Every navy officer who gets accepted to flight school dreams of piloting a F/A-18 Hornet. Nobody says, "I want to fly a C-2 Greyhound! That's the life for me!" But they all don't get to fly the "go-fasts." The navy needs Greyhound and Seahawk pilots just as much as they need the fighter jocks, who are the rock stars of the air wing.
I work with navy helo pilots every day. They know their place in the pecking order. But they work hard, fly hard and deserve a lot of respect. And as a helo ordnance maintainer, I get the added perk of occasionally being able to fly in the birds I work on (which is more than the Hornet maintainers get to say).
Getting a ride is a thrill. I once got a front-seat ride in a Cobra. The hour went by like 10 minutes.
"I want to fly jets, sir!"
When my old man was flying in B-24's (bombardier), the ground-echelon sergeants who'd had training on MG's would occasionally be called up to fill gaps in the aircrew lists. One of the sergeants in the squadron's ground-echelon roster from October, 1942, was with the old man's much-shuffled aircrew, in a new a/c, when they disappeared during the first Ploesti raid on August 1, 1943. Dad didn't make the trip: they did a big personnel reshuffle just before moving the air group from England to Libya, the flying officers grounded for medical or on sick call got moved to base ops so the squadron skippers could get fresh duty-ready officers (only way they could wangle that), and off they went in a big cloud of dust on temporary transfer to Ninth Air Force and the pleasures of Bizerte. My old man thought his navigator had gone down, too, but then he ran into him in the Lowry AFB O-club in Denver in 1951: the guy had been in the shuffle, too, and got shipped out to a sister squadron for two draft choices to be named later. (He went on the raid, though.) Each thought the other had gone down with their crew.