be on the pilot’s tasked with flying million-dollar aircraft over the Super Bowl each year and Adam from the United States Marines and Chad with the United States Navy are just two of the four pilots who will be flying over the stadium in Miami, FL on Sunday. Both men sat down with FanSided’s own Mark Carman to talk about the logistics of how the flight happens and how they were chosen for the flyover.
But the men also revealed moments that many of us have never heard before — their scariest moments in the air.
“Probably the deployments,” Chad said. “You’ll always hear guys talking about the night arrested landings on the ship and that always gets your heart racing. It’s dark, you may have been out there flying for, you know, 6 to 8 hours. You’ve probably refueled three or four times. You’ve eaten your lunch as you’re sitting in the tiny seat. And then you come back and land on the ship at night, and sometimes the weather’s bad, sometimes the decks pitching sometimes, you know, all sorts of other things are occurring but that’s, that’s your home that’s where you gotta go.”
The other pilot also shared his thoughts on some of the tougher aspects of the job.
“A lot of times we’ll do these massive exercises and hundreds or so planes in the air and everybody’s really got to be on their A-game for that,” Adam said. “Especially when you throw night tanking in there with dozens of jets around you. It can get pretty intense sometimes in those situations which is all the more reason why it takes, you know, laser focus 100 percent of time, when we do what we do.”
You can catch both men, and their other two counterparts on Sunday when they fly over the stadium at the end of the signing of the National Anthem.