In a world where brashly advertising your exploits on social media is a staple of modern life, the unpretentious and inconspicuous B.C. Thomas offers a refreshing study on the merits of simplicity.
B.C. Thomas stands in front of the SR-71 Blackbird. (Credit: B.C. Thomas via Youtube)
Jack Olson
Editor-in-Chief, The Buckley Beacon
If you examined everyone who has ever lived on Earth and averaged their individual speeds over their whole lives, you might be able to guess the types of people in the top one percent. Olympic sprinters, race car drivers, and airline pilots all spend a significant amount of time in motion, moving much faster than the rest of us. But who eclipses even them? I am one of the few who know, as I’ve had the privilege of meeting the man who may just be at the very top of this speed pyramid: B.C. Thomas.
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas is a former Air Force combat and test pilot, famous for recording the most time in the cockpit of the SR-71 Blackbird. The SR-71 was a Cold War-era spy plane built wholly for one thing: speed. Designed in the late 1950s by Lockheed Martin’s clandestine “Skunkworks” division, the Blackbird remains the fastest jet to have ever taken the sky. The Blackbird soared at 85,000 feet, requiring the pilot to wear a space suit, at speeds of over 2,200 miles per hour, or 3.2 times the speed of sound. Compare that to the airline pilot, who sees 600 miles per hour at a measly 40,000 feet on a good day.
Having heard about Thomas’ exploits, I expected an encounter with the cool, confident arrogance exuded by the legendary Chuck Yeager or Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Instead, I encountered an older man with slouched shoulders, standing in front of a worn Toyota Corolla from the early 2000s. He had light gray hair contrasted by strong, dark eyebrows. He was slim, clad in a striped Polo shirt, blue jeans, and a gray rain jacket. He offered a “Hello” in a soft, strained voice before immediately returning to his ambiguous resting expression. In a world where brashly advertising your exploits on social media is a staple of modern life, the unpretentious and inconspicuous B.C. Thomas offers a refreshing study on the merits of simplicity.
Perhaps it was humble beginnings in Denison, Texas that molded Bredette Corydon Thomas into the prodigious yet remarkably understated man he is today. Born weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Thomas’ life began in a fraught world at war. His father, a mail clerk hailing from one of the founding families of Denison, left to join the Navy in 1944. Thomas still remembers his father’s parting gift to him: a hard rubber airplane, complete with a propeller. Just like that, he knew he wanted to be a pilot. In 1947, Thomas heard about the exploits of Chuck Yeager, read aloud to him by his mother from the newspaper. “I remember when he broke the sound barrier,” he says. “I was so, so excited about that.” Just like that, he knew he wanted to be a test pilot, one of those special few who flew the airplanes with the newest tech, pushing the boundaries of science and possibility.
In high school, Thomas was careful to avoid sports or any other activities that could damage his body and ruin his chances of becoming a test pilot like Yeager. Unlike many of his Texan peers, he didn’t understand football. “Why would you go out and purposefully run at somebody full-speed and hit him in the head?” he asks. “I never understood that. Still don’t.” Instead of playing football, Thomas split his time between playing saxophone in the school band and visiting the nearby Perrin Air Force base.
When the time finally came, he promptly enrolled at the closest college with an Air Force training corps, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. An outstanding Air Force cadet and math student, there was little standing between him and pilot training until he flunked the eye exam in his senior year. When his commanding officer suggested that Thomas become a navigator, he responded in his characteristically respectful manner: “Sir, I do not want to be a navigator.”
Thomas could not tolerate anything between him and the cockpit; he had to be a pilot. He convinced the Air Force to let him pursue a master’s degree in Statistics at SMU while he worked with his hometown eye doctor to fix his vision. After a couple years of reshaping his cornea by wearing hard, corrective contact lenses and taking the eye exam six more times, Thomas was permitted to attend pilot training. “I consider it the best year of my life–having my children born was pretty special too–but that year was the most exciting year of my life because it was everything I wanted to do.”
From there, Thomas’ long career in the Air Force became a flurry of aircraft types and mission sets. “My plan was to fly as many different airplanes as I could,” he says. He had set out to climb the allusory ziggurat, an aviation pyramid that narrowed with a smaller, more elite group of pilots flying a more robust, specialized aircraft at each higher level.
Nothing could deter Thomas from reaching the top of the ziggurat, even the prospect of death. Graduating from pilot training in late 1966 meant going to Vietnam, where he found himself flying a C-130 cargo airplane out of Thailand, relying on fighter aircraft to give him cover over the deadly skies of Vietnam. His best friend from pilot training, 2nd Lieutenant David Whitehill, was shot down in an A-37 in the midst of the war. After Vietnam while serving as a test pilot in California, Thomas witnessed a close colleague named Mike Love fail to eject out of a flaming F-4 Phantom jet; he did not survive. A few years later, as part of the SR-71 program, Thomas’ former deskmate at Edwards Air Force Base, Dick Scobee, perished in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. Thomas flew a mission later that night. “In the face of losing some of my colleagues, it never deterred that need for flight or sense of duty,” he reflects. “I never had a thought about quitting flying. I don’t know why that is.”
Thomas’ raw competence and mission-driven tenacity in the Blackbird later got him selected for astronaut training. In the entire Air Force, only three pilots were invited to apply to NASA that year. Thomas unfortunately did not make the final cut. “I thought about it–well, shucks–but I was flying the SR-71, so I wasn’t traumatized or anything like that.” Thomas finished his Air Force career flying the SR-71, retiring as the most senior, most experienced pilot in the aircraft. He then went to work as a test pilot for United Airlines in San Francisco, where he flew every single kind of jet that United Airlines flew, from the tiny Boeing 727 trijet to the hulking queen of the skies, the Boeing 747.
Upon retiring from aviation in 2001 at age 60, Thomas settled in Foster City, California. “I’d return to Texas if my wife would let me,” he grumbles lightheartedly. He didn’t embrace the sedentary nature of these supposed “golden years”; ever since he was 15 in Texas, he had had a job. He figured that he was a pretty good instructor pilot in the Air Force, so he decided to try his hand at teaching math at a local Catholic all-boys school. He quickly realized that there was a large chasm in enthusiasm between professional pilots and the repeat algebra students of Serra High School. In his first job since college without a flight suit as the daily uniform, Thomas struggled—not due to a lack of qualification, but perhaps because of an excess of it. He soon re-retired, spending his time watching historical documentaries and visiting his two grown-up children with his wife, Nancy.
He continues to love talking about his career. If you ask him a question, you can expect it answered to absolute completion, including all the technical details you’d never understand. I asked inquisitively if he ever felt any fear flying in the SR-71, especially on one particular mission over North Korea where the spy plane was sent as little more than bait for enemy missile launches. “I had full confidence in our defensive systems,” he stated dryly. “Our defense was to accelerate and jam, and keep jamming as long as that warning light was on. Then we’d climb and turn at 45 degrees of bank. There was a way you could get the turn rate faster by pulling the airplane’s nose up, going to 90 degrees of bank, letting the nose slice down to the horizon, and returning to 45 degrees of bank. Of course, you couldn’t let the nose go too high. Going that fast, one degree is a 3,000 feet per minute rate of climb.” After his speech, I’d completely forgotten that my question was about fear.
Although the technical details linger in his mind (clearly the product of an infallible memory), when Thomas reminisces about flying his mind does not go to the mathematical calculations he made in the cockpit or the long checklist of procedures to be performed before takeoff. Instead, he remembers his career through a poetic lens. He often draws inspiration from a poem called “High Flight,” written by a young American WWII pilot, John Gillespie Magee Jr., just months before he perished over Britain. In it, the newly minted pilot attempts to describe the joys of flight to a layperson. “I’ve heard people recite High Flight all my life, and I’ve never been happy with the way they said it,” Thomas says, his strong brow furrowing. “It wasn’t said with much emotion, with much feeling for what the words meant.” As he reads “High Flight,” aloud, that typically emotionless face lights up with love and his old voice quivers with fervor, with zealous belief in every word he says: “While with silent lifting mind, I’ve trod the high, untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”