525th FS commander breaks active-duty record

Published Feb. 19, 2015
By Air Force 2nd Lt. Michael Trent Harrington
JBER Public Affairs

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska -- On Feb. 3, Air Force Lt. Col. Clayton Percle, 525th Fighter Squadron commander, clocked his thousandth hour flying the F-22 Raptor and thereby crossed an invisible line in the air, into an elite club as exclusive today as the society of sound-barrier breakers was in the late 1940s.

It took three generations, three wars and decades of men and women launching planes and bringing them home for him to notch the mythical sixth week in a stealth fighter jet cockpit. It was a long road through history to the first active duty, thousand-hour Raptor pilot and a long road for Percle.

"The only thing I ever wanted to do before I became a fighter pilot was to be a train engineer," Percle said, and sure enough, fate tried more than once to push him toward locomotives on steel tracks and away from steel wings on flightpaths.

Percle's grandfather was a combat engineer in the First World War and fought in the battle of the Marne - a struggle that featured predecessors of the 90th Fighter Squadron, Percle's sister unit here, flying over no man's land. Another grandfather was a combat medic in World War II.

Both grandfathers survived, and eventually the Percle line brought forth a 7-year-old Tennessean from Clarksville who fell ill with chickenpox and missed attending an air show with his dad.

The senior Percle was an Army chief warrant officer in Vietnam, winner of the Distinguished Flying Cross and an AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter pilot with nearly 2,000 combat flying hours himself.

The flying father brought home to his son a poster of an F-15C Eagle, streaming across a laminated two-foot poster at full afterburner.

At that moment, Percle said, he knew what he was supposed to do, and he'd spend the entirety of his young life preparing to do it.

But the path that led Percle through the U.S. Air Force Academy - the service's factory for pilot slots and the single most likely way to an eventual fighter cockpit - soon changed.

Percle fell and shattered a growth plate in his hip during basic training.
He was told he could choose to start all over, and lose a year of his life to sitting and waiting, or he could try his hand at an unlikely ROTC pilot slot from the University of Memphis.

Percle headed to Memphis.

He enrolled in 1994, as the Air Force shrank in the wake of the Cold War and Gulf War I.

Strategic Air Command had dissolved as a major command, and the Department of Defense fell to a fraction of its Reagan-era bulk.

"I would not give up on my dream," Percle remembered, and he took the chance of not even getting to be a pilot, let alone flying the F-15s he'd pictured since childhood.

Percle did get that pilot training slot. When he was selected to fly the F-15C out of training, his dad was there to run onstage and tackle him with joy.

Adding the hours he logged in the T-37 Tweet, the T-38 Talon and the F-15 to his Raptor tally, Percle has spent 2,000 hours, some 83 straight days, in flight.

One or two thousand flying hours is not so long compared to the time heavy counterparts log in their cockpits, Percle admitted.

Though he's the only Airman in the cockpit, Percle won't claim a single hour for himself alone.

"It's not something I've accomplished on my own," Percle said. "It's a credit to the men and women who maintain the fighter, the operations crews, equipment organizers, resource managers and intelligence collectors who ensure I can go out and fly the airplane every day.

"It's not a milestone or a benchmark for me, it's a milestone for the program and for the Air Force," he added.

"If I went back and talked to 7-year-old me and told him what was going on here today, that I was flying an F-22, he'd say 'What's that?'" Percle said with a laugh.

"I'd never have imagined it. It's not even something I even dreamed of. I think if I went back and showed myself, I'd be pretty shocked."

Other Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve pilots have already reached - and other active duty pilots undoubtedly will reach - the thousand-hour mark in the coming years.

The accomplishment is soon becoming part of a routine - and that, Percle says, is just fine, because it is less about the pilot in the cockpit or the plane in the air and more about the collective effort that keeps them there.

"You don't really climb into the jet," Percle said. "You strap it on your back. Like a homesick angel."